Tips
Have you ever gone to your favorite band’s MySpace page and found they’ve uploaded a new track or demo from their upcoming album and wished you had a way to download it so you could put it on your iPod until you can actually buy the new album? Well then, here’s a tip for all of you Mac OS X an MySpace users.
Disclaimer: The following instructions are intended for legitimate use. As a musician myself, I do not condone music piracy. Support your favorite bands by purchasing their music. Oh, and the songs you can download using this method are not high quality encodings.
Fire up Safari and navigate to your favorite band’s MySpace page.
Open up the Activity window from the Window menu (Shortcut: Command-Option-A). Back in the main browser window, click on the song you want. In the Activity window, a new item should begin loading that has an address beginning with http://cache##-music##.myspacecdn.com (where ## are numbers). If you look under the Status column, it’s usually one of the largest files. Click on this item, and copy the address using Command-C.
Now open up the Downloads window from the Window menu (Shortcut: Command-Option-L). Paste the link you copied using Command-V. The song will begin to download.
Keep all three windows open (main browser, activity, downloads) while the song downloads. Once complete, open the file in iTunes, add artist info, and you’re good to go for the next two months until the new album comes out!
In the twelve short hours that I’ve been using the retail version of Leopard, I’ve discovered a small, easily overlooked, yet very handy feature in iChat. It is now possible to customize the shortcut order for your accounts/contact lists without having to use Chax or some other enhancer. Not only does this allow you to prioritize the order of your contact lists, it also lets you change the default list that appears when you click on the iChat icon in the dock.
Say you’re like me, and you have multiple accounts in iChat – an AIM screen name, Bonjour, and a couple Jabber/Google Talk accounts.
Note the order they appear in the Accounts pane of the Preferences window. This order directly corresponds to the shortcut that will display each contact list. According to the picture above, Command+1 should display my AIM buddy list, Command+2 for Jabber, and Command+3 for Bonjour contacts. A quick look at the Window menu confirms this.
To change the order of the shortcut keys, just drag the account names around. Command+1 is the first (top) account in the list, Command+2 the second, and so on. As you could probably guess, iChat supports up to nine shortcuts in this manner. Oh yeah, the first account in the list will be the one that shows when you click on the iChat icon in the dock.