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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
Note and Compute
We often have to deal with calculations. But for most of us they do not contain complex mathematical formulas, sines, or cosines: what amount to bill a client, how many panels to buy for remodeling of an apartment, how much money can I put away for a future purchase, how much others owe me taking into account their previous payments – here are most of the questions and issues with which we have to face on a daily basis. And the question of comfort does not lie in how many complex mathematical operations we can do, but in how can we conveniently store, redo and share our calculations.
What if and why not offering my client one more service of mine, and why not try buying less of the building materials this time? We want to see better what options we have. Often, we agree to the first reasonable option without much thinking only because we do not have a kind of tool that would allow us to quickly and easily apply the changes we want to make and get the final result. On the other hand, often we have to go back to the calculations in order to add something to them or modify them, whether that’s credit card payments, an estimate of expenses for the next month, or budget planning.
Custom Exposé Glows for Download
In our previous article: Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow, we have brought forward the option to change your Exposé glowing effect. After few minutes playing around with the image sprite, I have come up with these various sprites.
In this article, I'd like to share the sprite with you. You can refer to the previous daily trick for the step by step guide on how to change the effect.
Inspired by Artless Processes - Customize Snow Leopard Exposé Glow.
Screenshots and download link provided after the jump.
Get the Most out of Adium
Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
Most of Mac users have known the existence of this instant messaging client. And today, I would like to reveal some of the nifty tricks while using Adium to get the most out of Adium, such as inserting line break, changing nickname, updating Twitter with Adium, and many others.
Don't forget to leave your comment or feedback.
Mac Color Picker Trick
Previously, we've talked about built-in Preview color picker for Mac OS X Leopard. To our disappointment, last time we've failed to grab the real hex color code for picked color.
Fortunate for us, we found out a way to get the real hex color code from color bar and we will discuss about that in this article.
Ways to Relaunch Finder
If something happens to our Finder (freeze, perhaps), without the provision of quit option we will be certainly forced to restart our Mac. But that won't be the case if we have the know-how to relaunch Finder.
There are many ways to relaunch Finder, until now I've found 4 ways for relaunching Finder. Let's master all of them.
Lock Your Mac Desktop (Part II)
In case you haven't noticed it, this is the continuation of Lock Your Mac Desktop but also the compilation of all useful resources from our readers. In the earlier part, we have covered about locking Mac desktop by enabling security password upon waking up and going to login window with fast user switching. If you have yet to know those two, I recommend you to check it out. (Though I doubt most of you will…)
In this article, we will tap on readers' suggestions on locking Mac desktop, including using active screen corners, utilizing keychain access, installing lock widget, and one more quick trick.
Lock Your Mac Desktop
There are times when we want to walk out of our Mac yet still have many running tasks to stop us from logging out. Surely, these can become an itch-scratching issue if we have no knowledge on locking our Mac.
In this article, we will share you two ways of locking your Mac desktop.
Learn and Record Music with GarageBand
I am sure there is at least one time you wish to make and record your own music. However, you are reluctant to come to the studio for the reason of inconvenience. Moreover, it will take you and people who help recording a lot of time and effort in order to make a rather perfect song.
Garageband can help solve this problem. With a Mac, an electric instrument (piano or guitar) together with a garageband software, the whole music world is in your hand.
Full Maximize Window. Now on Mac OS X
Most new Mac switchers fired complaints on the strange behavior of green 'maximize' button that fails to maximize window to full screen. If you're one of them, it's time to rest assured and check out this nifty little freeware: Right Zoom.
"This free tool fixes an inconvenient behavior of green Zoom button in Mac OS X. It will always expand windows on a full screen instead of strange resizing", explained its developer, Blazing Tools Software.
The installation of this application is pretty straightforward: only unzipping and double-clicking are needed. However, as this application is running on background, you need to stop it by executing Terminal command: killall RightZoom
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Tips and Tricks
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Finder,
Mac
Search Specific Mac Sites with Google
Besides helping Internet users to search for useful information online, Google also provides search for specific Mac sites to assist Mac users in gathering more Mac related information.
As far as I know, there are two ways to perform search on specific Mac sites.
Adding Prefix to Search Keyword
By prefixing 'Mac' to your keyword search, there is a high chance to get returned results related to Mac. For example, to search for useful Mac keyboard shortcuts, you can use this search keyword: 'Mac Keyboard Shortcut'.
Searching with Google for Mac
To narrow down your scope on Mac specific sites, you can always use Google for Mac. Inside this page, you will see the search button labeled as 'Search Mac Sites' instead of usual 'Google Search'.
However, I believe some of us may want to incorporate this Mac specific search with Safari search box. The rest of this article will explain this.
Create Double-Sided Bar Chart with Keynote
In one of your future presentations, I believe you will be required to create a double-sided chart that is particularly useful to represent data with minimum to maximum range. Though there is actually a Keynote template for it, but apparently we might have missed it.
Before continuing to guide you on creating double-sided chart, let’s first see what it looks like.
iPhoto, Exterminate Duplicated Photos
Upon importing our most memorable photos to iPhoto, duplication of original photos can't be avoided, sometimes even take up most of our precious storage space. I believe we won't let duplicated stack of photos fill up our free space.
In the case that you want to free your storage, you can delete your original photos. But beforehand, let's check whether those photos are already inside your iPhoto Library.
There is an usual place where you can find those mentioned photos…
Dialog Button. The Most Basic Mac Usability
After several times going further to the tweaking process, often we forgot the very basic usability that we will need in using our Mac, which is well-known yet often ignored, i.e. choosing dialog button with keyboard.
Setting needs to be done are very minor comparing to major advantages and boost in productivity that will be gained. Let's follow the instructions on how to use keyboard to select dialog
iPhoto Option Tricks
It's really exciting to experience the new iPhoto, especially the process of teaching iPhoto on recognizing faces. Indeed, it's rather difficult to get correct suggestion from iPhoto with limited number of photos (with human face) imported but to me, the process is the fun part.
Skipping the discussion on how to perform face recognition (which can be learnt from MacWorld Demo), this article will focus on discussing the magic of option key:
- edit photo directly from iPhoto,
- change rotating orientation,
- batch rejection of photo suggestions, and
- switch between many iPhoto libraries.
Let's proceed further…
Amusing Space-Saving Dock Stacks
With its elegance Grid View and comprehensive List View, putting things on the right side of the Dock giving much more advantages than adding more clutters to Dock organization. Some stuffs of my interest to be kept on Dock are Preferences Stack, Menu Extras Stack and Groups of Applications.
Let me share with you how to make those stacks.
Free Download HD YouTube Video
Every internet users loves to watch YouTube, but ironically only some groups of people know how to download free YouTube videos easily with least effort required.
Initially, we can only download free YouTube videos in FLV format which can be learnt from previous article, Free Download YouTube Video with Safari. Until not long ago, YouTube has released high quality MP4 video as an additional feature for its users. It will be really satisfying if those MP4s can be downloaded.
The good news is, we know two tricks that can be used to download HD YouTube Video. And we feel that it's such a great honor to share these.
Assign Shortcuts for Web Bookmarks
Speaking of browser bookmarks, the nearest would be bookmarks menu attached to our browsers. Without accessing external sites for extracting out bookmarks, links to favorite sites can be obtained right from web browser bookmarks menu.
However, blazing fast access speed to bookmarked sites won't be achieved without bits of tweaking to browser settings and system preferences. The easiest tweak made to increase speed won't be far away from assigning new keyboard shortcuts.
Let's proceed on and get to step-by-step guide to adding new shortcut to browser bookmarks…
Unveiling 10 Hidden OS X Shortcuts
Years have passed since the first time I used my Mac. While using my Mac, by accidentally hitting wrong combination or purposely browsing for it, I'd discovered some hidden keyboard shortcuts.
Shortcut, as the name suggests, should bring us more productivity juice rather than drag us down. However, some shortcuts may suit you well, some may take more time for you to adapt; to adopt these new hidden shortcuts or to drop them, that's all depend on you.
Leopard Glossy Black Dock Skin
As requested by our readers, today we'd love to share a quick tip on customizing the Dock. Your Dock will become like what's shown on the screenshot…
Create Booklet with Mac Preview
One of the missing yet necessary utility from our Mac Preview, though we've gotten many other extra features, is the ability to print document as booklet.
Unlike normal printing option, to print a document (or maybe, eBook) as booklet the order of the page is extremely important, e.g. order of the page for printing 8-Page document should be 8-1 2-7 6-3 4-5, which will consume up most of the time in the process of ordering.
Therefore, to create booklets of our documents, we will need…