BeTips.net

Occassionally, you may find erroneous results in your queries. For example, a query on files larger than 1MB may return a 50K file in the results window. The problem lies with an entry in the index that has for some reason been entered incorrectly.
To fix a bug like this, zip the file, delete the original, and then unzip the archive. The file’s size attribute will be newly added to the index and it should no longer appear erroneously in your queries.

When running queries, you can of course double-click any file or folder to launch it. But what you may not know is that you can also double-click the path entry for any file in the results window to bring up that file’s parent folder in Tracker

BeatWare’s Mail-It utilizes your central People database as its address book, like a good BeOS citizen application should. In fact, the interface onto People files Mail-It provides is so good you may prefer it to the People app itself.
If you want to create a Person file from an incoming message, just single-click the sender’s e-mail address in the message header. A new contact form will appear, with the sender’s name and address already filled in. Add any additional details, click OK, and a new Person file will be written to ~/people.

Not only can all of your workspaces be set to different resolutions and color depths, but they can also run in different colors or with different background images, which makes it much easier to identify them at a glance.

If you’ve been playing with Gobe Productive, you’re already familiar with its tear-off palettes full of gradients, fills, and shades. What you may not have realized, though, is that you can double-click on any square in any of these palettes and customize it to your heart’s content. You can even create and save alternate palettes for later use, so you can build entire libraries of effects to be used in any document.

Next time you’ve got a Person file open, take a look at the field names on the left-hand side. Both E-mail and URL are underlined, indicating that they’re links. Single-click the E-mail link to to start a new message to that address, or click URL to (duh) send that URL to your browser.

If you type:
ln -s / ~/config/be/Disks
into Terminal, it will install a symlink to the root partition in your Be menu. It even gets that nifty Disks icon. Plus, if you mount a CD or Jaz disk, it automatically shows up (naturally), giving you easy access to all mounted partitions from one menu.

If you drag a file over an icon and the icon doesn’t light up (i.e. the target application doesn’t recognize the dragged file as being of a supported type), try again — but this time, hold down the Ctrl key while you drag. This will force the target to try and open the file, even if it isn’t a registered handler for that filetype.
For example, if you register SoundPlay as the default player for MP3 audio, you will be unable to drag a .mp3 onto CL-Amp to play it with that app. Holding down the control key while dragging the file tells Tracker to bypass the default filetype association.
Of course, this won’t work if you drop a file of a type unrecognized by the target app; for example, dropping a GIF image onto SoundPlay would only cause problems (because SoundPlay would try to open the GIF as an audio file).

If you would like for one of your files, to always open in an application other than the Preferred Application for it’s file type, you can use the Tracker Add-on ‚FileType‘, to set the Preferred Application of that single file.
This is how you do it: Right click the file – a context menu pops up. Select FileType from the Add-Ons submenu – a window named „(Filename) File Type“ pops up. In the field Preferred Application there’s a drop down list labeled Application, in which you choose the application you want to this specific file to open with.
This will not affect other files of the same file type. If you want to change the Preferred Application of all the files of a certain type, you do so in the FileTypes-application found in the BeMenu, under preferences. (Se the Tip „Change the preferred application for a file type“)

Make downloading zip, expander or whatever files via Net+ 2.0 a breeze by specifiying a download directory in your preferences. Then, when you click a download link, you don’t have to deal with the Save dialog box. To make life even easier, set your Expander prefernces (and Software Valet) so it will automatically expand files once they are downloaded. One click, and moments later the program you wanted is downloaded, expanded and ready to go.