UsingMac.com
Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
What Can You Show Me Right Away?
Friend of mine, which is a window user, suddenly asks me to show him what are the things that are really stunning on my Mac. Since it comes in sudden, my brain was locked to ground.
After few ticks, my brain began to work properly and I came up with these stuffs:
Coverflow View
One of the mind-blowing feature inside Mac OS X that can really stun your friend to his feet. This view can be selected by going inside Finder and select coverflow view (keystrokes: Command-4).
Mac - Pink Valentine
Mac, you're my Valentine..
Valentine, the day full of love and joy, won't be perfect without the existence of your Mac in your life. I think this should be the answer you can get from Mac fanboy-fangirl. You can also find several interesting, creative ideas and modifications on their Apple, themed "Pink Valentine".
Let's see what are those hot pink products.
40+ Mac Mods from Time to Time
Though Apple products have been really elegant-looking, people are still having the urge to change the looks and feel of their Mac, here are several Mac Mods from Time to Time:
Menu Bar Feature on My Mac
Recently, I get addicted to enhance my menu bar. It's very fun, very challenging as you've to browse across the web to find the coolest feature for menu bar and at last show off to your friends (especially to those who are not using Mac).
I successfully attach features to my menu bar that change it from no brainer to cool, fantastic menu bar.
Let me explain a bit of my sophisticated menu bar.
Jing
Jing simply makes me fall in love as it can not only take snapshot but also record into flash video. However, the flash video size will be very high due to high resolution used (and hence, it's not suitable for blog posting).
Adium
This is my most favorite instant messenger compare with others. Adium has accompanied me since my first touch on Mac.
DiggUpdate
Everyone should have known Digg. However, not many people know that we can monitor every update inside Digg popular stories via Mac menu bar, i.e. DiggUpdate.
Fans, Temps, Network, Disks, Memory and CPU
All of these are provided by iStat Menus. They monitor the overall activity of our Mac.
Menu Calendar
This smart, tiny MenuCalendar is able to help us do a lot of things. MenuCalendar will automatically sync with your iCal once it's installed to your Mac.
And the rest..
are already attached into Mac package. They can be enabled from System Preference Pane.
So, how powerful are your menu bar?
Feel free to drop your masterpiece.
Mac Crystal Clear Pane
With this Crystal Clear Utility, it's possible to create a translucent window for your Mac.
My Favorite Wallpaper Pools
After browsing around the web, I found many sites that collect all nice and cool wallpapers. And among all of those, my favorite wallpaper pools are:
Wallpapers of wonderful panorama
These wallpapers I got from InterfaceLift. There are much more of those cool wallpapers inside this site. Gotta go to check it.
Show off - Option Trick
After some time I getting in trouble with doing same (minimizing or closing panes) patterns over and over. I try to discover new thing and I can relax now. Why? Now, we can close all opened windows in one applications in just one click while we are holding Option key.
And they will sit tamely in the Dock, just like this..
Full-Screen-Shot Minimizing File Size
Lately, most of the people use large monitor as their desktop. If you have monitor size of 1680×1050 pixels then if you print screen the entire screen, the file size will be much larger than after adjusting.
If you clever enough, you will make use your photoshop and shrink the file dimension. Therefore, if you want to print five screens then you have to repeat that five times. That will be troublesome, I think.
The easiest way is by adjusting your screen resolution inside Display Preference Pane. Using QuickSilver search for playpref and you will got application you want. Or you can go under System Preference.
Mac Screen Shot - Rumble
For most of people, image take a very good part in creating mood. Sometimes, someone want to take some screen shots from some images to use into some purposes (and I think I use some words that you spell it some).
Mac supplies you with the feature to taking screen shot, that its smoothness is the best. You can capture screen shots into the form of file or you can capture into clipboard for making further modification to your print screen.
I think you all know how to use this print screen thing works. Therefore, I will just give you some tricks of screen shot making.
Customizing Screenshot Shortcut
Do you realize that, Mac uses Command-Option-3, Command-Option-4, Command-Option-Shift-3 and Command-Option-Shift-4 for screen shot taking? Those are very long keystrokes.
For people who often use this screen shot. I suggest you customize your shortcut. You just need to go to QuickSilver and use keyword keymouse and then customize your screen shot shortcut. For your reference, I only customize shortcut for save picture of screen as file to F13. You see, just one key, we can take picture of the entire desktop.