Just to remind you all that the end of this month will be the deadline for UsingMac Contest. If you haven't participated in the contest, make sure to submit the screenshot of What's on Your Mac Screen and stand a chance to win fabulous prizes.
Categories:
Special Event
Tags:
Contest,
Reminder
Facebook Notifications is an application that alerts you when new activities happen on Facebook and also helps you easily update your status.
If you are one of Facebook active members, this application suits you best.
I personally feel it's quite troublesome to browse into Facebook only to check for new
notifications.
Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License Type: Freeware
Categories:
Applications
Tags:
Application,
Facebook,
Notification
Sorry for the long hiatus of daily trick series due to lack of internet connection. Now, we're back on the track again.
If you put the Dock on the left of the screen, you're left with two display options, which are Grid View and List View. However, folks at Mac OS X Hints found a Terminal command to bring out new list view.
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES && killall Dock
After execution of the command above, your list view will look like the combination of Grid View and List View.
↑ new List View : After Execution of Command Line
And you can always use command line below to revert back to normal.
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool NO && killall Dock
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Dock,
Stack
If you've mastered and used not only one language, but many of them, I believe you would want to have selections of input source and the input source switcher.
First of all, let me guide you to add more input sources for your Mac OS X 10.6.
Though now you can have more than one language of input sources, it will slow you down if you can't do the fast switching between input sources. In order to perform a quick input sources switch, you need to…
For a side note, if you only need to switch between two input sources, you can just press the keystrokes without the need of holding modifier keys.
(L). The screenshot of input source selector that I mentioned.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Input Source
I'm really excited to grab a copy of Snow Leopard and successfully upgraded my MacBook to Mac OS X 10.6. And amazed by many new feature enhancements, I decided to extend the UsingMac Contest so that you can also submit a screenshot of your Mac desktop, extended until end of September 2009.
It's very simple to participate in the contest: you only need to submit screenshot(s) of your Mac desktop to show the beauty of Mac. Or, if you're proud of your Mac hardware setup, you can also submit the photo of your Mac.
The image uploader is provided at the bottom of this linked article. Some examples are provided after the jump.
It surprises me that Apple has finally solved the hard-to-navigate minimized window issue with the release of Snow Leopard. If you've upgraded to Snow Leopard, you won't need to use Open Minimized Window Trick to reveal those minimized windows.
With Snow Leopard, you only need to click-and-hold on the Dock icon of that application and an Exposé display will appear, showing all opened as well as minimized windows.
And if you prefer using Hot Corners to using click-and-hold, you can set it up as one of your hot corner actions; you can do it by following these steps:
With simple steps, you can get a wonderful effect. Great!
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Expose,
Snow Leopard
When I browsed through new features of Snow Leopard, I stumbled on text transformation feature built-in on TextEdit. Using this feature, you can easily capitalize, make lower case, or turn words into upper case.
This new feature can be found on TextEdit Menubar · Edit → Transformations.
Putting productivity on the top priority, I create keyboard shortcuts for each of the action. If you want to do the same thing, you can follow these steps:
As you can see from screenshot on the left side, now I have applied my customized shortcuts for these new text transformation actions.
Hope that I can help you improving your productivity with this little trick.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Snow Leopard,
TextEdit
Reading from the title, you will know that I have successfully installed Snow Leopard on my little Black Macbook. As a kick-start, let me share with you this simple trick to enable stack highlighting.
You only need to execute these two lines of Terminal commands to make it happens :
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
killall Dock
After execution of the second command line, your Dock will be restarted and when you mouse over one of your stack items, it will be highlighted.
Screenshot on the right displays how the stack highlighting looks like.
Source → MacRumors Forums
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Dock,
Snow Leopard,
Stack
Often, it's really annoying to have stream of continuously coming unwanted messages. By only trashing the message won't discourage the senders in spamming our mail.
There is one way you can use to discourage them: by rejecting the message. Technically, it's called Bounce Back. If you're currently using Mail.app (default mail reader for Mac), you can do the trick.
There are still many interesting, nifty Mail tricks, which can be found out more here or you can just check out additional mail plugins.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Mail,
mail,
Reject
As we all have known, having alias (or well-known as shortcut) can save you a lot of time in navigating through files.
For highlighted items, there are 3 ways you can use to create an alias of them:
Depending on the situation, you can choose one of the making alias techniques. For example, if you want to make alias on the same directory and subsequently move it elsewhere, 3rd technique is the most suitable.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Alias,
Daily Trick,
Finder,
finder
It's not just as simple as pressing Cmd-Shift-3 to screen capture your Mac. If you've used screen capturing feature for quite a long time, you will figure out some nifty tricks of it.
In this daily trick, I am going to share some tricks that I know in capturing screen. I hope that using list is fine for you.
That's all for this screen capturing tricks. You can apply some of the tricks above to capture things on your Mac desktop and use the screen capture result to take part in our contest: UsingMac Contest. Beauty of the Mac [more…].
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Capture,
Daily Trick,
Grab,
Screen
Upon seeing my Mac setup, I always have this kind of excitement to share it to everyone.
I believe some of you might feel the same. Now, it's the chance for you to show your
Mac setup to other Mac users as we've arranged this contest for everyone to submit their
Mac setups!
Update. You can also submit your desktop setup to show the world how cool is your Mac.
Before starting with the requirements for this contest, let's see the prize for winners.
Let's continue to the description of the prizes and how to win.
Perhaps some Mac users are not used to using Zoom window of Mac; they would prefer to have maximized browser. We have a good news here, you can maximize your browser with a single click on this address → Maximized View.
And of course, you can always bookmark the address above so that everytime you want to maximize your browser window, a single click on the bookmarked address will do.
This trick works fine with Safari and Firefox. I haven't checked it on other browsers.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Browser,
Daily Trick,
Window
After installing the latest Safari 4.0.3 via Software Update, my Mac suddenly refuses to open new window of Safari. The possible cause of this problem is the plugins that have been installed on your Safari.
The first possible fix is by uninstalling Glims. To do this, you can go to MacHangout FAQ to download Glims Uninstaller.
If Safari is still not working after the installation, you can check on several possible and delete some possible clashing plugins:
Note that you can just: open Finder, hit Cmd-Shift-G, and copy-paste the address written above for quick directory jump.
I have managed to make my Safari working fine now. Hope that you can get your Safari working again too.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Safari
If you are using Safari as your Web Browser, there is no need to install any third-party apps in order to capture a web page to be sent to your friend. You can just use feature of Safari, from menubar: Safari → Mail Contents of This Page.
And the whole page you're currently displayed will be sent to your new composed Mail. Aside from using the menubar, you can also use keyboard shortcut Cmd-I to do the job.
As a side note, in Safari you can always use Cmd-Shift-I to send only the link of the page to your friends.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
In our previous daily trick, we have discussed about the Canned Searches, which is also known as Smart Folders. And in this daily trick, we are going to talk about creating your personalized Smart Folders, not just using the pre-defined searches.
First of all, you should open Finder window. And then followed by these steps:
Now, you can create as many Smart Folders as you want. And this will save your time by avoiding repetitive insertion of search constraints.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Finder,
finder,
Folder
One of our readers, Mahdi Hosseini, stumbled on the Smart Folder trick and he is eager to share with us.
Smart Folder TrickI came across a cool thing buried inside Finder.app.
If you like the current Canned Searches that could be used to search for certain files, such as All Documents, All Images, etc, and wish to have more search categories, worry not.
You can follow these steps to browse for more:
For example, by using the Smart Folder: All PDF Documents, you don't need to search all over the place to find your PDFs, single click on this Smart Folder will do the job.
End of the TrickMany thanks to Mahdi for this little useful trick.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Finder,
finder,
Folder
It's only several days left until the end of The Mac Sale. In this bundle, you can grab up to 10 great applications worth of $450 with just $49.99. This is the first good news.
The second good news we have here: you can get another 5% discount for the bundle.
If you use USINGMAC as your coupon code, you can get that discount.
For more information of the applications inside the bundle, you can visit The Mac Sale.
Categories:
Applications,
Special Event
Tags:
Bundle,
Discount,
Event
I believe we all have ever used Wikipedia and perhaps we often use it. And usually, we will use our web browser to search the entry of Wikipedia, won't we?
But using our Mac, it is not necessary for us to open web browser just to look for the entry in Wikipedia. It's because we can use our Dictionary.app to browse through Wikipedia entries.
But initially, you will need to enable Wikipedia as one of your Dictionary sources. Here are the steps to do it:
Of course with similar steps as above, you can also enable Thesaurus or other dictionaries as the source.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Dictionary,
Wikipedia
If you feel that there are too many things on your Finder sidebar, you can hide some of the rarely used items. It's very easy to hide the items; You only need to drag-drop it out of sidebar.
However, if someday you feel that you will need the item again, you can:
But up to now, I still can't find the way to hide the sidebar while keeping the toolbar shown, like in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4).
If you want to change the icon, you can follow the guide written here and if you want to revert back to original icon, we can find the how-to inside here.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Finder,
finder
If you're feeling bored of the contextual menu of the Dock, you can always change the menu labeling. To change the menu labeling, these steps can guide you:
There are many labels you can change apart from the given example. The part that you can change is shown in the highlighted part as shown in the screenshot below.
Just try this little trick and have fun!
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Dock
Often, we want to quickly access to some directory paths to Finder, such as accessing folder Applications, Home, or Desktop. If you go to Finder Menubar → Go, you can see some pre-assigned keyboard shorcuts that can help you quickly access those directories (e.g. Cmd-Shift-A for Applications).
And for the directory not on the list, you can always use Cmd-Shift-G and fill in the path for quick directory access (e.g. ~/Documents/Drafts).
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Finder,
finder
In order to send files to the other Mac on the same local network, usually we will utilize a public folder and create a drop box inside. Drop Box is a folder where other users can drop files into it, but they can't see the content inside.
The drop box creation is simple and straightforward:
However, you also need to turn on your File Sharing so that other users on the local network can access to your Public Folder.
You can go inside System Preferences → Sharing to turn on your File Sharing. Now, you should be able to share files easily on the local network.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Sharing
When we received a mail with many attachments, there are some actions can be taken: change download location, download all attachments, or download only some attachments.
To change the location of your downloaded attachments, you can follow these steps:
After you've changed the download location, now you can download the attachments without afraid of losing track of those files. If you want to download all files, you can click on the save button and all of the attachments will be saved to the download folder.
If you don't want to download all of the attachments, you can:
Hope that you will be able to handle mail attachment better than before reading this.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick,
Mail,
mail
Having downloaded some nice menubar applications, the problem of always keeping those menubar items launched upon login may arise. One reader pointed out the absence of an option to keep the item automatically activated (like in Dock).
Unfortunately, there isn't any quick way to always launch the menubar items. The only way is by assigning it to our login items, which can be done by following these steps:
It is always good to remember that the more you have applications assigned as your login items, the longer it will take for your start-up time.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick