In this workweek ’s Dashboard roundup , I cover ways to quickly impress envelope , enable and disable Dashboard growth way , and access OS 10 public utility company . I also pick a “ Why ” of the week .
Easy Envelopes (; detached ) . Are you the type that likes to publish address on your envelope rather than scrawl them with a pen ? If so , Easy Envelopes is a must — it lets you quickly print envelope immediately from Dashboard . Its port is dead - uncomplicated : Type the name of one of your liaison in the name field ; Easy Envelopes searches your Address Book contacts for that somebody ’s reference and summate it to the envelope . ( You have the selection of choosing the home or work computer address if a contact has both . ) Or click the reference field to typecast an address manually . When you ’re ready to impress , just click the print push ( smartly disguised as a postage stamp emboss with a pressman on it ) , inclose a white gasbag into your pressman , and voila !
Via the options on the “ back ” of the Widget , you could choose the envelope size and fonts ; customise your proceeds address ( none , text , or an image ) ; choose whether the return destination is publish on the front or back of the gasbag ; and enable USPS barcodes .
Easy Envelope has only two flaw of note . The first is that when searching for contact , the Widget seems to explore only name calling , not companies.[See chastisement below.]And my biggest ill ( no wordplay mean ) is fair subjective : I think the Widget is big than it needs to be . Dashboard real landed estate is a precious trade good , and although I appreciate the envelope - centric design , it takes up a second too much blank , in my opinion . But overall , Easy Envelopes is an elegant and easy - to - purpose solution for impress gasbag — even if you do n’t need its functionality , you ’ve got to agree that it ’s one of the best - implemented gismo yet .
UPDATE 9/2/05 : It turns out that Easy Envelopes does indeed seek company names ; however , since it ’s design to publish envelopes , it push aside companies that do n’t have a street address in their Address Book phonograph record . Unfortunately , in prove two twelve or so company figure with Easy Envelopes , it appear that I accidentally take companies that had only telephone numbers , URLs , and email addresses in their record . I rue this mistake .
DevMode (; free ) . There have been a good turn of article and baksheesh around the Web about Dashboard ’s “ development ” mode , which lets developer puzzle out on thingamajig as normal app outdoors of Dashboard . ( For exemplar , here ’s oneon our own Mac OS ten Hints . ) The matter is , to turn development modal value on or off requires either a head trip to Terminal or a freestanding utility . If you need to oft enable and disable this mode , the DevMode Widget is a great ( and diminutive ) addition to your Dashboard . It shows the current maturation mode condition ( on or off ) ; click the Widget toggle the musical mode and then relaunches the Dock ( a necessary footprint , since Dashboard fly the coop as part of the Dock ) .
UtilityButton (; innocent ) . Now here ’s a gizmo I never would have dreamed up , but I ’m glad someone did . All those helpful utilities Apple includes with Mac OS X are buried several layers down into your hard drive at /Applications / public utility . So unless you use one of the various rocket launcher utility out there ( such as LaunchBar ) , or in some way use the Dock to plunge them , it takes some effort to get to these usefulness . UtilityButton invest a ( thankfully , small — notice a pattern here ? ) clitoris on your Dashboard for quick entree . Click the push button , and you get a bulge - up card of OS X ’s built - in utilities ; choose an item from the menu to launch it . That ’s all it does , but I ’m sure to many drug user , that ’s enough to quality as “ utilitarian . ”
Widget “ Why ? ” of the Week
Each workweek , I give a good - natured sack at a Widget that make me recollect , “ Why was this necessary ? ” This week ’s “ why ” goes toPi Viewer . What does it do ? Why , it displays the economic value of pi to 135 decimal position , of course ! Few people are likely to need the economic value of pi to such precision , and those that do probably have it pre - programme ( with even greater precision ) into a scientific program or calculator , but hey — for those who need to test themselves on the 113th denary place of pi , now they can .
