UsingMac.com - Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users

A French guy is using his MacBook when it suddenly transforms into a MacBook Spaceship.

Let's watch and be amazed by this new MacBook technology.

Source: LiveLeak - MacBook Transform

Usually, in order to adjust the brightness of our Mac to 0%, we will press and hold the function button all the way until the light from our Mac is gone. And I am not satisfied with this usual stuff as it's not giving me immediate darkness to my Mac.

I've mentioned this trick somewhere in previous articles, we can use single keystrokes to get total darkness of our Mac.

Some new Mac users, without knowing the existence of universal shortcut to directly shut down their Mac, would go for the menu bar, search for the apple logo, choose the option, and confirm from the prompted dialog box.

Note. These shortcuts, except for restart, will take the action immediately without prompting dialog box asking for confirmation. Make sure you save all your works beforehand.

Wallpapers can be creative, elegant, and refreshing. If you are looking to add some awesomeness to your Mac, you probably need a desktop wallpaper that decorates your Mac to create something that matches the elegance of Mac.

In this post we present mind-blowing desktop wallpapers related fantasy art, light stream, and color spectrum themse. All screenshots are clickable and lead to the pages where they can be downloaded.

They are definitely worth a look!

We would like to shout a big thank you for our sponsors. They've done a great task in enriching our Mac life. You can purchase an adspot on UsingMac through BuySellAds.

CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac helps you in cleaning up useless system files that pile up and waste your precious disk space.

Keynote Quartet FX

A set of great presentation-making tools that can make your presentation memorable and mind-blowing!

Many new tweaks, free applications, wallpapers, and giveaways are coming! Make sure you come back often~

Upon installation of application, some system files are spread across your Mac without your knowing that. Even after uninstallation, those persistent files are leaved behind, eating up your free space.

Several third party apps are available to clean up these leftovers; CleanMyMac is one of those. And this time, we are giving away 5x CleanMyMac as courtesy of MacPaw.

Lacking of productivity applications will slow down our workflow and consume more time, even though we've already purchased a Mac. Using only built-in Mac applications, we can neither get the most out of our Mac nor boost our productivity.

In this article, we've compiled several free applications for Mac OS X (including application launcher, easy note-taker application, data backup tool, data sharing utility, etc) that can significantly boost your productivity.

Let us know which one is your favorite!

After burning some time to play around with GarageBand 2009, I got a new skill to share with you all in this article: recording speech.

Although it sounds simple, there are many hidden tricks to get clean and nice recorded speech. Hope this article can help you in your future speech recording.

Many thanks to everyone who has participated in the giveaway to try out luck in winning one free SyncMate Expert from Eltima Software.

Regardless of the order, here are the five lucky winners we have:

1. Zachary Price
   “The two features that I think are the best are the iCal & ToDo lists synchronization&hellip..”
2. James Lee
   “.. I'm very interested in some of smaller features in Syncmate Expert, notably: bookmarks, folder and notes synchronization, SMS manager and reader, Device info, actions log and Call History..”
3. Mike
   “.. folder synchronization. It is awesome to have folders that sync to my Windows Mobile phone as if it was music syncronizing to an iPod.. ”
4. Sam G.
   “Bookmarks... it is so very painful to have to retype out my web addresses using my SPV M3100's "touchscreen" so the ability to sync bookmarks would save me a lot of time..”
5. alej11
   “.. managing SMS right from Mac computer. Sending, receiving, creating and deleting SMS when working at Mac became possible with SyncMate Expert Edition.
   That's just plain and simply awesome!”

License codes are on their way, should reach their places soon!

Having my Mac accompanying my daily life, it would be a miss without the companion of music. And for now, I still adore iTunes as my music player. However, there are still some limitations to the awesomeness of iTunes, such as hard to rate, difficult to find lyrics, little information in mini player mode, etc.

In this article, I am going to share with you some of the freewares that can make you experience iTunes like never before. Hope you enjoy it!