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I don't often need to open a PDF file, and when I do it's typically something I'm looking at in my Web browser. Since I'm using Google Chrome, the built-in PDF viewer is what I use 90% of the time. I do, however, get the odd email at my day job (where we don't use webmail) with a PDF attachment I need to read.

So I thought, "why not open those in Chrome, too?" It's easy enough to set up. Here's how to do it.

First, locate your Google Chrome executable. The easiest way to do this is to right-click your Chrome shortcut and choose properties from the menu. In the box labeled target, you'll see the complete path to Chrome.exe. Highlight that text and copy it to your clipboard.

Between iLife ’06 and ’08, the timeline view was removed from iMovie. Instead of being displayed in a timeline, the video wraps around like text on a page. If you have iMovie ’11, there’s a way to get back the original timeline view, where the video is in one scrollable line.

Fire up iMovie ’11 and open up a project. The first thing you’re going to want to do is swap the project view and the events view so that the video you’re editing is along the bottom of the screen. To do this, click the ‘Swap Events and Projects’ button on the middle toolbar — it’s the one that looks a bit like a refresh button.

Swap Events and Projects button

Taking photos with smartphones and uploading them to the Internet instantly is nothing to brag about these days. Even point-and-shoot cameras have optional Wi-Fi solutions available to upload images as soon as they’re taken. But what if your needs are a little more complex? What if you need to use the lens choices only available with a full-blown Digital SLR configuration, but still want to get some form of the image online as fast as possible? Whether you are in the field with a mobile MiFi-like hotspot, or at a location with Wi-Fi access available, the following solution will allow you to take stunning images in full resolution, and still streamline the upload process with correctly sized images for immediate sharing with family and friends.

Welcome to another installment of Tips and Tricks. These articles aim to teach you some handy things you might not know about your Apple stuff. Let’s continue the series by looking at Finder.

Dropping Files Onto Applications

If you have a bunch of files you want to open simultaneously with the same application, this trick will save a bit of time. Any files you drag and drop onto the icon of an application in a Finder window will be opened with that program, provided it supports the file type you’re dragging. You can drag and drop more than file at the same time, to help save time. Applications which support the files you’re dragging will be highlighted as you hover over them, and applications which don’t will stay the same. This trick also works the same way with applications in the Dock.

Whether you backup via an online service, Time Machine, a cloned backup or manually, you’ve probably forgotten something critical: testing.

A good backup strategy is generally something simple and automated. You “set it and forget it,” but you really shouldn’t. In my day job, I see too many teary eyes from people who thought data was backed up but it wasn’t. Just this week I had my own little panic attack when I realized Time Machine hadn’t run in a week. Somehow I accidentally unplugged the FireWire cable moving things around and my Mac really didn’t warn me Time Machine wasn’t running. Ouch.

Too often I see backup systems “glitch.” Maybe the hard drive was corrupt or a folder was moved. Unless you check backup logs way closer than everyone, you don’t find out the backup failed until you try to do a restore — and the time to do that restore isn’t when you are missing data. Even reviewing logs is no substitute for testing.

Today we’ve got a full-length TechUniversity freebie for you!

Embedded below is a 19 minute screencast on publishing a podcast with GarageBand and some other tools. We’ll walk you through how to export your podcast and get it published!

If you enjoy this screencast, please check out all the other great screencasts at TechUniversity!

iTunes 10 was released yesterday and brought with it a few UI overhauls. The loss of color in the sidebar for one, along with the change of orientation of the window controls at the top of the window. There currently isn’t a way to bring back the colored icons in the sidebar, but there sure is a way to get the window controls back to their former positions.

It’s simple enough, and requires just one line to be entered into Terminal. Quit iTunes, wait for it to close completely, then fire up Terminal, which can be found under Applications → Utilities. Either type or paste the following code into the Terminal window and hit Return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

Now when you reopen iTunes, the ‘traffic light’ controls should be back along the top of the window, side-by-side. It does a lot for keeping the look of OS X consistent across applications. Of course, perhaps this is Apple’s way of telling us that in the next version of the Mac operating system, all the windows are going to be laid out like this.