Certain files within your operating system are hidden and although they exist, there’s no way to see them and no setting in your System Preferences to make them appear. For many web developers, like myself, the .htaccess is a common offender. It is something that you occasionally need to edit, especially when setting up a new website, but Mac OS X keeps it hidden making it extremely hard to edit.

To show all hidden files within your OS, here’s what you do.

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Enter the following command in to the terminal:
   

   defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
   killall Finder

3. Done! Your finder will take a second to reload and then you’ll notice all sorts of hidden files throughout your hard drive.

Done with whatever hidden file you needed to deal with and sick of seeing all the extra crap? Do the exact same thing as above but change “TRUE” to “FALSE” and everything will return to it’s original invisible state.

NOTE: Generally speaking, most hidden files are probably invisible to the average user for a very good reason. Be careful with what you’re editing, moving, or deleting and backup your system beforehand.

Note: I originally posted this over at Chai Life, but felt it deserved a place here as well.

Emoji Icons are a rather extensive set of icons (Emoji being the Japanese word for what we call emoticons or smilies) that are common in Japanese text messaging and web sites and are essentially have been standardized in Japan. They are available on the iPhone and are very fun to use, but it takes a bit of trickery to get them unlocked. Here’s a step-by-step on how to unlock them. Once unlocked, you can sent them in text messages, emails, or whatever else you can type on the phone and they will be viewable by anyone who has a phone or computer that supports them. Even other iPhone users, even if they haven’t done these unlocking steps themselves. So, without further ado, here’s how to unlock them:

1. Install the “Spell Number” app at the iTunes App Store. Don’t worry, it’s completely free.
2. Once installed, launch the app.
3. In the box, type this exactly: 91929394.59
4. As soon as you have that typed in, without doing anything else, press your ‘Home’ button.
5. From your home screen, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboards.
6. Choose International Keyboards, then scroll down to Japanese, click it, and turn on Emoji.
7. That’s it! You’re done! Thought it might be harder? Too bad. You can delete the app now, unless you feel you need it for other purposes. Whenever you’re typing, there will now be a little icon on the bottom left to switch back and forth between Emoji and English (or whatever other languages you use).

Here’s a small selection of the 461 emoji icons now available to you:

Not everyone is aware of this, but virtually anything that you can print within Mac OS X can also be saved as a PDF. Here’s how to do it.

1. Open the document, website, or any other printable item you wish to save as a PDF.
2. Choose “Print” from the File menu, or hit Command-P.
3. In the lower left-hand corner, click the button that says “PDF”.
4. Choose “Save as PDF…”
5. Name your file and choose where you want to save it, then click “Save”.

You’ve now saved what you had open as a Portable Document Format (PDF).

The following list of shortcuts can be quite helpful for new and veteran users alike in navigating around your Mac and making every day tasks a lot quicker and easier.

Lets face it, however much we’d like to think that Mac OS X is the perfect operating system, it isn’t actually perfect. Sometimes, albeit not as often as with Windows, the Finder crashes, freezes, or has some other problem that would require it to be relaunched. Many people may just hold down the power button to reboot the whole computer, but chances are your issue can be fixed much quicker and easier by relaunching the Finder itself. Here are the three methods to do so that are built right in to Mac OS X.

Relauch Using Force Quit

1. Type Command+Option+Escape to open the Force Quit window.
2. Select “Finder” in the Force Quit window.
3. Click “Relaunch”.

Relaunch Using The Dock

1. If you keep your Dock hidden, move your mouse over it so it pops up.
2. Hold down Control+Option on your keyboard and click on the Finder icon in your Dock.
3. Click “Relaunch”.

Relaunch Using Terminal

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Type in the following command:
   

   killall Finder

3. Press Enter.

You may not know this, but your iPhone or iPod Touch has a significantly easier method to delete content than you may have previously been aware. In Email, for example, you’re probably under the impression that you have to hit ‘Edit’ in the upper right hand corner, select the email(s) you want deleted, then choose delete.

Here’s how you make the process of deleting a single message a lot quicker:

1. With a single finger, swipe from the left side of the message to the right.
2. Tap the box named “Delete” that will appear.

There you have it, nice and easy! This works in Mail, Messages, Notes, Safari Bookmarks, and probably at a few more Apps that I am unaware of.

Sometimes you just need to shout something in a text message or maybe you have some other reason for typing with all capital letters. Regardless of your reason, here’s how you can enable and turn on Caps Lock on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

First things first, you need to enable the feature. To do this, open up your Settings and go to General, then Keyboard. Here you’ll see a toggle switch for “Enable Caps Lock”. Just make sure it’s set to “on” and you’re all set. It should look like the following picture.

Now you’ve got it enabled, so here’s how do you actually toggle the Caps Lock on and off while you’re typing. You should already know where the shift button is, so instead of clicking it once to enable a single-use shift, quickly double-tap it. You’ll notice the icon change to blue and you’re done. YOU CAN NOW TYPE IN ALL CAPS.

Sometimes you’re reading something and you’ve just got no idea what it means. Well, problem solved. Simply hold your cursor over the word you’re reading in just about any Apple application (Sadly, this does not work in Firefox) and enter the command Cmd + Ctrl + D. Here’s what you’ll see:

Most people don’t realize this, but you can instantly put your display to sleep with a quick and easy keystroke. Sure, you can always just click the Apple menu and choose “Sleep” or set up a hot corner, but why go through the fuss when you can just type the following:

Ctrl + Shift + Eject (⏏)

Stacks were a great new feature introduced to the Dock along back when Leopard came out. By now, you probably rely on them as much as I do, but most people don’t know any functionality beyond viewing a folder directly from your Dock in either Fan, Grid, or List mode. Here are a few fun tricks to make your Stacks usage more enjoyable.

• Recent Items
  Why this is not a default stack, I do not know, but it is something I’ve added to every Mac I use and is great. Using the following terminal command, you can add a stack which will display your choice of the latest applications, documents, servers, favorite volumes, or favorite items.

  defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’
  killall Dock

  

• Fan & Grid Highlighting
  This terminal command will set your stacks to highlight the item you’re on when in Fan or Grid mode. Not sure why this isn’t the default, because it looks a ton better.

  In Snow Leopard:
  defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  In Leopard:
  defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  

• Altered List Highlighting in Snow Leopard
  Just like the above command adds highlighting to the Fan & Grid views, this one changes the appearance of a the list view (albeit only in Snow Leopard) to better match your new highlighting for the Fan & Grid stacks.

  defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -boolean YES
  killall Dock

  

• Slow Motion
  This little trick serves absolutely no purpose or offers any benefit other than looking cool. If one of your Stacks is set to view in either Fan or Grid mode, you can hold down the shift key when you click it and you get the joy of watching it pop open in slow motion instead of the speed with which you are used to. Obviously can’t get you a screen shot of this one, so just try it out.

There you have it! I hope you find these Stack enhancements and tricks helpful, useful, or at least nice to look at. Note, if you want to change the highlighting of those stacks back to the defaults simply change the “YES” to a “NO” in both commands.