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Elegant Apple Mockups 2: Mythical MacTouch

2009-01-05T12:30:00Z

"If MacTouch is to be built by the big family of Apple, what will it look like", this question seems to be vibrating near my ears all of sudden. Out of my curiosity, I go Google-ing for MacTouch.

Some remarkably interesting MacTouch/MacBook Touch mockups, possibly made by Apple fans, are found.

Apple Safari Pad

Revealed to be the origins of iPhone, this mockup code-named Safari Pad looks pretty much similar to well-known iPhone. For me, this design mockup will be way satisfying to be manufactured as MacBook Touch.

Dual Page MacTouch

Designed to be played as 2-Page book, this mockup interestingly transform a MacBook into multi-functionality device: reading, performing as laptop or two-player gaming platform.

Silver-Plated MacTouch

To have upcoming MacTouch inheriting the great silver chasing of MacBook Pro (like the mockup), I would be the one to be on head of the queue for this touchy MacBook.

Glossy MacBook Touch

This Glossy MacBook Touch mockup, taking most of the part as screen, would provide us wider display and, more importantly, inheriting the glossy appearance of iMac.

iPod Touch Transformation

In line with UI elements of iPod Touch, will this mockup be used for further innovation of Apple on MacBook Touch? If it's, I hope it don't want to be disappointed by simply bigger version of iPod Touch.

iMac Touch

Though it's just humble mockup, this slim-looking MacBook Touch looks so impressive that we would cry for putting this mockup into reality.

Create Booklet with Mac Preview

2009-01-04T12:31:00Z

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…

Create Booklet 1.0.1

Create Booklet, created by Christoph Vogelbusch, is the additional utility sought by many booklet fans. With this nifty utility, which is a sequence of automator actions actually, in few steps a well-arranged booklet can be printed out.

You can download it from this page: Create Booklet 1.0.1.

Integration with Mac Preview

With only one additional option, which is to create the booklet, no much further learnings are required to master this new utility. These simple steps will be more than enough to help you utilize this.

Install Create Booklet 1.0.1
Open your document with Preview (usually in form of PDF)
Choose File → Print... (keystrokes Command-P)
Located at lower left, button labelled PDF can be pressed
From provided menu selections, choose new option Create Booklet
In the new Preview pane opened from the finished process, pages have already been sorted to be printed as booklet

I've tried it on printing my several notes and it really works!

Highlights of 2008

2008-12-31T10:00:00Z

Before starting the new year, we will take a brief look at UsingMac resources during year 2008, including remarkable Mac applications, killer tips and tricks, awesome wallpapers collection, time saver keyboard shortcuts and other interesting stuffs.

Remarkable Mac Applications

It doesn't matter how powerful your Mac, without wide knowledge of Mac application, you won't fully utilize your Mac. Oppositely, brutally installing all applications recommended by favorite sources isn't a wise step also.

In the year 2008, compilations of articles about Mac applications are significant enough to give you brief introduction to many Mac applications that's readily available.

100+ Free Applications for Mac OS X

Don't be shocked by the amount of free applications here. There are actually thousands of those, but I only mention some that worth the spotlight, such as Deeper, Paparazzi!, AppCleaner and many other apps.

Mac Application Launchers

To name some of application launchers spotted by UsingMac, there are still many of those available. However, in the case of choosing application launcher, experience and growing productivity comes first, as reflected by growing learning of using Quicksilver, Namely, Sapiends and other application launchers mentioned.

Mac Image Viewers

Other than those famous application launchers, image viewers are also available in various forms with various conveniences and features delivered to us. But of course, you won't need image viewers if you don't even have a single image.

Mac Applications for Video Recording

Here you can find several alternatives of video recorder for Mac, from free to $99.99 price tag, from only capturing screen to advance movie editing.

Mac Apps that Stand Out from the Crowd

These apps are so unique that I can hardly find any special category for them. But their usability and functionality really stand out from the crowd; They worth the mention!

Killer Tips and Tricks

As the backbone of UsingMac, killer tips and tricks won't be absent from our big roundup. There are many of the killer tips and tricks we have provided and we're glad that some even get huge exposure from popular sites.

Here are the highlights of some killer tips and tricks.

100+ Must Know Quick Leopard Tips

Huge list of tips and tricks that can be done on your Mac. This huge list would not be interesting without trying out the tips and tricks.

Preview Tutorial - Embed Icon into Stack Drawer

Step by step guide to kill your plain-looking stack folder and replace it with icon embedded drawer icon.

Quicksilver Tricks

Things that you can do with your Quicksilver as not merely an application launcher but a time saver application, including list of available actions and other killer Quicksilver tricks.

10 Handy Mac Preview Application Tricks as Image Editor

Editing image with your Mac isn't as difficult as it seems to be. These 10 tricks will give you the power to do more with Preview.

Dock Tweaks for Mac OS X Leopard

Having your Trash name changed into Recycle Bin is one of the tricks taught inside this article. There are also couple more cool things that you can do for your Dock.

Impressive Safari Plugins

With its competitor, Firefox 3, empowered with many third party plugins, the blazing speed of Safari may lose. But these impressive Safari plugins may at least bring Safari to be a par to Firefox.

Terminal Sings Songs

Not only you can use your Terminal to do some of your works, but during a mind-numbing day, your Terminal can also amuse you with its not-so-special songs.

Free Download YouTube Video with Safari

This article will reveal you the secret trick of using Activity Monitor to grab free YouTube Video from its huge video database. And this trick can also be done on other media sites similar to YouTube.

Awesome Wallpapers Collection

While most of the time discussing about Mac tricks, sometimes we will throw wallpaper compilation to reinvigorate our Mac display. Currently, they're thousands of wallpapers showcased on our gallery and more will be added in the future.

Monthly Wallpapers

Every month, we will have an article called Wallpapers of the Month. And up to now, we've already three of these, showcasing best wallpapers found on the particular month, which are

Nature Wallpapers

Apart from those monthly wallpapers, nature wallpapers are also mind-refreshing. And we've found hundreds of them and compiled them in two separate articles

Apple Wallpapers

Some compilations of wallpapers focused on Apple logo are made, but these two are the most popular throughout year 2008

Other Wallpapers

Not only limited to those kinds of wallpapers mentioned above but other wallpapers are also hot among our readers

Time Saver Keyboard Shortcuts

It's no doubt that keyboard shortcuts play important role in saving your time and boosting your productivity. Experiencing this fact, sometimes I present available keyboard shortcuts in a comprehensive way: by highlighting certain part with different text coloring to emphasize on its usefulness.

Modifier Keys and Their Impact on Keyboard Shortcuts

Remembering keyboard shortcuts it's not only the matter of how big your brain is but more to the matter of how you understand the impact of adding additional modifier keys (Shift, Control and Option) to keystrokes.

This article gives you the main idea of it.

40 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Finder

Like Windows Explorer on Windows, Finder is the most visited place while using your Mac. Therefore, keyboard shortcuts like Command-1 to view list as icons and many other time saving shortcuts can greatly boost our file-searching speed.

It's also explained a bit how you can adapt your old Windows keyboard shortcuts to new Mac keystrokes.

45 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Firefox

List of available Firefox keyboard shortcuts, comparing keyboard shortcuts for Windows and keystrokes for Mac in a easy-to-understand, tabular way.

25 Useful Shortcuts for Safari

Collection of Safari Web Browser keyboard shortcuts from not widely known to commonly used keystrokes.

Mail Keyboard Shortcuts

Remembering shortcuts is the most efficient way to get the most out of our Mac, not exclusive for Mail. This simple list of 63 Mail keyboard shortcuts will help you know better features inside your Mail and what keystrokes to use that can cut your time consumption on using Mail.

iMovie'08 - The Quick Shortcuts

For iMovie'08 fans, keyboard shortcuts are useful in editing movie. In this article, not only you will be introduced to several shortcuts but you will also get overall function of the feature discussed.

Mac Screen Savers

Nowadays, screen saver isn't merely for screen-burn protection, but screen saver is also used for point of attraction. It's also kind of showing off to some extent.

Here are useful UsingMac resources regarding to Mac screen saver.

Top Selection of Mac Screen Savers

Collection of absolutely beautiful screen savers. Splitted into two articles which each of them bear different screen savers strong characteristics: eye-candy versus colorful.

Unique Clock Screen Savers

Instead of plain-looking clock screen saver, it's so much better to have screen saver dedicated to show you clock in a very creative way, such as the Polar Clock Screen Saver, Drop Clock, Word Clock, and other unique clock screen savers.

iPhoto and Mosaic Screen Saver

One of the golden egg inside your Mac is the Mosaic Screen Saver, in this article, you will see the awesomeness of this Mosaic screen saver and how to make it works!

Customize Flurry Screen Saver

As the title suggests, this article teaches you how to make customization to your Flurry screen saver. But if it's suitable, you can use the guide for other screen savers as well.

Other Attractive Stuffs

These are the other attractive stuffs that can be found on UsingMac in the year 2008 (and more will emerge on year 2009).

To dig out more of UsingMac available resources, you can go to our archive section.

Request for Feedback

For year 2009, what would you expect most from UsingMac? Would you mind to post your opinion about UsingMac on our comment box?

Mac Screen Capture Tricks

2008-12-21T07:00:00Z

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!

Snap Whole Screen

As stated above, you can use Command-Shift-3 to take capture the whole screen; If you've your display set to 1280x800 then you will get a snapshot with that dimension.

Normally, the captured screen will be stored to your Desktop. This will eventually clutter up your Desktop, we can either save the captured screen to Clipboard (by adding modifier key Control) or save to customizable place.

Capture Selected Area Only

Capturing the snapshot of selected area is the most useful feature of screen capture. This feature also differs Mac Screen Capture from Windows Print Screen.

Keystrokes Command-Shift-4 is used to change the mouse to crosshair form before screen capture area can be drawn. Flexibility is given to Mac users for drawing the screen capture area where Mac users can use several modifier keys for different functions, as follows:

Spacebar to move selected area
Shift to resize selected area either horizontally/vertically
Control to resize selected area without moving upper-left pin point

Note: Selected screen will be captured upon mouse-up.

Snap Single Window/Object

If you press Spacebar after pressing Command-Shift-4, the initial crosshair pointer will change into camera icon. In this mode, area of the snap will be narrowed down to hovered object, including the shadow.

If you want to remove the shadow, you need to execute this command line using your Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true && killall SystemUIServer

Note: Change -bool true to -bool false to enable the shadow.

Capture Screen Saver

If you've realized, I used snapshots of my screen saver for some previous illustrations. Maybe some tried to snap their Mac screen saver but to no avail as the screen saver will be exited by any keypresses.

Special steps are required to do it:

Open Menubar: Apple → System Preferences
Go to Desktop & Screen Saver
Select your screen saver
Hold down Command-Shift and click on the button Test
Now you're previewing your screen saver, press 3 whenever you want to snap the screen

You can also use sticky keys to do the trick.

Note: Actually it's the same as pressing Command-Shift-3, but the order is reversed to avoid being exited from screen saver mode.

Grab the Screen

Grab, come along with installation package, delivers the same service as your system screen capture with several additional features:

Timed Screen
Menubar: Capture → Timed Screen (Command-Shift-Z)
The timer will count up to 10 seconds before the selected area/screen is snapped.
Mouse Pointer
Menubar: Grab → Preferences… (Command-Comma)
Only using Grab you can capture your mouse pointer. If you insist on using system screen capture, you need to 'photoshop' the snapshot and put the mouse pointer in.

Grab can be found inside Finder → Applications → Utilities.

Change Screenshot Name, Format and Location

Introducing Deeper and its ability to tweak your system settings, including those of screen capture:

Go to Deeper Homepage, download and install
Launch it and type in your password
Go under General section
Pay attention to the center of the pane, there you can see settings for your screen capture
Really easy to be customized and quite fun!

Hope you can capture the best moment of your Mac!

Mac Resources for Your Christmas

2008-12-19T07:00:00Z

Christmas is coming and it's the right time to start decorating your house, as well as your Mac.

Maybe there are already a lot of free Christmas resources around the net, but I'd like to make one special list for Mac.

Though this is not a huge list, but I've tried to cover the most interesting things on your Mac, such as screen saver, wallpaper, and many other fun stuffs. So, what are you waiting for now?

Christmas Screen Savers

Nothing represents Christmas as much as falling snowflakes and flying Santas. Here are collection of screen savers that picture Christmas on your Mac.

Scattered Flurries

Perhaps you've long bored with the moving Flurry of Colors on your Mac, especially during Christmas day. You can add more flurries of snow to your Mac Screen Saver.

Snowfall

If you will never have a great Christmas without falling flakes of snow, you can download this snowfall quartz composer screen saver to simulates the ice storm!

LotsaSnow

Following the popularity of LotsaWater which pours the water into your Desktop, I believe the performance of LotsaSnow won't disappoint you during Christmas time. Basically, it throws flakes of snow right into your Desktop, but not in reality.

A Very 3D Christmas Screen Saver

Regardless of its nearly ten dollars price tag, this screen saver and its 3D display worth our mention, to migrate the Santa into the world of inside our Mac; Without neglecting the fact that you can also put Santa in the city.

Christmas Wallpapers

Though we have showcased some beauty of the wallpaper world, we realized that we've put less attention on wallpapers for Christmas.

Here are several great wallpapers you can use on your Mac for Christmas!

Snow Man Snow Child

Waiting for the Miracle

A Small Gift for Christmas

Wishing You Magic

Christmas Lighthouse

Holidays Christmas

X'Mas Holiday

Christmas Icons

Most of these icons are to help you in better representing Christmas with your Mac. Santa Hat, Gift Packaging and Christmas Tree and Snowman Icons are must to have.

Christmas Gift Icons

SantaClaus Hat

Just for Fun

Apart from Screen Savers, Wallpaers and Icons, they're still many other Christmas related stuffs to decorate your Mac.

Snowflakes

Pour snowflakes right onto your working Desktop; No need to enter the screen saver mode is the main advantage (and also the major distraction). But not to care much about the distractions, it's for Christmas afterall.

X-Mas Tree

Create your very own stand-alone Christmas tree with various selection of lights, bells, decorations and blinking stars (no, you won't have hanging Christmas Sock there).

Festive Lights

Dashboard Widget that dresses your Mac in elegant animated lights with 10 available motion patterns for you to enjoy. With simple Terminal command, you can drag this widget out of Dashboard into your Mac Desktop.

MacLampsX

Decorate your Mac with couple of Christmas Lamps put at the back of your working windows, attempting to reduce distraction level on your Mac.

Xmas Lights

This little application behaves like MacLampsX with only difference in kind of lamps used and horizontal placement of lamps.

Santa Menu

Stick a head of santa to your menu bar and make a "Ho-Ho-Ho" sound in certain interval. Nothing much, really.

Useful Resources

Not enough of Christmas stuffs?

White Knight Logic
We often feature screen savers built by White Knight Logic development team. We love their shiny-blinky ideas, sometimes.
Wakaba: Screen Savers
Its collection of Lotsa Screen Savers has always captured the attention of Screen Saver Hunters.
Useless Creations
You can find some great Mac 3D Screen Savers here, in case you want to spend your spare time.
Apple Downloads: Icons & Screen Savers
Official Apple Site where you can find most popular Apple downloads.
InterfaceLIFT: Christmas Icons
Fasticon: Christmas Icons
VladStudio: Christmas Wallpapers
Wallcoo: Christmas Illustration Wallpapers

Last Word

UsingMac wishes you have a very magic Merry Christmas and memorable time with Mac. Viva Mac!

Wallpapers of the Month: December 2008

2008-12-17T07:00:00Z

We're back again with the stunning wallpapers collection! Though we just started two months ago, we feel joyful to receive overhelming response from our readers.

Our eyes are just as sharp as last time to filter out the best wallpapers from huge selection of wallpapers around the world. As usual, we prefer to present you wallpapers with distraction level as low as possible in order to maintain your productivity level at its highest.

Before proceeding further, we would like to suggest you other great wallpapers compilation that we've made:

Remarkable Apple Wallpapers
200 Mind-Blowing Nature Wallpapers
Beautiful, Inspiring Firefox Wallpapers
Wallpapers of the Month: October 2008 & November 2008

Here you go, our wallpapers selection for this month!

Elements

Earth & Moon

Door of Universe

The Earth

Tuesday Symmetrical

Laying in the Grass

Callandra's Dance

Walenstadtberg

Skyway

Nebula X4

Universe

Stream's End

Glimpse of Eden

Breath

Just a Dream

No Line on the Horizon

Heaven's Farm

Sunset

Roaster's Ranch

Mountain Lake

Aurora

Winter Wonderland

Aurorius

Blue Landscape

Bio Dome

Quiet in the City

Vault Day

Wonderland

Of All Places

Winter Snow

Wintus Park of Slumber

Garden

Sunflower Field

The Last World

Celestial Moon

Meteorite

Outer Space

Further Resources

In case you find the wallpapers above not enough…

Wallcoo
Professional wallpaper site to showcase over 50,000 high quality free wallpapers.
InterfaceLIFT
Site to find great collection of wallpapers which the search can be narrowed down to certain categorization.
DeviantART → Wallpapers

Community of artists and those devoted to art. Many digital art, skin art, wallpaper art, and many other art related stuffs are showcased in this site.
eWallpapers

Site with wide collection of high resolution and widescreen wallpapers, from Nature to Computer, from Movies to Celebrities and many other interesting categories.
HDDesktopWallpapers

Last Word

We've gather our wallpapers compilation at one place, feel free to visit our wallpapers showroom. Thanks for visiting!

Mail Keyboard Shortcuts

2008-12-16T05:07:00Z

Without any doubt, Mail is the most welcomed Email Client. It's also the most essential Mac application. In my daily Mac usage, Mail has never been absent from my workflow.

There are lots of features provided by Mail which will take us dozens of hours to read through all of them. I, as a lazy reader myself, would gladly suggest some of these keyboard shortcuts to help you utilize most of Mail features.

Before proceeding to the list of keyboard shortcuts, these are several previous articles for your reference to get the most out of your Mail:

Continue reading and you will see a list of more than 60 Mail shortcuts!

	Action	Keyboard Shortcut
1	Copy Entire Message	Select Title → Command-C
2	Copy Selected Text to Find	Command-E
3	Find for Current Message	Command-F
4	Find Next	Command-G
5	Append Selected Messages to New	Command-Option-I
6	Jump to Selected Text	Command-J
7	Erase Deleted Messages	Command-K
8	Toggle Deleted Messages (Hide/Show)	Command-L
9	Minimize Window	Command-M
10	New Message	Command-N
11	Reply Message to Sender	Command-R
	Reply Message to All	Command-Shift-R
12	Save as Draft	Command-S
13	Reveal Font Panel	Command-T
14	Increase Quote Level	Command-[']
	Decrease Quote Level	Command-Option-[']
15	Open Activity Window	Command-0
16	Select Inbox	Command-1
17	Select Outbox	Command-2
18	Select Drafts	Command-3
19	Select Sent	Command-4
20	Select Trash	Command-5
21	Select Junk	Command-6
22	Select Notes	Command-7
23	Select To Do	Command-8
24	Select RSS Reader	Command-9
25	Larger Font SIze	Command-[+]
	Smaller Font SIze	Command-[-]
26	Align Left	Command-[{]
27	Align Center	Command-[\|]
28	Align Right	Command-[}]
29	Spell Checker	Command-[:]
30	Flag Mispelling Words	Command-[;]
31	Attach File	Command-Shift-A
32	Bounce to Sender	Command-Shift-B
33	Reveal Colors Panel	Command-Shift-C
34	Send Message	Command-Shift-D
35	Redirect Message	Command-Shift-E
36	Forward Message	Command-Shift-F
37	Find Previous	Command-Shift-G
38	Toggle Detailed Headers (Hide/Show)	Command-Shift-H
39	Reply with iChat	Command-Shift-I
40	Mark as Junk	Command-Shift-J
41	Select All Related Messages	Command-Shift-K
42	Mark as Flagged	Command-Shift-L
43	Toggle Mailbox (Hide/Show)	Command-Shift-M
44	Get New Mail	Command-Shift-N
45	Switch Between Rich/Plain Text	Command-Shift-T
46	Mark as Read/Unread	Command-Shift-U
47	Paste as Quotation	Command-Shift-V
48	Add to Address Book	Command-Shift-Y
49	Reveal Bcc Header	Command-Option-B
50	Copy Font Style	Command-Option-C
51	Select Search Field	Command-Option-F
52	Delete Messages in Junk Mail	Command-Option-J
53	Apply Rules to Selected	Command-Option-L
54	New Viewer Window	Command-Option-N
55	Show Plain Text Alternative	Command-Option-P
56	Reveal Reply-To Header	Command-Option-R
57	Move Selected to Last Working Mailbox	Command-Option-T
58	Show Original Content	Command-Option-U
59	Paste Font Style	Command-Option-V
60	Collapse/Expand	←/→
61	Move to Next/Previous Message	↓/↑
62	Change Toolbar Style	Command + Click Pill Button
63	Copy Message to Other Mailbox	Option + Drag Message

Modifier keys Command, Option, and Shift allow us to have more available keyboard shortcuts to perform fairly distinctive actions. By observing how these modifier keys behave, adapting yourself to new Mac keyboard shortcuts will come in handy.

Mac Resources: November 2008

2008-12-01T13:57:00Z

Happy new month, and hope this last month will be this year best month to close the year. For those who have been following usingMac up for quite a while, we are really thankful for all the watching, comments and suggestions. We have done our to bring the best stuffs, tips and tricks for all current and soon-to-be Mac users.

We compiled couple of important, useful and mostly interesting roundups that has happened in the past month alone. Hope you will enjoy them.

Applications

100+ Free Applications for Mac OS X

If you are always be the one looking for new friendly, sleek Mac applications to try out, check this out.

QuickSilver Tips

QuickSilver is one of the top tools we like to use here in usingMac. It is our best productivity booster in our app repertoire. Guess, we are always up to date with its latest tips to share amoung readers. Enjoy

Unique Mac Apps You Might Have not Yet Taste

Sometime it might not be as obvious that all the while you had been using the most precious meticulously crafted Mac app. It offers nothing geeky but unique experience for all Mac users alone. All in one box of your lovely Mac.

Other Apps we have reviewed

Mac Stickies

EventBox

Customize your Mac

November Wallpapers

If you like all star-studded wallpapers, stunningly imaginative space and sky wallpapers, do check back this article.

iTunes Visualizer

You use Mac and you love music don't you? An iTunes will kick in all the sounds and music you like to listen, what else left? Get your amazing charming visualizers here.

Lastly, check following tips here as well 200 Leopard Productivity Hotkeys, Spotlight Search Optimized. Enjoy the tips. Drop us a nice suggestion if you have one, don't hesitate to throw us what you think on below comment section.

Mac Apps that Stand Out from the Crowd

2008-11-23T10:00:00Z

There are too many Mac applications readily available which, either directly or indirectly, confuse most Mac users, making them hard to find the best application. On the other side, most application developers also feel really itch-scratching to think of fresh and unique application.

To my surprise, some developers have amazed me with their applications that came out different than others, such as application to set different Docks on different Spaces, to set different wallpaper on different Spaces, to bring you to cleaning room, and many other creative yet useful functionality.

There are many of them, but here I will mention some that I am currently using.

DockSpaces, Dock Extensions

Using Dock Spaces, you can create up to 10 distinct Docks which are ready to be triggered and changed. If you're currently not used to using one of Mac application launchers, you would love this Dock expansion application.

For further customization, you would be able to attach every distinct Dock into different Spaces. [Dock Spaces via Smoking Apples]

Deeper, Reveal Hidden Preferences

Recalling the days of tweaking, Mac geeks come out with killer Terminal tweaks, some are very useful, some are plain amazing. However, many are afraid of corrupting their system files during tweaking and choose not to tweak their Macs.

But with Deeper, you can personalize your Mac with simple GUI and get the most out of your Mac. [Deeper via 100 Free Applications]

Camouflage, Desktop Icons Hiding

Most Mac users are troubled by endless clutters on their Desktop, like me, the more I tried to clean up my Desktop, the messier my Desktop became.

With Camouflage, we can easily hide/show our Desktop icons. Basically, it moves all of your icons under the wallpaper. [Camouflage via 100 Free Applications]

Hyperspaces, Different Wallpapers on Different Spaces

With Hyperspace, you can customize every bit of your Spaces with different desktop pictures, naming on each space or even hotkeys. And it's fairly easy to do that.

Hyperspace is a an application with $12.95 price tag but without paying any single pennies, you have the chance to use trial version, which enables you to play around with customization up to 2 Spaces. [Hyperspaces via Smoking Apples]

Omnidea Rulers, Ruler for Everyone

Having problem with measuring certain part of the screen, often for me to use built-in Mac OS X snapshot ruler which is quite troublesome (and a single careless will create accidental snap).

But now, to easily take your Desktop's coordinate, Rulers comes in handy. And Rulers even empowered with color picker. [Omnidea Rulers via Niiconn]

MacLoc, Logout without Closing Applications

With a very different behavior than usual Mac log out, MacLoc won't close all of your applications while logging you out from the system. With this, you will be able to protect your valuable data whenever you want to walk out. [MacLoc via 100 Free Applications]

Keyboard Cleaner, Clean Your MacBook with No Hesitation

Whenever it's time to clean our laptop, it's require that we shut down our Mac to avoid unwanted keystrokes being triggered. Come to think of this, it's such a hassle to do this all the time.

Keyboard Cleaner should help you clean out all the troubles: it will lock you out the screen, enabling you to clean out your MacBook without worrying on accidentally triggering undesired keystrokes; Only Command-Q is accepted, i.e. to bring you out of the cleaning state. [Keyboard Cleaner via MakeUseOf]

OmniDazzle, Mouse Trail Plugins

Having mouse track without trails, I feel a bit losing to those Windows users. In the case of using large display, mouse trail will also be a great help to find your mouse.

Folks at OmniGroup made an impressive plugin for your mouse which enables your mouse to have trails, such as Pixie Dust, Footprints and Flashlight. But be careful, excessive use of this will eat up your productivity. [OmniDazzle via Mac OS X Hints]

Mac Image Viewers

2008-11-19T10:00:00Z

Most Mac users will like to use Preview as their image viewer. Most users will also use iPhoto. But few of us, feeling not satisfied with these built-in applications, seeks for better image viewers.

As a matter of fact, there are many Mac image viewers built by developers, such as Xee, CocoViewX and Sequential, just to name a few. After having fun with some of them, I've come up with this list of Mac image viewers to share with you.

Let's see what are these Mac image viewers.

Xee 2.0

Homepage | Download

Xee, an image viewer for easier image management, is designed to give you extra speed and convenience in viewing images. Not just that, you also have sleek and comfortable interface for you to play with your images. Empowered with auto-detect, by just opening an image, Xee can display the slideshow of collection of images within the same folder.

CocoViewX

Homepage | Download

Image Viewer for Mac OS X that has the capabilities of viewing and manipulating mostly used image formats: BMP, TIFF, PNG, JPG, and many others. The interface is designed to have similarity with your Finder which enables you to easily use it without time wasted on learning stage.

Sequential

Homepage | Download

Sequential is an image viewer for Mac OS X that is designed for digging inside the folder of images and displaying them. Not only limited to displaying local files, but Sequential can also be used to load images from page URL, which distinguishes it from other application of its genre.

FujiyamaSlideShow

Homepage | Download

FujiyawaSlideShow, an image viewer application made by Japanese, helps you view folders of your image files easily. With many selectable layout views, this image viewer will fit nicely to your preference.

PhotoStickies

Homepage | Download

PhotoStickies is a simple image viewer with an uniqueness of viewing your image in form of Stickies. Meaning that you won't further clutter your Desktop with more and more popping up window panes; You got a simple inspector and less distractive Stickikes of the viewer pane.

Xsee

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Native Mac OS X image browser and viewer beautified by Aqua interface. This image browser supports GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PNG and other image formats. Slideshow view can be easily triggered and empowered with support to keyboard shortcuts.

JustLooking

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JustLooking, a universal binary application which can be run on both PowerPC and Inter Macs, has reached its version 3.2 which now supports many more features. But basically, it enhances your experience in viewing pictures and images on your Mac OS X.

ViewIt

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ViewIt is native, fast and easy to use image viewer which supports image formats: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PSD, GIF, and many others. With the purchase of US$22.00, you can get advance version of ViewIt. However, there is also a free version available to be downloaded from the site.

Archer

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Archer is intended for fast, flexible, and easy to use image slideshow browser. The functionality of Archer is not only limited to displaying still images, but you can also use Archer to view video and audio files.

I, as an ordinary person, admit that I can't exhaustively search throughout all the available Mac image viewers. But I've done my best to compile these lists. If you've any additional Mac image viewers that you'd recommend, feel free to put it on the comment box, please?

Spotlight Tweaks

2008-11-15T10:00:00Z

Though there are large selection of Mac Application Launchers, many still don't intend to switch from the blazing Spotlight.

To satisfy the demand of many Spotlight fans, I will discuss several Spotlight tweaks that I usually play around with. I hope you can use these tweaks wisely.

Several UsingMac resources that will be helpful for you to improve your Spotlight experience:

But before we started the tweaks…

Disclaimer

We won't take any responsibilities for damages or data loss due to practicing the content of this article. Please kindly backup your files involved in the tweaking before you proceed.

Now let's begin the tweaking process!

Tweaking Spotlight Label

To some, it would be really boring to look at the very same labelling for Spotlight search results in every event of using Spotlight. To few, it would be really painful to be the same as others. To me, I just want to think different!

Therefore, I change my Spotlight labelling: from "Top Hit" to "Recommended", from "Definition" to "Dictionary" and many others. And I will guide you on how to do this.

Go inside Macintosh HD → System → Library → Core Services, where Macintosh HD is my Hard Drive name (yours will be different). Look for Spotlight
Control-Click on it to show up the contextual menu and choose Show Package Contents
Follow this path: Contents → Resources → English.lproj
Find the file MDSimpleGrouping.strings and copy it to your Desktop
Delete the original file (the one inside Spotlight package) but don't forget to make backup
Open the file copied to Desktop and update the content
If you want to change the label name, change the value on the right hand side of the equal sign. Examples:
"TOP_HIT" = "Top Hit"; → "TOP_HIT" = "Recommended";
"DEFINITION" = "Definition"; → "DEFINITION" = "Dictionary";
Save the file and drop it back to English.lproj folder (the one under Spotlight package)
Open your Terminal and relaunch your Spotlight by executing command line: killall Spotlight

Cheers, now you've done your relabelling.

Tweak Spotlight Search Counts

While searching with Google, we will know exactly how many results are there in Google pool (sometimes it''s millions of results returned), but in Spotlight, only plain "Show All" displayed.

Today, I will guide you on how to display the search count (like what's shown on the screenshot above).

Go inside Macintosh HD → System → Library → Core Services. Note: Macintosh HD is my Hard Drive name
Look for Spotlight
Control-Click on it to show up the contextual menu and choose Show Package Contents and then follow this path: Contents → Resources → English.lproj
Find the file MDMenuStrings.strings and copy it to your Desktop
Make a backup of it and delete the original file
Open MDMenuStrings.strings (which is just now copied to Desktop)
Make the changes:
SHOW_ALL_NO_COUNT = "Show All"; → SHOW_ALL_NO_COUNT = "Show All (%d)";
Save the file and copy it back to English.lproj folder
Relaunch your Spotlight (Terminal command killall Spotlight will do)

Believe me, you would be able to get the count from now on!

Re-Index Spotlight

As mentioned before in Spotlight - Indexing, we can force Spotlight to reindex certain volume by executing this command line:

sudo mdutil -E -p "/Volumes/Macintosh HD"

where Macintosh HD is the volume name I want my Spotlight to re-index.

The indexing will take quite a long time, so it's recommended to use this as necessary.

Or if you want to play safe, you can follow the instruction from Apple Support:

Go to System Preferences
Click Spotlight and go under Privacy tab
Drag folder or entire volume to the list
Remove it
Spotlight will re-index the contents

That's It…

We've reached the end of our tweaking session. If you've any great tweaks regarding to Spotlight, feel free to put that in the comment box below. Thanks.