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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
Mac Screen Capture Tricks
Capturing screen of Mac is not just limited to keystrokes Command-Shift-3 alone to capture the whole screen. Some may feel unnecessary to know many screen capture tricks. Some feel the urge to explore more of this nifty screen capture features.
As I've experienced, I found out many practical screen capture tricks, such as Screen Capture Part of Screen, Screen Capture the Screen Saver and many others.
If you've followed UsingMac for quite a time, you will find that I've mentioned some of the screen capture tricks in my previous articles. Here, I will add more tricks, along with the old tricks, to provide more complete and useful resource.
Before going further, you can take a look of other resources related to Screen Capture:
Let's get started!
Tricks for Mac Stickies
Stickies, as the name suggests, is an application readily available on your Mac to let you stick your thoughts - in a form of small notes - on your Desktop.
Stickies reside inside Applications → Stickies.
Not only limited to making notes, but with Stickies you can also perform several tricks, such as embedding picture, scrolling down notes, making stickies translucent, and many other tricks.
Upon continuing reading this article, you will see several tricks for using Mac Stickies.
Quicksilver Tricks
Many have tasted the increase in productivity by using Quicksilver as their Application launcher. Some even built more Quicksilver skins to make it look nicer. But only a few realized that there are still more Quicksilver actions available for them to use.
As one of the Quicksilver's big fans, here I am with full enthusiastic, presenting default actions and cool tricks that you can do with Quicksilver.
8 Essences of Power Browsing with Safari
Obviously, we want to have the best user experience while using this web browser and for sure, there should be some hidden features inside. That's why I'm here, exposing you to several remarkable findings on Safari web browser. And these findings will become your basic guide on using Safari web browser, if you are new to the world of Mac.
You could expect to find something new here, trust me.
Customize Flurry Screen Saver
This is for sure: Even though you use the same Flurry screen saver as mine, our screen saver won't look similar to each other. This is maybe due to the fact that, we think different.
With your Flurry screen saver, you can easily customize the settings so that it looks really different from others, which distinguish you as the Mac power user and at the same time distinguish who are reading this cool trick by UsingMac.com from others that are not reading.
So here are the steps to customize your Flurry:
- Open your System Preferences
- Go to Desktop & Screen Saver
- Move to Screen Saver section
- Choose Flurry as your screen saver
- Click on the Options… button, near lower right of the preview pane
- Adjust here and there, and make your Flurry unique!
Let's see some of my favorite Flurries.
Take a Snap of Screen Saver
Anytime you are trying to capture a screensaver, you will fail miserably as the screen saver will automatically go off when you try to press any key.
But, there is an easy way to take a snap of screen saver.
Take a Snap
- Open Apple - System Preferences…
- Go inside Desktop & Screen Saver
- Choose your screen saver
- Hold down Command-Shift and press Test button
- Hit 3 to snap the screen saver
- You can do it many times, before you decide to exit by releasing either Command or Shift key
Check Your Hard Disk
Check Remaining Hard Disk Capacity
I remember in my old Windows day, I regularly check for my remaining hard disk capacity, just because I was too poor to have high-end hard disk. Now, we've large capacity of hard disk drive, making us overlook the need of checking remaining hard disk capacity.
To check on remaining hard disk capacity as well as used hard disk space, you can do the following steps:
- Go to Your Desktop
- Select your Hard Disk Icon
- Control-Click and select Get Info (keystrokes: Command-I)
- Expand the General section by clicking on the triangle next to the wording
Smart Folder on Finder
Searching with Spotlight has long become my habit to search for certain cluttered of files which I usually forgot where I put them. Even sometimes my search result returns another cluttered of files that I will need to add certain criterias to limit the search. These criterias include limiting search by adding more keywords, limiting the scope of the search and adding specific attributes (eg. Kind is Images).
Though after adding these limitations I will easily find my files, yet for me it seems to be such a hassle to do it again and again. But, to be really exaggerating, Smart Folder saves my life!
Using Smart Folder, you can save your search criterias into one beautifully constructed purple gear folder - it's the icon. And to do the same search again, only single click on the smart folder is needed.
10 Nifty Mail Tricks that You Definitely Want to Know
As a solid procrastinator myself (and a mysterious Mac fanboy), I tend to stare all day long at my Mailbox and Subscribed Feeds. Even though you are less similar to me, under the depth of my heart, I still believe that you will frequently check your Mailbox. This motivates me in bringing up these cool, less-known tricks in using your Mail that will definitely benefit you, not to make you procrastinate further but to make your spare time more enjoyable.
These tricks include message redirection, message rejection, slideshow of attachments and other nifty Mail tricks. You will definitely want to know more about these as I was in the first place.
Exporting Keynote Presentation to QuickTime Compatible Movie File
Keynote - the most elegance, well-built application suitable for transforming ordinary slides into extraordinary presentation - maybe sounds unfamiliar to Windows users' ears. In most case, it's due to the fact that Keynote has its own extension; The slides and effects created in Keynote can be opened only with Keynote. However, Keynote is quite popular among Mac users; Perhaps, Steve Jobs also used Keynote for his presentations.
But, as I've experienced, presentations and/or movie effects made on Keynote can surely wow your friends who own only Windows. And for the sake of saving the trouble, I've found a way to export Keynote presentation into QuickTime Movie file (.MOV).
Let's assume that you've got your presentation slides and gorgeous effects ready and set. And now, you want to export your Keynote presentation into movie file, these following steps would be required.
Cleaning Mac G5
After I cleaned up my Mac keyboard. I'm very surprised to know the fact that so much dirt was hidden inside it. When I glazed to my Mac G5, I start to imagine how dirty it will be. Why not I open it? So I got into the fighting processes against dirts inside my Mac G5
1. Moving the G5
I'll be blamed to death by my brother, who presents me this G5, if I don't take good care of my G5. Even a single scratch on it will become my nightmare.
And frankly, my G5 is so heavy that needs my skinny muscle to contracts more than necessary.
Secret Images, Hidden Inside Keynote
Playing around with my Keynote, I realized that when choosing our theme for presentation, there are several images attached to the theme. Out of curiosity, I try to seek for those images.
As expected, I discovered those hidden images, unindexed by Spotlight (with dimension of the image remains uncalculated) right inside my Keynote package contents.
And surprisingly enough, there are more than 30 gorgeous images spotted inside; Some of those can even be used as Desktop wallpapers. Seriously, this is my best finding up to now.
Those hidden images are located inside: Macintosh HD ▸ Applications ▸ iWork'08 ▸ Keynote ▸ Contents ▸ Resources ▸ Themes ▸ Shared. You need to take note that in order to access the contents of Keynote, you need to Control-Click on the Keynote icon and choose Show Package Contents.
For you who don't have Keynote installed, here are several hidden images that can be used as your desktop wallpapers.
Basic of Quitting Application
Unlike Windows, we couldn't quit opened Mac application by simply clicking on the cross arrow located at the corner of the window pane. I believe this is meant to help Mac users boost their productivity by saving time used in launching applications that is neglected by Windows.
As I've experienced using Windows before, I used to accidentally killing all opened windows while closing application, which I didn't want to, and that's really stressing me.
So, if you're already switching to Mac, be grateful and …
How to Create Steve Jobs' Keynote
Apple Special Event for September 2008 has ended. Steve Jobs has done his good job on presenting the new products. Nothing is really mind-blowing here. But from his keynote slides, I can see several interesting effects. For sure, we can employ those cool effects to work for our presentation slides.
There are several keynote effects that I like from his presentation and hopefully, I've successfully clone those down to my keynote. These animations are as follows:
- Flying Numbers
- Image Transitions
- Shining Numbers
- Rainbow-Colored Nano-chromatic
- Display Full iPod Nano Collection
Let's rock!
Adjust Key Repeat Rate
Key repeat is the term used to describe the behavior of our keyboard that will repeat the key we pressed with a certain rate.
Once you know, it comes automatically for you to realize that the rate of deletion while pressing Delete key as well as the speed of moving cursor with Arrow Keys are set by this Key Repeat Rate.
There is this nice thing in Mac that we, as a mere human, can adjust the Key Repeat Rate without much effort. It's just about moving a slider or two from left to right (or vice versa).
These two sliders, named Key Repeat Rate and Delay Until Repeat, are concealed inside System Preferences ▸ Keyboard & Mouse ▸ Keyboard. Key Repeat Rate will handle the delay between that very same letters while Delay Until Repeat will manage the delay needed to begin letters repetition.
Undoubtedly Useful Spring Loader
Using Mac for such a long time, there is this very intuitive way to open or move around files - by dragging - makes me feel lucky having a Mac.
Many will say that "Mac sucks because Mac can't perform cut-and-paste". Indeed, cut-and-paste feature isn't implemented on Mac, but this alone doesn't mean that Mac has a poor quality of built-in feature. Actually, there is much more useful built-in feature on Mac, the Spring Loader. What can it do?
Using Advanced Drag-Drop
It seems that these little tricks here shouldn't be missed. This article is the extension of my other article entitled Using Drag-Drop.
Downloading Image Files
Sometimes you will see a nice looking pictures on the web; You want to download it. Instead of clicking on the image and hence being linked to the place where you can download it. But hey, it's really time consuming. You can just simply drag-and-drop it to anywhere inside your Finder (either Desktop or your local Hard Drive or somewhere else). Is it cool? It's really cool.
Re-Emphasize Exposé Feature
Exposé, one of the built-in Mac gimmicks that Windows doesn't have, has been doing great job on promoting Mac to Windows users. Personally, I will invoke my Exposé whenever I saw my Windowish friends approaching me while operating my Mac. It's just "Wow!" for them, though it's as simple as bread and butter for Mac users.
Besides being used for attracting attention, we, Mac users, usually use Exposé for the sake of productivity boosting.
Apple Remote Prank Prevention
Yesterday, I've a short talk with my friend who is also a MacBook owner. In the middle of the talk, he pull out his Apple remote, clicked on the menu and caused my MacBook to suddenly launch Front Row…
That prank is inevitable if you're not doing the prevention from the day you know it can happen on your Mac. Let me help you bury that kind of prank into the deep of the history…
Your Mac Secret Recipes
Maybe this is a joke, Apple developers put up their favorite desserts' inside one of their Quartz Core Animation examples: Mac HD ▸ Developer ▸ Examples ▸ Quartz ▸ Core Animation ▸ Recipes.
Run the file Recipes.xcodeproj with Xcode and then choose Build and Go from its toolbar. Then you will be able to run The Recipes application (not quite an application yet, actually…).
Since the version is intended to be an example, it's not completed yet. Currently, only the dessert list is completed. And it's quite fun to find out that for most of the dessert, they sound unfamiliar to my ears.