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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow
For Snow Leopard Users
If you have noticed, whenever you press F9 key to activate Exposé, you will see a rather different Exposé from Mac OS X Leopard. And upon mouse over on one of the item, you can see blue glowing effect.
Today, we are going to bring you to tweak on the glow color to your liking.
Daily Trick 46. Fast Exposé Shortcut
Whenever you want to open the Exposé view of an application, usually mac users will advice you on using Hot Corner. However, we have a new trick here for you.
- Open 'Application Switcher' with Cmd-Tab
- Press Tabs until the app you want to perform Exposé to is selected
- Hit the arrow key [↓] or [↑] and the Exposé for that app will appear
It's fast, quick, and totally free of mouse actions.
But unfortunately, this trick only works in Snow Leopard.
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Daily Tricks
Tags:
Expose,
Shortcut
Daily Trick 45. Quick Manage Mail
Throughout the whole time of using Mac, often we will spend time on checking and managing our mail. I personally like the default mail application for Mac: Mail.app.
In this trick, I am going to share with you some keyboard shortcuts that come in handy when we're going to manage our mailboxes, quick navigate mailbox, and handle message.
Daily Trick 44. Quick Exponential Math (10.6)
I believe we all know that we can use Spotlight to do quick calculation, where we can do quick addition, substraction, and other simple mathematical operations right from within of the Spotlight window.
In Leopard, you can just type in pow(a,b) to find the value of a^b (e.g. 3^4 = 81). However, you can do it even faster with Snow Leopard by just typing a^b.
Note that you can always use key combination Cmd-Space to call up Spotlight box.
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Daily Tricks
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Calculator,
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Exponential
Daily Trick 43. Batch Resize Images (10.6)
Although the steps needed to do batch resize images on Snow Leopard are more or less similar to those batch resize steps for Mac OS X Leopard, there is a simple workaround needed to perform batch open and resize images on Snow Leopard.
Daily Trick 42. Quick Terminal Command
If you're fans of single-liner for UNIX command, you can always use this quick Terminal command line execution trick to save the steps for executing Terminal command.
Here are the steps:
- Ctrl-Click on Terminal icon sitting on your Dock
- From the pop-up menu, choose New Command…
- Type the command line you want to execute on the appearing window pane
- And click on Run button for command line execution
With this trick, I am sure you can start to tweak around with simple command line, e.g. command line for New List View.
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Command,
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Terminal
Daily Trick 41. New List View (10.6)
Sorry for the long hiatus of daily trick series due to lack of internet connection. Now, we're back on the track again.
If you put the Dock on the left of the screen, you're left with two display options, which are Grid View and List View. However, folks at Mac OS X Hints found a Terminal command to bring out new list view.
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES && killall Dock
After execution of the command above, your list view will look like the combination of Grid View and List View.
↑ new List View : After Execution of Command Line
And you can always use command line below to revert back to normal.
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool NO && killall Dock
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Stack
Daily Trick 40. Input Source Selector (10.6)
If you've mastered and used not only one language, but many of them, I believe you would want to have selections of input source and the input source switcher.
First of all, let me guide you to add more input sources for your Mac OS X 10.6.
- Open System Preferences and go to Language & Text section
- Select Input Sources tab
- Inside, there will be many languages input sources listed. Enable input source for the language by ticking the checkbox next to it
- Now if you click on the menubar flag icon (just next to Spotlight), you will be able to change your input source
Though now you can have more than one language of input sources, it will slow you down if you can't do the fast switching between input sources. In order to perform a quick input sources switch, you need to…
- Open System Preferences and go to Keyboard section
- From the sidebar pane, select shortcuts for Keyboard & Text Input
- The last two of the shortcut list displayed on the right pane are used to change your input source
- Assign the same keystrokes for them. If you are using language switching quite often, you can consider assigning Opt-Tab for them. Otherwise, Cmd-Shift-Space would be okay
- Lastly, whenever you want to switch to different input source, just press and hold the modifier keys (Opt for Opt-Tab or Cmd-Shift for Cmd-Shift-Space)
- You can perform an action like switching application, i.e. you can press Tab or Space many times to choose the input source
For a side note, if you only need to switch between two input sources, you can just press the keystrokes without the need of holding modifier keys.
(L). The screenshot of input source selector that I mentioned.
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Input Source
Daily Trick 39. New Exposé Feature (10.6)
It surprises me that Apple has finally solved the hard-to-navigate minimized window issue with the release of Snow Leopard. If you've upgraded to Snow Leopard, you won't need to use Open Minimized Window Trick to reveal those minimized windows.
With Snow Leopard, you only need to click-and-hold on the Dock icon of that application and an Exposé display will appear, showing all opened as well as minimized windows.
And if you prefer using Hot Corners to using click-and-hold, you can set it up as one of your hot corner actions; you can do it by following these steps:
- Open System Preferences and click on Exposé & Spaces icon
- On top of the pane, you will be able to see four select boxes, which each of them is mapped into one hot corner action
- Choose Application Windows for one of the boxes
- Next time if you want to show all opened windows, you only need to move your cursor to the assigned corner
With simple steps, you can get a wonderful effect. Great!
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Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Expose,
Snow Leopard
Daily Trick 38. Text Transform (10.6)
When I browsed through new features of Snow Leopard, I stumbled on text transformation feature built-in on TextEdit. Using this feature, you can easily capitalize, make lower case, or turn words into upper case.
This new feature can be found on TextEdit Menubar · Edit → Transformations.
Putting productivity on the top priority, I create keyboard shortcuts for each of the action. If you want to do the same thing, you can follow these steps:
- Open System Preferences and click on Keyboard
- From the Keyboard Preferences Pane, go inside the Keyboard Shortcuts section
- Click on the [+] button and an additional menu will appear
-
And these particulars can be used:
Application: TextEditFor creating keyboard shortcut to make highlighted words upper case.
Menu Title: Make Upper Case
Keyboard Shortcut: Cmd-Shift-↑ - Menu Title can be changed to Make Lower Case or Capitalize to create another shortcuts for another two text transformation actions
As you can see from screenshot on the left side, now I have applied my customized shortcuts for these new text transformation actions.
Hope that I can help you improving your productivity with this little trick.
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Daily Tricks
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Daily Trick,
Snow Leopard,
TextEdit
Daily Trick 37. Snow Leopard Stack Highlight
Reading from the title, you will know that I have successfully installed Snow Leopard on my little Black Macbook. As a kick-start, let me share with you this simple trick to enable stack highlighting.
You only need to execute these two lines of Terminal commands to make it happens :
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
killall Dock
After execution of the second command line, your Dock will be restarted and when you mouse over one of your stack items, it will be highlighted.
Screenshot on the right displays how the stack highlighting looks like.
Source → MacRumors Forums
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Daily Tricks
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Daily Trick,
Dock,
Snow Leopard,
Stack
Daily Trick 36. Reject Message
Often, it's really annoying to have stream of continuously coming unwanted messages. By only trashing the message won't discourage the senders in spamming our mail.
There is one way you can use to discourage them: by rejecting the message. Technically, it's called Bounce Back. If you're currently using Mail.app (default mail reader for Mac), you can do the trick.
- Open Mail and highlight the unwanted message
- Go to menubar Message → Bounce or you can always use keystrokes Cmd-Shift-B
- The message will be bounced back to the sender
There are still many interesting, nifty Mail tricks, which can be found out more here or you can just check out additional mail plugins.
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Reject
Daily Trick 35. File Aliasing
As we all have known, having alias (or well-known as shortcut) can save you a lot of time in navigating through files.
For highlighted items, there are 3 ways you can use to create an alias of them:
- Ctrl-Click on one of them (highlighted items) and choose Make Alias from the contextual menu
- Drag-n-Drop them with modifier keys Cmd-Opt pressed
- Hit the keyboard shorcut Cmd-L and the alias will be made
Depending on the situation, you can choose one of the making alias techniques. For example, if you want to make alias on the same directory and subsequently move it elsewhere, 3rd technique is the most suitable.
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Alias,
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Finder,
finder
Daily Trick 34. Screen Capture
It's not just as simple as pressing Cmd-Shift-3 to screen capture your Mac. If you've used screen capturing feature for quite a long time, you will figure out some nifty tricks of it.
In this daily trick, I am going to share some tricks that I know in capturing screen. I hope that using list is fine for you.
-
[Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-3] or [Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-4]
After pressing the keystrokes to capture screen, by default the picture will be saved to your Desktop. If you press another modifier key [ctrl] while performing the keystrokes the snapshot will be saved to your clipboard.
This trick is quite well-known. I just re-emphasized it here. -
[Cmd-Shift-4] + [Spacebar]
Using this key combination, you will be able to capture a certain stand-alone object on your Mac desktop, e.g. the dock, the menubar, opened window, etc. It's easy to use as the captured part will be highlighted. -
[Cmd-Shift-4] + [Hold Spacebar | Shift | Option]
In adjusting your screen capture region, you can use the key listed above. It's hard to explain how each of them works, but it's self-explanatory if you try it. -
Grab: Cmd-Shift-Z
This is to have a screen capture with timing. Using built-in application called Grab, you can bring forward a 10-second timer to capture your screen when it's elapsed.
That's all for this screen capturing tricks. You can apply some of the tricks above to capture things on your Mac desktop and use the screen capture result to take part in our contest: UsingMac Contest. Beauty of the Mac [more…].
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Daily Trick 33. Maximize Browser Window
Perhaps some Mac users are not used to using Zoom window of Mac; they would prefer to have maximized browser. We have a good news here, you can maximize your browser with a single click on this address → Maximized View.
And of course, you can always bookmark the address above so that everytime you want to maximize your browser window, a single click on the bookmarked address will do.
This trick works fine with Safari and Firefox. I haven't checked it on other browsers.
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Daily Tricks
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Browser,
Daily Trick,
Window
Daily Trick 32. Safari 4.0.3 Won't Launch
After installing the latest Safari 4.0.3 via Software Update, my Mac suddenly refuses to open new window of Safari. The possible cause of this problem is the plugins that have been installed on your Safari.
The first possible fix is by uninstalling Glims. To do this, you can go to MacHangout FAQ to download Glims Uninstaller.
If Safari is still not working after the installation, you can check on several possible and delete some possible clashing plugins:
- Mac HD → Library → InputManagers: /Library/InputManagers
- Mac HD → Library → Input Methods: /Library/Input Methods
- Home → Library → Input Methods: ~/Library/Input Methods
- Mac HD → Library → Application Support: /Library/Application Support
Note that you can just: open Finder, hit Cmd-Shift-G, and copy-paste the address written above for quick directory jump.
I have managed to make my Safari working fine now. Hope that you can get your Safari working again too.
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Daily Tricks
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Daily Trick,
Safari
Daily Trick 31. Mail Web Content
If you are using Safari as your Web Browser, there is no need to install any third-party apps in order to capture a web page to be sent to your friend. You can just use feature of Safari, from menubar: Safari → Mail Contents of This Page.
And the whole page you're currently displayed will be sent to your new composed Mail. Aside from using the menubar, you can also use keyboard shortcut Cmd-I to do the job.
As a side note, in Safari you can always use Cmd-Shift-I to send only the link of the page to your friends.
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Daily Trick 30. Smart Folder 2
In our previous daily trick, we have discussed about the Canned Searches, which is also known as Smart Folders. And in this daily trick, we are going to talk about creating your personalized Smart Folders, not just using the pre-defined searches.
First of all, you should open Finder window. And then followed by these steps:
- Press down Cmd-Shift-F to search items with a keyword, or you can also use Cmd-F to search items their kind
-
Now you can use the available option box to narrow down your search results.
Let's say you want to have a collection of JPEG Images, the option box selection will be Kind → Images · JPEG - You can add more constraints by pressing the (+) button sitting on the right side
- After you have finished with the constraining, click on the (Save) button and a popup dialogue pane will appear
- Fill in the name and don't forget to tick the checkbox labeled Add To Sidebar
- Upon hitting Save button for confirmation, your search terms and constraints will be saved in the form of Smart Folder and added to Finder Sidebar
Now, you can create as many Smart Folders as you want. And this will save your time by avoiding repetitive insertion of search constraints.
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Daily Trick 29. Smart Folder
One of our readers, Mahdi Hosseini, stumbled on the Smart Folder trick and he is eager to share with us.
Smart Folder TrickI came across a cool thing buried inside Finder.app.
If you like the current Canned Searches that could be used to search for certain files, such as All Documents, All Images, etc, and wish to have more search categories, worry not.
You can follow these steps to browse for more:
- Open your Finder and hit Cmd-Shift-G for opening Quick Address Jump
- Copy this address into the popped-down box: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/CannedSearches/
- You will find many Canned Search/Smart Folders inside with different search categories, you can drop some to your sidebar
- Everytime you want to do the searching, just click on the folder
For example, by using the Smart Folder: All PDF Documents, you don't need to search all over the place to find your PDFs, single click on this Smart Folder will do the job.
End of the TrickMany thanks to Mahdi for this little useful trick.
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Daily Tricks
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Finder,
finder,
Folder
Daily Trick 28. Wikipedia Browser
I believe we all have ever used Wikipedia and perhaps we often use it. And usually, we will use our web browser to search the entry of Wikipedia, won't we?
But using our Mac, it is not necessary for us to open web browser just to look for the entry in Wikipedia. It's because we can use our Dictionary.app to browse through Wikipedia entries.
But initially, you will need to enable Wikipedia as one of your Dictionary sources. Here are the steps to do it:
- Open your Dictionary.app and go to its Preferences
- Inside you can see many sources for your Dictionary. You should choose the one labelled Wikipedia, tick it, and drag it to the first order
- After you've done this setting, you can type in your search term and the search result will be grabbed from Wikipedia
Of course with similar steps as above, you can also enable Thesaurus or other dictionaries as the source.
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Daily Tricks
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Daily Trick,
Dictionary,
Wikipedia
Daily Trick 27. Simplify Finder Sidebar
If you feel that there are too many things on your Finder sidebar, you can hide some of the rarely used items. It's very easy to hide the items; You only need to drag-drop it out of sidebar.
However, if someday you feel that you will need the item again, you can:
- Go to Finder and open Finder Preferences → Cmd-[,]
- Choose the Sidebar Section
- Tick the items that you want to add onto the sidebar
- Or you can simply drag-drop the icon to empty space of your Finder sidebar
But up to now, I still can't find the way to hide the sidebar while keeping the toolbar shown, like in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4).
If you want to change the icon, you can follow the guide written here and if you want to revert back to original icon, we can find the how-to inside here.
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Daily Tricks
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Finder,
finder
Daily Trick 26. Change Dock Menu Label
If you're feeling bored of the contextual menu of the Dock, you can always change the menu labeling. To change the menu labeling, these steps can guide you:
- Open your Finder, go to Mac HDD → System → Library → CoreServices
- Find your Dock.app icon, Ctrl-Click on it and choose Show Package Contents
- And then follow the path: Contents → Resources → English.lproj
- Search for the item DockMenus.strings and change its privilege so that you are able to modify the content
- Open it and you can see the command and respective labeling, e.g. QUIT = "Quit";.
If you want to change the labeling, just edit the right hand side (under the quote) - After you save the file, you can see the changes immediately from your Dock menu
There are many labels you can change apart from the given example. The part that you can change is shown in the highlighted part as shown in the screenshot below.
Just try this little trick and have fun!
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Dock
Daily Trick 25. Quick Directory Access
Often, we want to quickly access to some directory paths to Finder, such as accessing folder Applications, Home, or Desktop. If you go to Finder Menubar → Go, you can see some pre-assigned keyboard shorcuts that can help you quickly access those directories (e.g. Cmd-Shift-A for Applications).
And for the directory not on the list, you can always use Cmd-Shift-G and fill in the path for quick directory access (e.g. ~/Documents/Drafts).
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Daily Trick 24. Share Data with Drop Box
In order to send files to the other Mac on the same local network, usually we will utilize a public folder and create a drop box inside. Drop Box is a folder where other users can drop files into it, but they can't see the content inside.
The drop box creation is simple and straightforward:
- Open Finder and go to Home Directory
- Search & open your Public folder
- Create a new "Drop Box" folder
- Open its Get Info pane (Cmd-I)
- Under Sharing & Permissions section, change privileges for other users into Write only (Drop Box)
However, you also need to turn on your File Sharing so that other users on the local network can access to your Public Folder.
You can go inside System Preferences → Sharing to turn on your File Sharing. Now, you should be able to share files easily on the local network.
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Sharing
Daily Trick 23. Mail Attachment
When we received a mail with many attachments, there are some actions can be taken: change download location, download all attachments, or download only some attachments.
To change the location of your downloaded attachments, you can follow these steps:
- Open Mail and go to menubar Mail → Preferences
- Go under General section and search for the option box labelled Downloads folder
- By changing this setting, you can change the download location of your attachment files
After you've changed the download location, now you can download the attachments without afraid of losing track of those files. If you want to download all files, you can click on the save button and all of the attachments will be saved to the download folder.
If you don't want to download all of the attachments, you can:
- Click-and-hold the save button and the drop down list will appear
- You can choose the attachment to be downloaded from that drop down list
- Of course, you can also choose to download all attachments from the drop down list
Hope that you will be able to handle mail attachment better than before reading this.
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Daily Tricks
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Mail,
mail
Daily Trick 22. Assign Login Items
Having downloaded some nice menubar applications, the problem of always keeping those menubar items launched upon login may arise. One reader pointed out the absence of an option to keep the item automatically activated (like in Dock).
Unfortunately, there isn't any quick way to always launch the menubar items. The only way is by assigning it to our login items, which can be done by following these steps:
- Open Menubar Apple → System Preferences
- Go under Accounts → Login Items
- There you will see several applications that are already assigned as login items
- Search for the [+] and use it to add more login items
- You can also choose whether to hide the application with provided checkbox
It is always good to remember that the more you have applications assigned as your login items, the longer it will take for your start-up time.
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Daily Trick 21. Grab and Scroll
In many occasions, scrolling will be needed. If we are using a trackpad, usually we will use double finger to scroll vertically or horizontally.
However, some users may not feel accustomed to the double finger scrolling, they would choose to drag the scroll bar. For these users, we can suggest another new way of scrolling grab-scrolling.
How to perform the scrolling? Follow these steps and you will know:
- Open an application has a scroll bar
- Put your pointer on top of that application
- Press and hold down modifier keys Cmd-Opt
- You will see the pointer transformed into an open hand
- When you perform a click-and-hold, the hand will look like grabbing the pane
- Move around the cursor (while holding the click) to perform the scrolling
This works just like grabbing around the map in Google Map.
Now, you can experience a brand new way of scrolling, i.e. grab-scrolling. And for me, this trick is extremely useful when you want to scroll diagonally.
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Daily Trick 20. Quick Equation
I believe most of us have already known that we can type in an equation on the Spotlight and straightaway get the result without the need to open Calculator. Also, I believe that only few of us know that we can do a quick equation without using Spotlight.
How can it be done?
- Type in the equation, let say (5*3)+8*9-3
- Highlight all of the equation and hit Cmd-Shift-8
- The equation will be immediately changed to 84
- It's important to note that some applications don't have this feature
So, next time if you want to do a quick equation, you should use this instead of Spotlight. Cheers from UsingMac!
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Daily Tricks
Tags:
Calculator,
Daily Trick
Daily Trick 19. Time Announcer
While we're kept occupied by some tasks, we may have lose the attention of the time, and may miss certain important events.
But with using Mac, you can set the clock to auto-announce the time every hour. Setting can be made easily with these steps:
- Go to your menubar and there you should be able to find your clock displayed
- Click it and choose Open Date & Time…
- Go under Clock section
- Tick the checkbox: Announce the Time
Not only set it to announce every hour, but there is also options for you to set the announcement to be made at interval of half hour or even quarter hour.
Obviously, don't try this in your office with your volume turned to maximum. You will annoy your colleagues, especially if you're using Hysterical as your custom voice.
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Daily Trick
Daily Trick 18. Quote Message
When replying or forwarding mail, there would be a high chance for us to quote some parts of the message. By quoting, you can pin-point the discussion of the mail.
To quote portion of your message, follow this steps:
- Highlight the portion of the message you want to quote
- After that, click on the Reply or Forward button
- All of the highlighted part will be put on new message
The good thing is, you don't need to waste time deleting unnecessary part of the received mail. Just quote it.
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