Simply click the Album column heading twice. The heading will rotate from “Album” to “Album by Artist” and then “Album by Year.” This will sort the iTunes Library by Artist, then by Year. The following is a summary of the different combinations:

1. 
   Sort by Artist alphabetically, then Album alphabetically.
    
2. 
   Sort by Album alphabetically.
    
3. 
   Sort by Album Artist alphabetically (or Artist if Album Artist is blank), then by Album alphabetically.
    
4. 
   Sort by Album Artist alphabetically (or Artist if Album Artist is blank), then by Album chronologically.
    

For compilation albums things get a little confusing. The Album Artist is not always the same as Artist, so it is important to remember that for the last two options, these will be listed according to Album Artist. Also, if the Album Artist is blank, but the album is marked as a compilation, these songs will be found at the end of the library.

It is nice to have Albums listed chronologically within each Artist!

1. Gather the images you want to animate into one folder.
2. Open a new document matching the dimensions of your source images.
3. Select all of the source images and drag them together into Photoshop. Release them over the general workspace. The first image should show up with a superimposed “X.” New to Photoshop CS5, the images will stack one at a time as layers in your current document when you hit “Enter.” (In previous versions, dragging the files into the workspace would simply open each one up as separate files)
4. Keep hitting “Enter” until all of the images are loaded as individual layers. Rearrange the layers into the correct order, if necessary.
5. Open the Animation palette (Window > Animation).
6. In the Animation palette menu (found top right corner of the palette), click Make Frames From Layers. You can also click Reverse Frames if needed. This will take each layer in your document and set it as an individual frame in the animation.
7. Now we will change the duration of each frame. In the same menu, click Select All Frames.
8. Click the drop down button just underneath each frame image (circled in red in the image below). This will bring up a menu where you can set a duration. Since all frames are selected, all frames will be set to the same time. Each change be changed individually, if desired.
9. The drop down button circled in black in the image above will change how many times the animation will loop; either a fixed number of times, or forever.
10. Once the frame order and timing as been set up, it is time to save the image! Click File > Save for Web & Devices, change any options if needed and save the image!

You will now have an animated GIF taken from a folder full of the individual frames. In fact, as long as each frame exists as a separate layer in Photoshop, the Animation palette can be used to create the GIF. But, with CS5 it is easy to make separate layers from a folder of the individual frames as described.

The simplest solution I found to selecting identical objects within multiple copies of the same group involves use of actions and the Note feature in Illustrator. This must be done before copies of the original group are created.

1. Open the Attributes palette (Window > Attributes)
2. Begin editing within your original group and select the desired sub-object
3. In the palette options drop down, click “Show Note” if it isn’t visible already.
4. The attributes palette should now have a white text box on the bottom.
5. Type a name for that object into the Notes box which you will use later to refer to this object type.
6. Open the Actions palette (Window > Actions)
7. Start recording a new action by clicking the “Create New Action” icon on the bottom of the Action palette, next to the trash can. The action should begin recording automatically.
8. Now click the palette options drop down in the top right corner, and click “Select Object”
9. Type in the note text you used earlier in the object attribute palette.
10. Stop recording the action by clicking the square.

This procedure creates an action which selects objects with the same note text, no matter what group they belong to. Now, you can duplicate your group as many times as you want. Running the action (by clicking the “play” icon when selected in the Action palette) will now select all of the same sub-objects in every instance of the duplicated group. This way you can easily modify each one at the same time!

Setting Note text for objects is an easy way to select specific sets of items later, but it is particularly useful when dealing with objects within groups. This tutorial was written with Adobe Illustrator CS4, but the method should work for other versions similarly.

If you are sure you really have zero unread messages, go to the following registry locations:

HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\MMS\Unread
HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\sms\Unread

In each location, there will be a key titled “Count.” Change these values to zero. In my case, the key for MMS was set to 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal, or, -1 in two’s compliment), which clearly is an erroneous value. Once I changed this number back to zero, the unread notification icon disappeared!

Method 1
Go to Edit > Preferences > Parental Control, and check “Disable: iTunes Store”

While this is the simplest way of getting rid of the arrows, in the latest versions of iTunes 9, disabling the iTunes Store also disables Genius and automatic album art downloading. If you use these features, like I do, disabling the iTunes Store altogether is not an option. In this case, there is another way:

Method 2
Follow the instructions found here. Basically, you first close iTunes, then with a text editor open C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml on Windows XP, or C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml on Windows Vista/7. After the following lines:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

add the code:

<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

When iTunes is reopened, the arrow icon links will be gone! Since I use Genius and downloading album art, I used the second method and it is working great so far in iTunes 9.01!

How many seconds are in a day? 86,400. Thanks, Kris.

Eventually, after a long Google search without any success and after considering trying to reinstall Windows 7, I came upon this forum, which described the same problem. It turns out there were two instances of a program “HsMgr.exe” which run on startup, and were somehow causing my programs not to execute. My fix was:

1. Click on the Start menu
2. In the search box, type msconfig and hit enter
3. Click on the Startup tab
4. Look for any item named HsMgr (such as HsMgr.exe or HsMgr64.exe) and uncheck these
5. Click OK
6. Restart your computer

Your programs should now be able to open. This problem seems to be due to lack of compatible drivers with 64-bit Windows 7.

[Update:] I discovered that the true problem had to do with my HT Omega Striker 7.1 sound card drivers. After installing a Windows 7 compatible driver update from HT’s website, the HsMgr programs can run in the background without preventing applications from opening.