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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
Daily Trick 17. Set Finder Home
Most of the time, we will use Finder to browse through our files. If you've noticed, there will be the same directory shown in the first time you open Finder.
Let's call it Finder Home.
By default, this finder home is set to your user home. Perhaps you don't need to visit our home frequently; You visit our Pictures folder more often. Then it would save you several clicks if you change the default Finder Home, with these simple steps.
- Access Finder menubar and choose
Finder → Preferences - Under the preferences pane, choose the General section
- Look for the only combo box and apparently it is used for setting Finder Hoome
- Choose the directory that you often visit
- Changes will be applied instantly and be shown when you open new finder window
However, if you don't want to set Finder Home, you can always drag-drop your favorite directory or folder to the sidebar and have access to it within single mouse-click.
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Daily Trick 16. Stream Download Video
If you have followed UsingMac articles for quite some time, I believe that we all have known how to download YouTube video easily even in HD quality.
For large videos, however, we will need to wait several tens of minutes before we can open the video. Hey, why don't we just stream download it? Like what we did while watching the video on YouTube?
If you want to stream download it, follow these steps:
- I assume that the video download process is already begun and you can see it in the Download Activity (Safari: Cmd-Opt-L; Firefox: Cmd-J)
- Now Ctrl-Click on the download item (the video) and choose Show in Finder
- The filename will be shown with format .download, you can't open it
- Ctrl-Click on it and select Show Package Contents
- Inside you can see the file with video format .mp4
- Run it and you've successfully stream download the video
This trick works well for downloading video from YouTube. I haven't tested it for other video sites.
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Video
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Download
Daily Trick 15. Quick Dictionary
Having English as my second language, there are many words that I don't know. As a result, I will need to open Dictionary most of the time.
If everytime I need to launch Dictionary.app to see the word definition, I will waste my precious time and decrease my productivity.
However, thanks to my Mac, with a simple keystrokes Ctrl-Cmd-D a quick dictionary pane will appear right in front of your eyes. If you failed to call the quick dictionary, it's possible that you've previously changed the shortcut. To change the shortcut back, follow these steps:
You can click on the thumbnail for larger view.
- Open Apple → System Preferences
- Go to Keyboard & Mouse and choose Keyboard Shortcuts section
- Search for Look up in Dictionary and change the shortcut back
Unfortunately, this feature is not supported by some applications, like Firefox.
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Daily Trick 14. Minimize Window
In many occassions, we will need to minimize application windows in order to reduce distraction level to minimum. Of course, we can always use key combination Cmd-M to minimize a window or even use Cmd-Opt-M to minimize all opened windows.
But the problem arise as soon as we want to restore the window. Most of the time, we will click on the Dock thumbnail to restore minimized window. However, if you feel tiresome to reach your mouse/trackpad, you can use this trick:
- Hit Cmd-Tab (+Tab) until you reach the application that has one of its windows minimized
- Still holding the Cmd key, press Opt key followed by releasing Cmd key
- The earlier minimized window will be restored without any clicks
Anyway, if you're ready to install additional application, you can use Witch to assist you in application switching process.
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Daily Trick 13. Schedule Shut Down
As Mac users, it would be much more convenient if we can schedule our shut down time. Using this scheduling feature, we can shut down our Mac even though we are not nearby.
The setting process is quite simple, you just need to follow these steps:
- Go to System Preferences → Energy Saver
- Click the Schedule… button at bottom right-corner of the pane
- A pane will appear for you to set up your schedule for shut down
You can click on the thumbnail for viewing larger screenshot.
Not limited to shut down, you can also use this setting to sleep, wake up, or even restart your Mac.
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System
Daily Trick 12. Trim MP3 Song
Talking about mp3 songs, one application should instantly crawl inside our mind: iTunes. Yes, today I will share with you how to trim your mp3 songs with iTunes.
As usual, first step you will need to open iTunes and then followed by:
- Select mp3 song you want to trim
- Open contextual menu and click on Get Info
- Go to Options tab
-
Inside you can see Start Time and Stop Time.
Fill it with the wanted start time and stop time of that mp3 song after trimming - Now select the song again, open the contextual menu and choose Create MP3 Version
- Last step is to wait for the process to finish
You can click on the thumbnail for viewing larger screenshot.
Have fun in trimming! And don't forget to introduce me some nice songs as you can see that I've no much songs in my iTunes playlist.
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Daily Trick 11. Decipher Serial Number
No, we're not talking any hacking process here. We will talk about our Mac serial number. Every Mac comes with serial number, do you know about this?
If you want to know your Mac serial number, you can click on the Apple logo on the menubar and then open About This Mac. On the floating pane, click the version number of your Mac two times, it will change into Mac serial number.
Then how can we decipher this serial number?
- Go to chipmunk.nl
- Enter your Mac serial number
- See interesting facts about your Mac, including production date and factory of production Ah! My Mac is produced in 4H (China), on May 2006 and it's number 1889.
This conversation often takes place after reading this trick.
"Where is your Mac coming from?"
"China. So, what can I do with this?"
"I dunno. Don't ask me."
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Daily Trick 10. Show Only One
It's good that we can open many applications at once, without any hesitation, using our Mac. The bad thing is, more often than not, we will get distracted if we open more than one applications at the same time.
Perhaps, some people will suggest using Isolator or Think. But for you (and me) that are often lazy to download additional applications, there is still a way out.
You can press Cmd-Opt-H to hide all other applications.
Or you can also hold modifier keys Cmd-Opt while clicking on the Dock icon.
Either one will result in showing only one application and hide others.
Personally for me, I seldom use Dock-clicking, usually I will just combine Cmd-Tab with Cmd-Opt-H. I am addicted to Mac keyboard shortcuts, I admit it!
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Finder,
finder
Daily Trick 9. Glims for Safari
Many have tried to tweak Safari, including me. Initially, I'm really satisfied with the tweaking process. But now, not really. What's the reason behind?
After browsing around the web, I found this little cocoa application for Safari called Glims. Glims empowers our Safari with many additional tools, such as Full Screen View, Search Engine Thumbnails, Tabs Re-open from Last Sessions, Bookmarks Separator and other gorgeous features.
You can click on the thumbnail for viewing larger screenshot.
Believe me, you should try installing this application. It's just a minute away, which is much faster and more gorgeous compared to tweaking by yourselves.
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Daily Trick 8. Site Hierarchy
After navigating deeper, deeper, and even deeper on a website, eventually we will find ourselves get lost inside the web. Often, we need to press the back button many times just to get back.
Maybe some have noticed it, if we're using Safari Web Browser, we can see the hierarchy of current viewing site.
Simply by moving to window title and Cmd-Click, site hierarchy can be shown.
From the top one is current hierarchy we're in, go down all the way to the website address. With this, it's much easier for us to move around the site.
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Daily Trick 7. Change Privilege
Sometimes, without having enough privileges for a file, we will end up unable to save, edit, or even open it. Of course, we can easily change the privilege by using Get Info pane.
Problem arises when we want to change the privileges of a folder and hundreds of items inside. It would be time consuming to change the privilege one by one. The best solution is by changing the privilege recursively.
- Open Get Info pane of the folder
- Go to Sharing & Permissions
- After unlocking, find the little gear icon and click on it
- Select Apply to enclosed items
- Changes made later on will apply to folder & all items inside it
We can now say good-bye to the traditional, super-slow way of changing privileges!
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Daily Trick 6. Toolbar View
After using Mac for quite some time, I believe we all have made use of our Finder toolbar. Many things can be done to our Finder toolbar, such as sticking application to toolbar for quick launch and dropping simple AppleScript.
Apart from those functions, everyone has different taste for how the icons should appear on the toolbar.
Be it like normal icon, text icon, or icon with text, we can easily change it by performing Cmd-Click on the pill button (top-right).
FYI. Cmd → Command
For more toolbar tricks, you can read our previous article about finder toolbar tricks:
[1] Finder Tweaks 1: The Toolbar
[2] Finder Tweaks 2: Extra Toolbar Items
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Daily Trick 5. Clean Desktop
After using Mac for quite some time, our desktop will surely cluttered with many files. Those icons make your desktop uglier and slow down the system.
Usually, people will suggest you to delete those items on the desktop or move them
somewhere else. However, we can always use this terminal code to hide all desktop
items:
chflags hidden ~/Desktop/*
And to reveal it again, we can use terminal code:
chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/*
But for those people who are not familiar in using Terminal, we can always use Camouflage for Mac.
Using Camouflage, with just a click away you can hide/show your icons.
And what's best is that, you can grab this application for free.
Finally, you will get the cleanest desktop ever. Make sure you grab some gorgeous walls from our previous wallpaper compilation to even beautify your clean Mac desktop.
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Daily Tricks 4. Eternal History
After using Safari for quite some time, it will be normal for us to have visit many sites and pages. All of those are tracked and saved in our history.
Perhaps after a year or more, we will forget some of useful sites and want to find it. At that time, we can use our history to trackback.
If you are using Firefox as web browser, you can have your eternal history by following these steps:
- Open Firefox and go to its Preferences
- Under Preferences Pane, choose Privacy Section
- Take a look at the first check box labelled "Keep my history for at least … days". You can fill any large numbers here, e.g. 99999.
- And your history files will remain there for that written days, practically eternal
On the other hand, if you want to make your history only lasts for 1 day, you can simply change the number to 1.
For Safari, the setting is under Safari Menubar → Preferences → General Section.
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Daily Trick 3. Quick Look Zoom
Quick Look usually scales down big images to suit the screen resolution. Because of this, we may lose some details of the image while we observed it in Quick Look mode.
Some people maybe suggest using Full Screen Mode, but that's not solving the problem for images with higher dimension than our screen resolution.
The ideal solution is to use Quick Look Zoom that is achieved by pressing (and holding down) Option key and you will see the cursor change to a magnifier icon. After the zooming, you will be able to drag the image around.
Zooming in effect:
[1] Normal View
[2] Zoom View
For zooming out, use Shift-Opt with mouse-click(s).
This trick only works on image files. If you want to zoom in/out PDFs, you can simply use Cmd-[+] or Cmd-[-].
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Daily Trick 2. Total Darkness
Usually, in order to adjust the brightness of our Mac to 0%, we will press and hold the function button all the way until the light from our Mac is gone. And I am not satisfied with this usual stuff as it's not giving me immediate darkness to my Mac.
I've mentioned this trick somewhere in previous articles, we can use single keystrokes to get total darkness of our Mac.
0% Brightness
Shortcut: Ctrl-Shift-Eject.
This will sleep only the display without turning your Mac into sleep mode.
And this saves more battery power compared to turning on screen saver.
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Daily Trick 1. Shut Down
Some new Mac users, without knowing the existence of universal shortcut to directly shut down their Mac, would go for the menu bar, search for the apple logo, choose the option, and confirm from the prompted dialog box.
All of these hassles can be replaced with keystrokes:
Cmd-Opt-Ctrl-Eject.
The same applies for restart, only single keystrokes needed:
Cmd-Ctrl-Eject.
And to put the computer to sleep: Cmd-Opt-Eject.
Note. These shortcuts, except for restart, will take the action immediately without prompting dialog box asking for confirmation. Make sure you save all your works beforehand.
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