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Preview Tutorial - Mark Up Tools

2008-07-04T20:00:00Z

With Preview, you can open your PDF files and do some modifications to the files. Modifications can be done only when file isn't locked.

There are several useful tools in Preview that you can use. One of those is the Mark Up Tools.

Introducing Mark Up Tools

As the name suggest, this tool is useful for you to emphasize some parts of your PDF files. There are three mark up tools available: Highlight Control Command H, Strike Through Control Command S and Underline Control Command U. Don't worry about the shortcuts since they're easy to remember: take out the first letter and add Control Command in front.

If you still forgot what are they, you can always refer back to Preview menu Tools ▸ Mark Up. The tools can be seen there.

Using Mark Up Tools

It's really simple to use these tools. You only need to draw a selection, hit the keystrokes, and the part under the selection will be marked.

Marking Up Rectangle Areas

For the sake of completeness (and for the sake of avoiding short article), I will introduce you a killer trick to draw a rectangular selection in Preview.

Hold down Option key, move pointer a bit and the pointer should be in Crosshair mode now. After that, you can draw a region (like the one in screen capture mode) and all texts under the region will be selected. This trick is amazingly useful when you're marking up tabular kind of data.

Screen Capture a Window

2008-07-03T20:00:00Z

We all know that by using Shift Command 3 we can take the capture the whole screen and using Shift Command 4 we can select the region to be screen captured.

Capturing Screen Window

There is a hidden trick behind screen capture, if you're pressing Shift Command 4+Spacebar, you will be able to capture a window hovered by your mouse along with the shadow.

You can also capture your menu bar, Dock and even additional menu extras of your Mac. I think you should try it. It's fun.

Disabling Shadow

If you don't like the shadow being captured, you can Disable shadow in screen window captures [MacOSXHints.com] with a simple command line.

Here is the command line defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true && killall SystemUIServer to prevent the shadow being screen captured.

And to restore back to original setting, you can use defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow && killall SystemUIServer.

Have fun capturing your screen!

Use MovieFX for Adding Movie Effect

2008-07-02T20:00:00Z

Inside Quartz Composer, there is a demo application that can add effect to your movie. This demo application is called MovieFX and can be found in Mac HD ▸ Developer ▸ Examples ▸ Quartz Composer ▸ Applications ▸ MovieFX.

Launching MovieFX

After you've been inside MovieFX folder, you should search for MovieFX.xcodeproj file. Open that file with XCode and from XCode toolbar, choose Build and Go.

Up to this point, you should be able to see new pane opened with entitled MovieFX.

Adding Movie Effects

Before starting, you need to drop QuickTime Movie file you want to be processed. After that, you can select 1 of 61 effects you want to use. From those effects, I only like 18 effects though.

Those effects I like are Black & White, Color Controls, Color Invert, Color Pencil, Compound Eye, Crystalize, Exposure Adjust, Flip-Flop, Gamma Adjust, and Glow, as shown on the short video below.

Click here to see this video on Flickr

</embed></object>

And the rest are Kaleidoscope, MagicBall, Mirror, Monochrome, Neon, Sepia, Spotlights, and X-Ray.

Click here to see this video on Flickr.

</object>

Don't forget to export your movie after changes are made.

Beautiful, Inspiring Firefox Wallpapers

2008-07-01T20:00:00Z

Hi all, now we're back again with our big collection of Firefox wallpapers. There are almost 100 wallpapers in total for you to enjoy. Hope that Firefox can bring you warm, comfortable summer.

Added : Best to be viewed with Firefox.

[Foxkeh.com]

[Technize.com]

[CleanWallpapers.blogspot.com]

[Steam10.deviantart.com]

[Flickr.com - MrTopf]

[Technology.DesktopNexus.com]

[Flickr.com - flod]

[Flickr.com - the.voyagers]

[MouseRunner.net]

[LinuxPoison.blogspot.com]

[3DataDesign.com]

[PicasaWeb.google.com]

[MouseRunner.net]

[PmWorks-Corp.com]

[Blog.Gilly.ws]

[Flickr.com - seanboy1]

[KillBill.skynetblogs.be]

[TRForumcu.net]

[Ken407.vox.com]

[Big.org.ua]

[Tybtsee.deviantart.com]

[Dawkz.deviantart.com]

[davdiana.deviantart.com]

[BeaverDesign.deviantart.com]

[michaelmknight.deviantart.com]

[tonev.deviantart.com]

[PandaLegacy.deviantart.com]

[yayieali.deviantart.com]

[leesized.deviantart.com]

[cdrummer.deviantart.com]

[WolfvanWhite.deviantart.com]

[NsaneNoob.deviantart.com]

[thegmer.deviantart.com]

[djBoy0007punjab.deviantart.com]

[khraath.deviantart.com]

[MouseRunner.deviantart.com]

[fdegrave.deviantart.com]

[nextexile.deviantart.com]

[disfractional.deviantart.com]

[mrickaby.deviantart.com]

[ionboy.deviantart.com]

[usedHONDA.deviantart.com]

[canada-man.deviantart.com]

Unique Clock Screensavers for Mac

2008-07-01T06:42:00Z

Polar Clock Screensaver

I am so much attracted to the smooth transition between one color to the other. Without doubt, this is the most colorful yet simple screensaver that I've ever seen.

Download link for PolarClock

Uniqlock

The only screensaver that has the combination of clock, music, dancing and young, pretty girls.

Download link for Uniqlock [not Leopard compatible]

Fractal Clock

A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,"[1] a property called self-similarity ~ Wikipedia

Making use of fractals, this screensaver creates appealing scene. Sometimes, the screensaver looks like a spider web.

Download link for Fractal Clock.

DropClock

With each digit of the clock slowly dropped one by one to the water, this screensaver creates a really comfortable view.

Download link for Drop Clock

Word Clock

Instead of using digits to show the date and time, Word Clock screensaver uses words to represent current time.

Download link for Word Clock.

Mac How To : Hide Everything

2008-06-29T21:54:00Z

Hide Menu Bar and Dock

We're now introducing you the trick to hide your Mac menu bar. It's useful when you're trying to mimic the way Windows users do to their menu bar. But for real, by hiding (getting rid of) your menu bar, you can get extra 20 pixels for your display.

And after your hardwork in tweaking, you don't need to care about what's the most suitable color for your menu bar; Invisible is the most suitable color.

Before starting, I'd like to tell you that you will need to have a free application so called Property List Editor. This application is already packed inside your Mac. In case you've deleted it, get it back now.

Here is the basic idea, you tweak the Info.plist file of certain application. This application, when launched, will hide the menu bar for you. It's also named as Full Screen Presentation Mode by Apple developers.

Enough of the explanation, I think. Let's jump to details:

Choose your Application. If you wonder, can you choose Finder as your preferred Application. I could say yes. (Location of Finder : Your HD ▸ System ▸ Library ▸ CoreServices ▸ Finder)
Control Click on it and choose Show Package Contents
Go inside Contents folder and open up Info.plist
You can see expandable list with the Root as, well, main root. Expand it.
Highlight Click on Root and create New Child by clicking on the button nearby. It's so big up there, I know you could find it.
New Property List name will be LSUIPresentationMode, with class Number and value 4
Save the file and relaunch the Application. After the change takes effect, you will have your Dock and menu bar automatically hidden

Source : How to Hide the Menu Bar and Dock [MacWorld.com].

For the menu bar, it's not completely out. You can move your mouse up and there you go, the menu bar pop out again, just like what you see in Windows. Unfortunately, you can't get your Spotlight to work when your menu bar is in this stealth mode. It doesn't matter for me, does it matter for you?

Hide All Files

This is one of my favorite Terminal command line, especially when I need to capture the screen of my Mac. Whenever I need to hide all my cluttered files on the Desktop, I will just execute the following Terminal command lines: chflags hidden ~/Desktop/*

And it works like a charm, all my files stored in the path ~ ▸ Desktop are hidden. To reveal them back, simply change hidden with nohidden.

You can always refer back to 5 Most Useful Terminal Command Utilities [UsingMac.com]. These command lines I use in everyday of my Mac life.

Hide Your Screen

It's just a funny idea that I get from an image taken by owner of Hongkiat.com.

Following this idea, I tried to Google and Flickr around. And discover this amazing slideshow on Flickr: w00kie's slideshow.

That's all about hiding your Mac screen, folks. And thus, you will get the transparent screen. Until now, I'm still amazed on how creative those people are.

Those still images make me amazed enough. How about this video?

Click on this link to watch the video on YouTube

</object>

Hide Crash Reports

Crash reports are rarely seen in Mac. However, when they appear, they destroy my mood. So before it happens, I usually turn them off with command line defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none. Crash Reports? Be gone!

I use these two browsers intensively, so it would be rationally true that these two got the best chance of crashing. And got the most chance of being screen captured.

Exhaustive Tutorial for iMovie

2008-06-28T19:52:00Z

This tutorials and all the details are written by Kelly Swee. Thanks, Kelly!

Starting Your Project (Command N)

After importing it into the mac, you will ﬁnd your imported videos under the events library. To start, go to File ▸ New Project. The new project is found in the Project Library. Select and drag the video clips from the Event Library into the Project Library.

Addition of Audio (Command 1)

Click on the icon or shortcut key Command 1 to add audio tracks. You may choose a range of audio tracks from the default ﬁles, iMovie' 08 Sound Effect and iLife Sound Effects . There are so many different sound effects that you can choose from. I would advise taking some time off to go through them and get familarized so that you could refer to them as you shoot and edit videos from different ocassions. You may also obtain tracks from your iTunes and Garageband.

Addition of Photos (Command 2)

Click on the icon or shortcut key Command 2 to add photos. Do remember to import your desired photos into iPhoto so that you may obtain them from this function. Images from your Photo Gallery can also be added to your iMovie project.

You will notice the image that you add into your iMovie project will move. The default setting is Ken Burns, which is a function whereby motion is added to a still image. The result is akin to a camera panning and moving over the image.

You may change the setting, by going to Edit ▸ Project Properties or shortcut key Command J. Go to Initial Photo Placement. The option Fit would mean that images added into the iMovie Project would remain still.

For my personal preference, I like to add the Ken Burns effect into my images so that the video will look pleasing and entertaining with a suitable audio track added. It's pretty interesting because you get to manipulate with how you want the motion to be added to your still image. Do some experimenting to get the hang out of it.

Here's an example:

However, it really boils down to what kind of video you want to create with the raw images or videos you have.

Addition of titles (Command 3)

Just click on the icon or Command 3 to choose a range of titles. Drag the desired titles into your iMovie project. You may add the words into your video, so as the video is played, the words are displayed. You may also create a title on its own, which is seen as with a black background.

Sometimes it's pretty weird. I still have not ﬁgure it out. For example, you have already added a title that lasts for 3 seconds to the clip of duration of 5 seconds. You would like to add a second title to the remaining of the video clip or a title that comes right after the previous one but it seems impossible.

However, it is possible to add as many titles as you want in a video clip. What I have been doing is to add the title to the proceeding clips, type in the words I want, after that click Done. Then I drag the title into the speciﬁc part of the previous video clip.

Addition of transitions (Command 4)

The addition of transition is simple. just drag the transition in between of two frames. However, the addition of transition would cause the scenes at the end of the video clip frame not to be shown. One option is to not to trim the video clip to perfection ﬁrst but to leave some loose ends. Trim the clip to perfection only after the transition is added.

Miscellaneous Part

Editing your Audio Tracks

The addition of your audio track into the project simply involves dragging the audio track in to the selected frame. Do remember that the audio track must be imported into your iTunes library.

To edit the audio track, click on the track and right click to select the option Trim. You will see this. To play it, press Spacebar, so select the part of the audio track you want and click Trim and it's done!

However, there were some circumstances where I could not extract the part of the audio track. For example, your video clip is only 30 seconds long, while you want the chorus of the song, which is usually found somewhere in the middle of the audio track. The audio track will always start from the beginning, which means that you will not be able to select the chorus for your video clip if you were to just drag the audio track into the scene and stop there.

Example:

Only the front part of the audio track can be edited, while the rest (unhighlighted) cannot be selected.

For me, there are two ways that I would do.

I would drag many Titles into my project. Go to Titles and select any titles. Just keep dragging till your project's duration is slightly longer than the duration of the song. Next, you can drag the audio track into the project. The entire audio track is seen now. Do the same as mentioned before, click on the audio track and right click to select Trim. You can see the entire audio track being highlighted. You can select your desired part now!

After you are done, you will return to your project and move the track to your video clip. As for the rest of the empty titles, just click and hold shift to select them and delete all of them at once. You are done!

For example:

Now the entire audio track is selected.

The other possible way is to edit your audio ﬁle before adding it into your video clip. It could be rather tedious but if the sound editing software that you are using is easy to manage, this could be one good way for you.

There are a number of sound editing softwares (trial versions for simple editing) which you could download online. I have used Wavepad, Goldwave and Audacity.

I thought Wavepad was not user friendly for mac but it is pretty alright when I used it in Windows.

I switched to using Audacity, which I am quite comfortable with except that there are certain ﬁles that fail to be opened.

Goldwave trial version is only valid with 50 tries. I used that last year, and from what I can remember it was pretty similar to Wavepad except that there were more functions than the latter. One of which was reducing the vocals from an audio track. However, the reducing vocals would cause a slight difference to the the original track as some of the music as to be removed as well.

Audio Skimming

When I ﬁrst started my iMovie'08, the audio skimming was turned on. That could be a default setting. This means that as you move your the cursor through the video clip, both the moving images with the accompanying audio would be displayed. Haha, I found that pretty disturbing.

You can choose to turn it off, by going to View ▸ Audio Skimming or shortcut key Command K or by pressing this small button.

Duration of the transition (Command R)

I found the default setting of 12 seconds too short, causing the transition to appear so quickly and in a non-obvious fashion, so I usually changed it to 20 seconds. Select the transition, then go to Edit ▸ Set Duration or shortcut keys Command R.

Transparent Login Picture

2008-06-27T12:27:00Z

Even though we have put transparent image as our login pictures, the white square box will still be there. This indicates that there is lack of transparency in displaying our login pictures.

But now, it's not a problem. Mac OS X Hints has put up a really interesting topic about how to enable this transparency. All of the steps are done in Terminal.

In their article, Show User Pictures with Transparency, I can conclude three main steps used in adding transparency to login pictures.

dscl . -read /Users/[your username] Picture
This will help you identify which image you're currently using for Desktop picture. As a response, Terminal will return the path of the picture.
Picture: /Library/User Pictures/Animals/Butterfly.tif
Don't forget to copy the path to this file, as you will need it later.
sudo dscl . -delete /Users/[your username] JPEGPhoto
As explained inside the article, we will have a JPEG version of the image. This JPEG version is the culprit behind the inability to display alpha transparency. With the command line above, this JPEG version will be removed.
sudo dscl . -change /Users/[your username] Picture '/Library/User Pictures/Animals/Butterfly.tif' '/Library/User Pictures/New/Smile.tiff'
The first parameter under the single quote is the path to the current login picture. This is the path that you've copied to clipboard at the 1st step.
The second parameter is the path to new login picture that you want to use. Obviously, use new login picture with some transparencies. You need to provide the full path of it. (Hint: You can use drag and drop to accomplish this task)

As usual, logout for the change to take effect.

I cannot fully guarantee that this trick will not harm your Mac. The only thing I can prove is that this trick didn't harm my Mac. So, you can try it for your own risk.

Screenshot above shows how awful the login pictures without transparency compare to the one with transparency.

There are several resources you can use to beautify this trick.

Fast User Switching (used in screenshot above)
Leopard Preview Trick: Grab Icon (I use this to capture the icon of Yahoo! Messenger)
Free Icons for Personal Use
35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

Strange Browsers

2008-06-26T17:16:00Z

Click here to view this short video on Flickr

</object>

You also can make your browsers (or other applications) to work like that. What you only need to do is run Terminal command line killall Dock while you're minimizing the browser window. Hitting Shift for slow motion effect will be a great help for this trick to work.

I've been playing around with these strange browsers all day long and found no harm to my Mac doing this. Should you try it also?

Terminal Sings Songs

2008-06-24T17:48:00Z

Just a quick tip, with a your Mac built-in voice, you can make your Mac sings several nice songs with Terminal.

say -v Good oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Is it nice? Do you want more? Don't worry, there is more songs ahead for you to enjoy, especially during your most boring time. You know what I mean.

say -v Bad oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Maybe you feel the lyric is a little bit boring? All o's like that. Let's use a little bit creativity.

osascript -e 'say "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo" using "Cellos"'

osascript -e 'say "Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dum de dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dee dummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" using "Pipe Organ"'

osascript -e 'say "Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dum de dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dee dummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" using "Hysterical"'

I don't like this one above. It's just because it's too long.

osascript -e 'say "oh This is a silly song silly song silly song this is the silliest song ive ever ever heard So why keep you listening listening listening while you are supposed to work to work to work to work its because i hate my job hate my job hate my job its because i hate my job more than anything else No its because youve no life youve no life youve no life and you better go get one after forwarding this crap" using "cellos"'

You can Triple-Click on the displayed command line to highlight the whole line.
Special thanks to :

MacRumors for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd songs
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) for the 4th and 5th songs
The commentor Jérémie for the last song

Firefox 3 How to: Store Bookmarklet in Bookmarks Bar

2008-06-24T02:08:00Z

Last time, I've compiled an article about Bookmarklets for Mac Safari. Actually, those bookmarklets also can be used on your Firefox 3. Because those bookmarklets are running with javascript. As long as you have your javascript turned on, you can use them.

"A bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page." ~ Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's a bit tricky to store your bookmarklets on Firefox 3 Bookmarks Bar. Simple favicon drag and drop, unfortunately, cannot work in Firefox 3. You still can do simple favicon drag and drop to bookmark a certain page of your visited site. But I don't know why, it just can't work on storing bookmarklets.

Therefore, you need another way to store the bookmarklets on bookmarks bar. I have two alternative ways here and I will explain you the details on how to make it. This is the case if you're willing to read through the article though. You can also watch the short video tutorial at the end of this article.

Alternative 1. Create New Bookmark

Copy the whole bookmarklet url
Control Click on the bookmarks bar and Choose New Bookmark from the pop up menu
Paste the url you've just copied before as the bookmark's Location. Fill in suitable title for the bookmarklet and confirm the bookmarklet creation

In my opinion, this way is slower than the second alternative. But this way is the usual and less complicated way.

Alternative 2. Bookmark with Clipping

With your Mac OS X, you can do text clipping. And to my surprise, this text clipping technique also works in Firefox 3. It's like dragging favicon but it's not exactly the same. Here, instead of you dragging the favicon, you need to drag the whole url. In order to easily drag the whole url, follow these steps:

Highlight the whole url with Command L. This step is necessary. I will explain it later
Drag the highlighted section to your Firefox bookmarks bar. In case you highlight the whole url manually, you need to click and hold your mouse for a while (about 1.5-2 seconds) before you can drag out the url. I guess this is designed in this way so that the system can correctly interpret what action you intend to perform
Change the title and hit OK. Done

Video Tutorial

As promised, I will put up the video tutorial for this particular trick.

Click here to view this short video on Flickr

</object>

Play Emacs Games on Mac OS X

2008-06-23T13:00:00Z

What's Emacs

Unlike what people think of and write of, Terminal game isn't the correct term to be used; Instead, emacs game is the correct term.

Emacs version 22.1 first supports Mac OS X on June 2, 2007. The complete story of emacs can be read from wikipedia: GNU Emacs, if you're interested.

How to Play Game with Emacs

Open Terminal
Execute command emacs
Under emacs, type keystrokes Escape X
Insert the game you want to play. There are several interesting games you can play here, such as: Tetris, Dunnet and Gomoku
Later I will tell you where to find the listing. Now, let's watch emacs in action

Click here to view this short video on Flickr

</object>

The first one I played is tetris, followed by dunnet, gomoku and the last one is 5x5.

Where to Find All Playable Games

If you're using Leopard now, you can open your Finder and then Go to Folder (Shift Command G): /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/play. Inside there you can find all playable features. But some of them are just plain animation and unfortunately, some of them cannot be played. Don't ask me why, I also don't know.

To jump from one game to another, use the instruction above starting from step 3. After something like M-x appears on the bottom of your Terminal, you can type in the game name and execute it.

There also other playable animations and games that are quite interesting:

Animations : animate, life, zone
Games : snake, solitaire, pong

Mac Applications for Video Recording

2008-06-22T18:09:00Z

Nowadays, I have been hunting for good mac applications to record screen of my Mac. And I found these five applications are good enough to do the task: ScreenFlow, SnapzProX, ScreenMimic, iShowU and Jing.

Their prices are varying. They also have their own uniqueness. Here are what I thought of them.

Jing

Price : $0.00 alias Free

Let's start from Jing.

With Jing, you can record video of your screen up to 5 minutes. The recorded video is in the swf format. The file size of the result is quite big so that it's not compatible for recording long video.

iShowU

Price : $20.00

In my opinion, iShowU has good user interface. You can easily customize your settings and save them as preset. And also there are some built-in presets to help you.

Feature that I like most of this screen recording: It can do instant recording, so we don't need to wait for the encoding to take place. And it has a reasonable price.

The demo is available but with a huge iShowU watermark on your recording.

Screen Mimic

Price : $65.00

The main advantage of this screen recorder is its ability to export movies as Adobe Flash SWF and Flash Video FLV format other than Quicktime MOV format.

The unique part of this application is the re-encoding feature. With this feature, you can have the second chance to encode again. This is especially useful for increasing/decreasing the frame rate and adjusting the mouse from the first encoding.

Demo of this applications is available for 15s recording.

Snapz Pro X

Price : $69.00

I remember when I first start my hunt on screen recorder, everybody says that I should try Snapz Pro X. It seems that this application is already so popular.

But there is one thing you need to take note, keystrokes Shift Command 3 will be used to invoke Snapz Pro X. And it's quite a long time needed for the encoding.

ScreenFlow

Price : $99.99

This is a newly built screen recorder for Mac OS X Leopard. So I've confidence that this screen recorder has been optimized for your Leopard.

After the encoding, the file is saved as ScreenFlow format. This file can be further exported to QuickTime Movie Format and interestingly, you can scale down the movie.

But yeah I know, the price is really high.

What's Your Decision?

So, have you decided which screen recorder application you will use? For additional information, I am currently using ScreenFlow, the most expensive one *ouch*.

Recover Deleted Desktop Picture

2008-06-21T22:04:00Z

I have set up a cool image as my Desktop picture and that precious file is accidentally deleted. And I will be really confused if someone came and asked me to send that image file I used as Desktop picture.

I spent my precious two-hours time digging through folders to find where the file is saved inside my Mac and ended up in vain. But then I realized, I can use one trick to recover that deleted Desktop picture. Here is how the trick works:

Open System Preferences
Choose Desktop & Screen Saver and then go under Desktop section
Simply drag out the Desktop picture thumbnail and you will get the copy of that picture file. It works like a charm

For additional illustration, I have embedded the video tutorial for this trick.

Preview: Handy Color Picker [Leopard]

2008-06-21T21:00:00Z

As a huge fan of Leopard Preview, I always try to do my image editing process with Preview. And I guess today is my lucky day, I discovered how to pick color from anywhere of your Mac screen with only Preview in hex format.

You could see the benefits here: Preview is fast, rarely crash and most importantly: it's free.

Setting Up

Here is the step by step tutorial on how to set up the color picker:

Open Preview without opening any images file. This way, only the menubar of Preview will be shown on your Mac
While the menubar is showing Preview, hit keystrokes Shift Command C to reveal one of Preview tools: Show Colors
Inside Colors Pane, choose Color Palettes which is the third pane from the list of tools
There you will see the palette chooser. In order to display the hex format of the color, you need to choose palette named Web Safe Colors
Now, you've done the setting

How to Use

Though the color picker setting is a bit complicated and troublesome, but when it comes to using it, it comes in really handy. Can you see the Magnifier icon next to that long, ugly color bar? Click on it, move it around to pick the color of pixel of the screen you want and here you go, the specified hex code of the picked color are shown plus the nearby colors.

I know you will love it. Mind leaving portion of your love in the comment box?