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Tweaks for the Dock

2010-01-05T14:00:00Z

Tweaking the interface of my Mac has long become part of activity. It's a lot of fun in the process of it. However, you should always remember to backup your files before starting the tweak, in case you accidentally make your Mac explode because of it (I'm exaggerating here).

Left all the worries behind and have fun with the tweaks!

Basic Shortcut

Though this one here can't be considered a tweak, but I believe it's good to know some of the shortcuts to faster up basic adjustment for your Dock.

Drag → Resize the Dock
Opt-Drag → Proportionally Resize the Dock
Shift-Drag → Move the Dock to Other Screen Edge

Note that when performing the Drag, you should click on the Dock separator and drag it.

Hidden Preferences

Have you heard about Secrets before? Secrets is a preference pane that reveals many of secret preferences. Example for Dock, it allows you to:

Change the pinning position
Use the Suck Effect for window minimization
Enable New List View for Stack
and many other interesting hidden preferences…

Secrets can be downloaded from http://secrets.blacktree.com/

Terminal Commands

In case you don't want to install additional preference pane (Secrets) for revealing secret preferences, you can still use the command line provided below and execute it with your Terminal for the effect.

New List View

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES && killall Dock

Stack Highlight

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
killall Dock

2D Dock

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Transparent Hidden Icon

defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES
killall Dock

Add "Recent Applications" Stack

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock

Dock Pinning (Left)

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start
killall Dock

Dock Pinning (Right)

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end
killall Dock

Restyle Dock Background

In order to get your Dock background changed like what is shown in the screenshot above, you can follow these steps:

Download the sprites from PlateauDock ↓
Open Finder, hit Cmd-Shift-G and enter this address:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources
And then copy in all 5 items inside the unzipped PlateauDock folder
Restart your Dock with Terminal command killall Dock for the change to take effect

Interestingly, if you delete these 5 files: scurve-l.png, scurve-m.png, scurve-sm.png, scurve-xl.png, and separator.png, you will get an Invisible Dock.

Rename Dock Menu

Feeling bored with default contextual menu naming for your Dock?
If so, you can try to change the naming with these simple steps:

Open your Dock, hit Cmd-Shift-G, and then enter this address
/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
Search for the file DockMenus.strings and open it, you will see lines of words, eg:
OPEN_FILENAME = "Open "%@"";
OPEN = "Open";
Left hand side is the command to OS, don't change it. Instead, you can change the naming on the right hand side. Example:
OPEN_FILENAME = "Launch "%@"";
OPEN = "Launch";
Restart your Dock for the change to take effect (Terminal → killall Dock)

This trick has been mentioned before here.

Do You Like This Article?

We are trying our best to write interesting articles for our readers. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or comments, you can always feedback us on the comment box provided or mail me at wendy[at]usingmac[dot]com.

Thanks for the time reading our articles.

100+ Beautiful Nature Wallpapers

2009-12-28T13:00:00Z

In this article, we’d like to showcase you a list of 100+ Beautiful Nature Wallpapers to decorate your desktop. Previously we have also compiled some beautiful wallpapers; if you like to collect wallpapers, you may want to look at some of these posts:

Let's proceed to wallpapers collection in this article.

Waterfalls, Lakes, and Beaches

Boat

Water

The Perfect Falls

Nei-Dong Waterfall

Rainforest Creek

Small Islands Caribbean

Maldives

Near the Ocean

Ocean Tides

Indian Beach

Exotic Beach

Rocky Coast

The Lookout

Sunny Bay

Sunset at the Bay

Sunset on the Beach

Tides Out for the Night

Beach Lake

Turquoise Reflections

Emerald Lake

Bridge on the River

August at the Lake

Autumn Lake

Lake Reflections

Sunset Lake

Lake Desktop

Maligne Lake

Moonrise Over Beebe Lake

Frozen Lake

Ice on the River

House on the Pond

Green Delight

Grizzly River

Rocks and Mountains

Mountain Cliffs

Mountain Valley

Between the Mountains

Cliff

Hardknott Pass Mountains

Balkan Mountains

Connors Hill

Mountains

Mountain Pass

New Castleridge

Peak District Valley

Newflower

Autumn Mountain

Cirques

Sammys Vac

Snow Alps

Fumarole on Mount Redoubt

Mountain Snow Forest

Cold Scenery

Way Out West

Mountain Lake

Lake Louise

Sky, Sunrise, and Sunsets

Morning Sunrise

The City of Thousand

Grassy Sunset

Ambury Sunset

Mystic Sunset

Clouds

Above the Clouds

The Long Goodbye

Green Landscapes and Woods

Autumn

Road Through the Woods

Country Path

Golden Autumn

Route to Castle Mountain

Winter Scape

Ivvavik National Park

Alone Storm

Sunset on the Field

Natural Scene

Nature

Rural Land

Waterville, Vermont

Green Bench

Road in the Woods

Forest Road

Country Road

Beautiful Autumn

In the Forest

Misty

Nature Elevation

Lighthouse

Industrial Landscape

Sunflowers Field

Wheat Field

Autumn Steppe

Fallen Leaves Tree

Green Striped Field

Daisy Field

Kahikatea Trees

The Shelter

Lazy Days

Deep Green

Freshness

Dreamy, Fantasy

Majestic Skies

Pacific City

Horizon

Beautiful Village

Verdant Field

Grain Field

Farm

Heaven's Farm

The Old Farm

Nature Balloon Ride

Balloons, Windmill, and Wheat

Summer Feelings

The Swan

Peaceful Winter

Moonlight Flyer

Old Dirt Road

50+ Mac Applications with Great Interface

2009-12-15T14:00:00Z

Having used Mac for quite some time, I discover that I deeply fall in love with smooth and sleek interface offered by most of Mac built-in applications.

And the good news is, there are many third-party applications out there developed with more or less the same design standard as those built-in Mac apps. More than fifty sample screenshots of beautiful Mac applications are ready to amaze you after the jump.

Productivity Tools

The Hit List - ToDo List for Mac

Homepage | Download | $49.95

Simple, yet sophisticated application to manage lists of your workflow.

Anxiety - Lightweight To-do Management

Homepage | Download | Donationware

Super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X that synchronizes with iCal and Mail.

JustNotes - Notes App

Homepage | Download | Donationware

A simple, beautiful notes application with nice user interface to let you focus on taking notes.

NoteBook is an application that helps Mac users manage notes, clippings, and todos of your life, or the e-mails, diagrams and spreadsheets of that important project.

Scrivener - Word Processor

Homepage | Download | $39.95

Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers.

Photo & Imaging Tools

Adobe Lightroom

Homepage | Download | $299.00

Pixelmator - Image Editor for Mac OS X

Homepage | Download | $59.00

Beautifully designed and easy-to-use image editor for Mac OS X.

LittleSnapper - Snap, Collect & Share

Homepage | Download | $35.00

Built for people who love to capture webpages or their desktop.

Aperture - Photo Editing and Management Tool

Homepage | Download | $199.00

Import, manage, and enhance your photos in one simple, integrated workflow.

Picturesque - Image Editor for Mac

Homepage | Download | $29.95

Picturesque is a simple app used to make images more beautiful.

System Tools

Daisy Disk - Disk Visualization Tool

Homepage | Download | $19.95

Useful tool to help you free up disk space by using beautiful sunburst visualization to help you finding and deleting big, useless files.

iStat Menus - System Monitoring Tool

Homepage | Download | Donationware

The most advanced system monitor tool for your Mac with super sleek interface.

CleanMyMac - Mac Maintenance Tool

Homepage | Download | $29.95

1Password - Secure Your Passwords

Homepage | Download | $39.95

1Password can create strong, unique passwords for you, remember them, and restore them, all directly in your web browser.

Fontcase - Font Management Tool

Homepage | Download | €42.00

Fontcase can preview every font for you and activate them only when needed.

File Transfer Tools

Flow - Elegant, Intuitive and Powerful File Transfer

Homepage | Download | $25.00

File transfer client that makes working with remote files as intuitive and natural as working locally with Finder.

Internet and Networking Apps

Notify - Email Notifier

Homepage | Download | $10.00

Postbox - Email Manager

Homepage | Download | $29.95

A better way to work with email messages and content.

Midnight Inbox - Email Organizer

Homepage | Download | $35.00

Helper for inbox collecting, processing, reviewing, and referencing.

NewsLife - Elegant, Easy to Use RSS Client

Homepage | Download | €5.00

Simplest way to stay up-to-date with tons of websites without even having to touch your web browser until you see something you want to read.

Delibar - Delicious Client for Mac

Homepage | Download | $18.00

Full featured client designed for Mac OS X to access Delicious bookmarks.

Socialite - Social Networking Client

Homepage | Download | $20.00

Beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services: Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS.

Tweetie - Twitter Client for Mac

Homepage | Download | $19.95

Simple and clean Twitter client for Mac OS X.

Canary - Twitter Client

Homepage | Download | Beta Version

Canary is a beautifully designed Twitter client.

Blogo - Blogging from Desktop

Homepage | Download | $25.00

Easily publish text, images, videos, slideshows and more with a simple, intuitive interface.

Propane - Campfire Client for Mac

Homepage | Download | $20.00

Full-featured application that runs in an ordinary browser as chat client for Campfire.

Delicious Library 2

Homepage | Download | $40.00

Catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games.

Audio & Music Apps

Snowtape - Internet Radio Recorder

Homepage | Download | $29.00

Perfect solution for saving music on your Mac.

Capo - Learn Your Music

Homepage | Download | $49.00

Capo lets you slow down your favorite songs, so you can hear the notes and learn how they are played.

Tangerine! - Playlist Creator

Homepage | Download | $24.95

Tangerine! lets you easily create playlists of upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It works by analyzing the BPM and the beat intensity of your music.

Ecoute - Play Your Library

Homepage | Download | $10.00

Simple, sleek and minimalistic music, podcast, movie player for Mac OS X.

CoverStream - [Re]Discover Your Music

Homepage | Download | €14.95

CoverStream helps you control, browse, and search your music.

TuneUp - Music Library Cleaner

Homepage | Download | $29.95

CoverSutra - Elegant iTunes Controller

Homepage | Download | $19.95

CoverSutra gives you a handy and attractive way to control iTunes without having to leave your current application.

TapeDeck - Audio Recorder for Mac

Homepage | Download | $25.00

Video & Screen-casting Tools

ScreenFlow - Professional Screen-casting Studio

Homepage | Download | $99.00

With ScreenFlow screen-casting software, you can capture the contents of your entire desktop at the same time as your video camera, microphone and computer's audio.

Design & Development Tools

Flux 2 - Web Design Application

Homepage | Download | £40.00

Flux 2 has the power to be your only web design tool.

xScope - Measurement Tools for Mac

Homepage | Download | $26.95

xScope is a powerful set of tools that are ideal for measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts.

Espresso - Web Development Tools

Homepage | Download | €59.95

CSSEdit - Web Styling Tools

Homepage | Download | €29.95

Tools to help you designing beautiful, innovative and fast-loading web sites.

RapidWeaver - Web Development Tool

Homepage | Download | $79.00

RapidWeaver creates clean, beautiful code that adheres to modern web standards.

Snippet - Code Snippets Collector

Homepage | Download | $12.95

A little tool that helps in creating snippets from selected text anywhere.

Swatch - Color Snippets Collector

Homepage | Download | $4.95

File Sharing Utilities

Stuf - Share Text & Images on Local Network

Homepage | Download | €12.99

Dropzone - Drag and Drop Buffer for Mac

Homepage | Download | $10.00

Drag and drop utility with many functionalities, designed for your Mac.

Financial Management Tools

Cha-Ching - Financial Management App

Homepage | Download | Beta Version

Flexible personal finance application available for Mac OS X.

Billings - Time Tracking and Invoicing

Homepage | Download | $39.99

Billings is an invoicing and time tracking app.

On The Job - Time Tracking and Invoicing

Homepage | Download | $39.95

An application designed to help you track your time and expenses, and bill your clients by easily and quickly creating professional invoices.

Application Updater

Bodega - Application Store for Mac

Homepage | Download | Freeware

Information Management Tools

Tags - File Tagger for Mac

Homepage | Download | $29.00

Vinoteka - Wine Management Software

Homepage | Download | €29.90

Vinoteka offers a realistic interface to manage your bottles (wine, liquors or spirits) recreate your cellar and organize wine tasting sessions.

Contactizer Pro - Information Management Tool

Homepage | Download | €99.00

All-in-one solution for managing, sharing and organizing your personal and business information.

Mac Applications for Tagging Files

2009-12-08T14:00:00Z

Often, we have plenty of important working stuffs stored on our Mac. Without proper management on those files, it will be difficult for us to search and get back to our previous work files.

One way to manage our files is by grouping files. There are some worth mention Mac File Tagging Applications that can help us grouping, categorizing, and managing our precious files using tags.

Punakea

Punakea is developed in order to work together with Spotlight search. In which, Punakea helps us in tagging files and even our bookmarks, enabling us to refer back easily anytime. Also, it helps us grouping files with common tags; this can boost our productivity.

Homepage Download Trial Version (30-day) Buy for $39.95

Nifty Box

If you're one of Spotlight avid and you want to further optimize your Spotlight search result, you should try using Nifty Box. With it, you can add personal keywords and tag your files and web bookmarks.

When the number of tags grow, Nifty Box also helps us organizing our tags into a bundle so that we can browse through our tags easily, just like browsing through our iTunes playlist.

Homepage Download Nifty Box (Free)

Default Folder X

Default Folder X makes file saving dialogs in Mac OS X easier to use by adding some enhancements to the interface, such as.

Hierarchical pop-up menus. Browse with menus that reveal folder contents as you hover over them.
Hierarchical location menu. Use the Open and Save dialog's location menu as a hierarchical pop-up menu.
Keyboard shortcuts. Open your favorite folders with keyboard shortcuts in every application as well as in Open and Save dialogs.
Dock and menu bar icons. Use Default Folder X's pop-up menus without an Open and Save dialog.
Available disk space. See your volumes' available disk space in pop-up menus.
And other enhancements…

With Default Folder X, you can easily add Spotlight keywords rights from the save dialog. Not only that, there is also a feature for you to assign default folder to each of your application, which can decrease time consumption during completion of workflow.

Homepage Download Trial Version (30-day) Buy for $34.95

Together

Together lets you keep everything in one place. By using Together, with a simple drag-drop action, you can collect, tag, and preview texts, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks, or even find them again easily the other time.

Homepage Download Trial Version (15-day) Buy for $39.00

Yojimbo

Yojimbo helps keeping all important bits of information organized and accessible. It’s practically easy to use Yojimbo, without any pre-learning required.

There are as many uses for Yojimbo as there are users of it. It accepts almost anything from text, bookmarks, images, pdfs, to web archives, serial numbers, or even passwords by simply dragging, copying, importing or printing.

Homepage Download Trial Version (30-day) Buy for $39.00

Yep 2

The strength in Yep is the ability to see your documents and search through them without worrying where exactly you saved it to.

With Yep, you can add your own tags to documents. It also has the ability to automatically move documents into a simple date based folder system located in your Documents folder, which results in the ease to track records of receipts, invoices, research papers, etc.

Homepage Download Trial Version Buy for $39.00

Fresh

You can use Fresh to tag files, pick recently used tags, and even rate files. By tagging files, using Spotlight to search for tagged items will be so much easier.

Homepage Download Trial Version Buy for $9.00

Leap 2

When we need to handle and manage hundreds (or even thousands) of files, we definitely need to group them with tags, which makes it extremely easy to find those files, regardless of their location.

Using Leap, you can use OpenMeta tag contentions to share tags across numerous programs. With tweaks and improvements in user interface, Leap makes tagging, rating and browsing of files even easier.

As a side note, you can buy a bundle containing Fresh, Deep, Leap, and Yep, four of them for $69.00, which I see as a good bargain if you really like to use them.

Homepage Download Trial Version Buy for $59.00

Of course, it is not recommended to purchase all of them as the functionalities of these file tagging applications kind of overlapping each other. You just need to find one that suits you the most and stick to it.

Although I myself rarely feel the need to manage my files (usually I just left them behind, cluttered), I hope that this small compilation of file tagging applications can help you in organizing your Mac.

Custom Exposé Glows for Download

2009-11-06T13:00:00Z

In our previous article: Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow, we have brought forward the option to change your Exposé glowing effect. After few minutes playing around with the image sprite, I have come up with these various sprites.

In this article, I'd like to share the sprite with you. You can refer to the previous daily trick for the step by step guide on how to change the effect.

Inspired by Artless Processes - Customize Snow Leopard Exposé Glow.

Screenshots and download link provided after the jump.

Transparent Blue Glow

Transparent Black Glow

Transparent White Glow

Outline Hover Effect

Transparent White Rectangle Glow

Download Link

All of the images for creating effects shown above can be downloaded from this link: Sprites.ZIP (10.9KB).

Shiny White Glow by Kent

Download link: shiny-white-glow.zip.

If you have created some nice effects and want to share with the rest of UsingMac readers, you can email me the attached sprite: wendy[at]usingmac[dot]com. You can also drop few words on provided comment box.

Mac Application Updaters

2009-11-05T14:00:00Z

Sometimes, it's difficult to search and update to the latest Mac applications. This may hinder some people in using their Macs. In order to reduce the hassle searching for required applications, we can use application updaters, which will do the information gathering for us.

Some application updaters can be seen after the jump.

Bodega

Bodega is an application updater for Mac that collects information on available Mac applications and presents them nicely with a sleek and nice user interface.

Within the Bodega, Applications are categorized. Hence, you can easily browse through Applications and directly download them to your Mac.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License: Freeware

AppFresh

Having installed various applications to your Mac, it's always good to keep them up to date with latest version. This can be easily done by using AppFresh.

AppFresh helps you check for latest version and keep all of your applications, widgets, preference panes, and plugins up to date.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License: Freeware

App Update

Similar to AppFresh, App Update also tracks for latest version of applications installed on our Mac. However, App Update presents the information with a simple widget interface.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | Kind: Dashboard Widget

Any Suggestion?

Perhaps, I've missed out one of your favorite application updaters. You can use the provided comment box to share with us. We will really appreciate it.

Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow

2009-11-04T15:00:00Z

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.

Step 1. Find the Image Sprites

Most of the time, the items that can be seen (let it buttons, icons, or other items) are located in the System folder of our Mac. The glowing effect of our Exposé is also using the image sprite stored in the System folder.

Here is the quick step to the directory containing the image sprites:

Open Finder and hit keystrokes Cmd-Shift-G
Type in the directory address: /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources
Then, hit enter to quickly jump to that directory (Resources folder)

Step 2. Move Them to Other Place

As you are now inside the System folder, the permission setting will stop you from making any direct changes to the files inside.

The workaround for this is to copy these two items to other place outside System folder, modify them, and move them back.

Here are the detailed steps:

Inside the folder, search for two image files, namely: expose-window-selection-big.png and expose-window-selection-small.png
Copy these two items somewhere else. And delete the original copy from this Resources folder
Now open these two images with your favorite image editor (e.g. Preview, Pixelmator, or Photoshop), change the color, and then save the changes
Move back these two images into your the same directory as before (Resources folder)

Step 3. Restart Exposé to the Effect

Finally to see the changes, you need to open Terminal and execute command line:

killall Dock

The above command line will restart the Dock for you as well as restart Exposé. After restarting the Exposé, you can now see the change in glow color after the modification.

The key to quickly do this tweak is to open several Finder windows. This will save your time from going through the whole process to search for Resources folder.

And, it's always recommended to make a backup for these two image files. Enjoy the tweaking!

New Design. The White UsingMac

2009-11-04T09:25:00Z

After several months of black-theme UsingMac, we've decided to transform into white-theme design. Perhaps, some of you might feel surprised by this sudden change, but we hope that you feel comfortable with our new design.

Why Do We Choose White?

Having browsed through most of the websites that contain guide or information, rarely can we see them using white-on-black layout. That's when we think of changing into white-on-black layout.

What Are The Changes We Made?

If you have visited our site before, you would notice that the look-and-feel of several places have been tweaked, for example: mini highlights on the top now is incorporated with simple round button, you can browse through those highlights by clicking on the button.

Besides that change, we have also made changes to

Logo → Now with simple text instead of image, for faster loading
Search Bar → Located at right most of our navigation bar
Sidebar → More appealing hover effect is added for better navigation
Comment Box → It has been enlarged and now accept line break

And the biggest change would be the change from Black to White.

What Do You Think?

We believe that we are still far from perfect. It's really appreciated if you can give us any constructive feedback or comment on this new design. Not only for giving feedback, you can also try out our new comment box.

Hope you enjoy this new experience with UsingMac.

Fave Mac App 3. Path Finder 5

2009-10-23T14:00:00Z

Path Finder is an award-winning file browser and management application for Mac OS X. This is achieved by adding on more useful features to the familiar user interface of Finder.

There are several features that I like to use while using Path Finder:

Multiple Tabs Browsing
Sometimes we might need to open multiple Finder window to drag-drop or browse around directories. Using Path Finder, we can combine all these opened windows into just a single window with multiple tabs.
Temporary Stack
Although the drag-drop technique has become my habit in boosting my productivity in handling files. Path Finder enhances this experience by adding temporary stack where we can have a temporary place for drag-drop process.
Dual Pane File Browsing
Often, we need to view different folders side by side. And the good news is, Path Finder provides the dual pane browsing ability for us. This feature of Path Finder is just too good to be missed.
Quick Preview
By default, if we want to show information of certain item on Finder, we will reveal the Get Info pane by hitting keystrokes Cmd-Opt-I.
However in Path Finder, we can just toggle on Preview Mode and we can have all important information the item has.
Recent Applications
Path Finder can also help us keeping track of up to 50 recent applications.

Even though it's quite pricey for an application, I still recommend using Path Finder. Path Finder really helps a lot in enhancing your Mac experience. For your information, there is 30-day trial provided for this application.

Screenshots are provided after the jump.

Homepage | Download Link: Leopard ↓ - Snow Leopard ↓ | License: $39.95

Screenshots

To get better understanding of Path Finder's interface, you can take a look at several snapshots of it that we've taken. You can click on thumbnail to see larger view.

Poll. Your Favorite Mac Desktop

2009-10-22T14:00:00Z

This article is intended to give exposure to other contestants that have submitted their works. The screenshots of their submissions are listed below. And you can cast vote on any that you like (you can choose more than one) at the end of this article.

Let's vote for your favorite Mac Desktop and support the one that you like!
Hint. You can use keystrokes Cmd-[↓] to quickly scroll down to end of page.

1. Radio Station

2. iMac on the Dock

3. Apple Color Spectrum

4. Garden

5. Black, White, and Red

6. Audio Technology

7. Daily Task

8. Outside World

9. Invisible Dock

10. Blue Moon

11. Blue Fractal

12. Clouds and Rain

13. Wooden Mac

14. Three Programs

15. Funnel OS X

16. Desktop Workspace

17. Login Screen

18. Custom Icons

19. Wall-E

20. Menubar Calendar

21. Andrew's Mac

22. Background and Dock

23. Mac Desktop

24. Avalanche

25. Advance Laboratory

26. Apple

27. iTunes

28. Clock Only

29. Halo 3

30. Blue Lightstream

31. Leather Dock

32. Spyda's Screenshot

33. DMC

34. Facebook Notifications

35. Fire Leopard

36. Linux Screenshot

37. List View

38. Color Bubble

39. Gay Bar

40. Stay Green

41. Mac Spaces

42. Desktop Calendar

43. Mach Desktop (Red)

Tweak Screencapture Behavior

2009-10-19T14:30:00Z

Normally, we will use keystrokes Cmd-Shift-3 or Cmd-Shift-4 to take snapshot with Mac default screencapture utility. And new in Snow Leopard, we will end up having a PNG image file automatically stored inside our Desktop folder with the name Screen shot … .

Those behaviors mentioned above are the default ones. We can easily change those with simple command lines.

Change Screencapture Filename
defaults write com.apple.screencapture name "New Name"
killall SystemUIServer You can change the value "New Name" to the name of your liking. And if you put the name as empty string (i.e. ""), you will get your screencapture named with the format: [current date] at [time], e.g. "2009-10-20 at AM 03.02.57".
Change Screencapture Location
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "New Location"
killall SystemUIServer Hint. You can drag-drop the folder to Terminal pane to get the folder location.
As seen in both command lines, the second line killall SystemUIServer is needed and used to restart the screencapture application. Only after restarting, changes will take effect.
Change Screencapture File Format
defaults write com.apple.screencapture type [new format]
killall SystemUIServer These file formats are available: PNG, PDF, JPG, JP2, GIF, TIF, BMP, PICT, and TGA.
Note. Replace the [new format] with one of those available formats, e.g. JPG.
Disable Window Shadow
When we used key combination [Cmd-Shift-4] + [Space], we will be able to capture a snapshot of window along with the shadow. The following command lines are used to disable the shadow. defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true
killall SystemUIServer You can change -bool true to -bool false to enable back the shadow.
Capture from Terminal Command
One of these command lines can be used to capture from terminal: screencapture -c
screencapture -i ~/Desktop/snapshot.png
screencapture -io ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
screencapture -M ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
screencapture -P ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
screencapture -t png ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
screencapture -T 5 ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
screencapture -x ~/Desktop/screenshot.png The usages of each command line can be checked using: man screencapture

Personally, I love to play around with Terminal tweaks. If you have any other interesting tweaks, feel free to share with us; we provided a comment box for that. Have a good time screencapture-ing!

Daily Trick 46. Fast Exposé Shortcut

2009-10-17T14:00:00Z

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.

The Winners of UsingMac Contest 1

2009-10-15T14:00:00Z

After long consideration and development time to put up all submissions into our new gallery, finally we can announce to our readers the winners of this contest.

1st Place. Biology

Artist: Myles O'Neill

I am astounded by the modifications and extra touches that he gives to his Mac. If not for the Dock he left there untouched, I can barely figure out that this is a screenshot of a Mac.

Big applause to Myles for winning licenses of Pixelmator, Layers, and Concentrate.

2nd Place. Custom Dock

Artist: Cameron Osborn

I like the way the icons are placed; they're not placed in the normal Dock. Instead, the icons are placed in a custom dock, like the title implies. What a creative modification.

And what I like the most is the simplicity and minimalistic atmosphere from the Desktop. Thumbs up to Cameron. Congrats Cameron! You've won 2 apps: Layers and Concentrate.

3rd Place. Fan Stack

Artist: Prakhar M.

From a single glance, perhaps you would be attracted to the modified stack icons.

However if you look more thoroughly, you would find out that he also modified the LED lights of active applications into three lights (default is one). This is the creative part of his desktop setup.

And with this, he won a copy of Concentrate.

Other Submissions

You can also see other 80 wonderful screenshots of Mac Desktop and photos of Mac Setup on our new gallery at gallery.usingmac.com under the category Mac Fanboy Collection.

We've also put up 200+ gorgeous wallpapers on the gallery.

We applied a queuing system to the gallery where upon clicking on the thumbnail, the lightbox view will not appear immediately. Instead, the image will be put on the process queue. You can view the image after the load is finished.

Have a nice time browsing!

Fave Mac App 2. Adium

2009-10-07T15:00:00Z

Adium is an application that lets you chat with your friends across many chat networks easily at the same time. With Adium, you can connect to Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, and many others with just one single chat client.

Adding to its value, Adium also provides us with interface to Twitter and Facebook. And if you can't past a single moment without chit-chat with friends, Adium suits you most.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License Type: Freeware

Daily Trick 45. Quick Manage Mail

2009-10-06T11:00:00Z

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.

Managing Mailboxes

You will use these shortcuts often. You should quickly burn these into your brain.

Cmd-Delete → Delete selected mailbox item(s)
Cmd-Shift-L → Mark selected items as "Flagged"
Cmd-Shift-J → Mark selected items as "Junk"
Cmd-Shift-Y → Add sender(s) of selected items to Address Book
Cmd-Shift-K → Select all related messages

Navigating Mailboxes

And you can always use keyboard shortcuts Cmd-1 ~ Cmd-8 for quick navigation to other mailboxes.

Handling Message

In the case of handling message, these keyboard shorcuts would be very useful:

Cmd-R → Reply
Cmd-Shift-R → Reply All
Cmd-Shift-F → Forward
Cmd-Shift-E → Redirect
Cmd-Shift-B → Bounce

Hope these shortcuts will help you in increasing your productivity.