UsingMac.com
Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users
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.
Categories:
Daily Tricks
Tags:
Daily Trick
100+ Elegant & Artistic Wallpapers
Wallpapers can be creative, elegant, and refreshing. If you are looking to add some awesomeness to your Mac, you probably need a desktop wallpaper that decorates your Mac to create something that matches the elegance of Mac.
In this post we present mind-blowing desktop wallpapers related fantasy art, light stream, and color spectrum themse. All screenshots are clickable and lead to the pages where they can be downloaded.
They are definitely worth a look!
Thanks to UsingMac Sponsors
We would like to shout a big thank you for our sponsors. They've done a great task in enriching our Mac life. You can purchase an adspot on UsingMac through BuySellAds.
CleanMyMac
CleanMyMac helps you in cleaning up useless system files that pile up and waste your precious disk space.
Keynote Quartet FX
A set of great presentation-making tools that can make your presentation memorable and mind-blowing!
Many new tweaks, free applications, wallpapers, and giveaways are coming! Make sure you come back often~
Giveaway: (5x) CleanMyMac from MacPaw
Upon installation of application, some system files are spread across your Mac without your knowing that. Even after uninstallation, those persistent files are leaved behind, eating up your free space.
Several third party apps are available to clean up these leftovers; CleanMyMac is one of those. And this time, we are giving away 5x CleanMyMac as courtesy of MacPaw.
20+ Free Productivity Booster Apps for Mac
Lacking of productivity applications will slow down our workflow and consume more time, even though we've already purchased a Mac. Using only built-in Mac applications, we can neither get the most out of our Mac nor boost our productivity.
In this article, we've compiled several free applications for Mac OS X (including application launcher, easy note-taker application, data backup tool, data sharing utility, etc) that can significantly boost your productivity.
Let us know which one is your favorite!
Recording Speech with GarageBand 2009
After burning some time to play around with GarageBand 2009, I got a new skill to share with you all in this article: recording speech.
Although it sounds simple, there are many hidden tricks to get clean and nice recorded speech. Hope this article can help you in your future speech recording.
Winners of SyncMate Expert Giveaway
Many thanks to everyone who has participated in the giveaway to try out luck in winning one free SyncMate Expert from Eltima Software.
Regardless of the order, here are the five lucky winners we have:
-
Zachary Price
“The two features that I think are the best are the iCal & ToDo lists synchronization&hellip..” -
James Lee
“.. I'm very interested in some of smaller features in Syncmate Expert, notably: bookmarks, folder and notes synchronization, SMS manager and reader, Device info, actions log and Call History..” -
Mike
“.. folder synchronization. It is awesome to have folders that sync to my Windows Mobile phone as if it was music syncronizing to an iPod.. ” -
Sam G.
“Bookmarks... it is so very painful to have to retype out my web addresses using my SPV M3100's "touchscreen" so the ability to sync bookmarks would save me a lot of time..” -
alej11
“.. managing SMS right from Mac computer. Sending, receiving, creating and deleting SMS when working at Mac became possible with SyncMate Expert Edition.
That's just plain and simply awesome!”
License codes are on their way, should reach their places soon!
Experience iTunes Like Never Before with Additional Freewares
Having my Mac accompanying my daily life, it would be a miss without the companion of music. And for now, I still adore iTunes as my music player. However, there are still some limitations to the awesomeness of iTunes, such as hard to rate, difficult to find lyrics, little information in mini player mode, etc.
In this article, I am going to share with you some of the freewares that can make you experience iTunes like never before. Hope you enjoy it!
Giveaway: (5x) SyncMate Expert Edition
If you are one of those Mac users who own Windows Mobile phones, you have probably encountered the problem of an impossibility of syncing these two devices. As Mac and WinMobile devices were not meant to cooperate, the variety of software synchronization solutions is not really wide.
This time, we are giving away 5x SyncMate Expert as courtesy of Eltima Software. Basically, SyncMate is one of sync tools between Mac and WinMobile.
30+ Free Menubar Applications for Mac
Menubar applications are sometimes more favorable than normal applications because not only these menubar applications can run seamlessly on background but also they can save most of our valuable dock space.
Most importantly, in this article you will see some variations of useful, free menubar applications. Let's try them out!
10 Simplest Apple Wallpapers, Ever
We always believe that desktop wallpapers can boost our inspiration, increase our productivity, and also draw other people's attention towards our Mac. However, we often feel uneasy, uncomfortable of the fact that most of the time wallpaper in fact become a distraction for us.
Having a little experience in creating wallpapers, we have given our best effort to create simple yet attractive Apple wallpapers. Hope that we can help you spice up your Mac.
Before seeing our hand-made wallpapers, you may want to see our previous collection of Apple wallpapers:
Evolution of Apple Products 1
Most of Apple products are designed to be minimalist and appealing to eyes; that's what we can see now: glossy screen with glimmering aluminum case. However, how about Apple products 30 years ago?
In this article, you can see how much Apple products have evolved for these past 30 years. You can also see that Apple products at the old time are much more expensive than these days. And maybe you will notice that some of the non-Apple laptops still resemble Apple products 10 years ago (Woah!).
Note. This article is not suitable to be read from RSS reader. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Evolution of Apple Products 2
After seeing those antiques from the article Evolution of Apple Products 1, I believe we already have a nice nostalgic moment.
Now is the time to show the glimmer of Apple products in the past 10 years…
Note. This article is not suitable to be read from RSS reader. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Emacs. Bizarre Findings
Contribution of Josh Sand
I have been digging around in /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/ recently, and I have found it is chock full of goodies, and possibly worth of an article on UsingMac.
Files I have found (put line in Terminal):
VirtualBox, The Free Virtual Machine
I was using VMware Fusion a while before I discovered VirtualBox. My intention is purely to test my web application on IE6+. That’s the reason why I would rather go for VirtualBox as a free, more lightweight and faster Virtual Machine developed and continuously enhanced by Sun Microsystems.
VirtualBox has a lot of similarities to VMware Fusion or Parallel in term of functions. However, from what I observe, VirtualBox is much faster and consumes less memory than VMware Fusion as well as Parallel. You can download and give it a try at http://www.virtualbox.org.
If your intention is like me, to use a Virtual Machine software to test your application on IE6+, VirtualBox perfectly suits you. Although VM Ware Fusion and Parallel are racing for the number of functionalities, VirtualBox on the other hands, try to optimize the speed and add in reasonable functions to suit with the basic purposes of using a virtual machine.
Yet another great thing about this open source application is that it can run on other operating system as well (e.g. Linux, Windows and Solaris).
Here is the starting point of VirtualBox.
Safari 4 Beta. New Features and Tweaks
I feel impressed on many new features of Safari 4 and I believe you feel the same. However, some of the features are not essential for us and may even break our usual workflow. This creates the urge to disable some of the features.
In this article, we will discuss with you new features of Safari 4, as well as Terminal command lines that can be used to disable these new features.
40+ Eye-Catching Mac Screensavers
Running screensaver can help you relax your mind and suppose to reduce damage to your display screen. But most importantly, nowadays screensavers are used to mesmerize everyone around them.
Knowing the importance of having unique, stunning screensaver, we are here to present you this article which consists of many screensavers that would catch your attention. No need to have long introduction here, let's see what are those screensavers.
Note. Click on the title to go to screensaver download page.
Mac Color Picker Trick
Previously, we've talked about built-in Preview color picker for Mac OS X Leopard. To our disappointment, last time we've failed to grab the real hex color code for picked color.
Fortunate for us, we found out a way to get the real hex color code from color bar and we will discuss about that in this article.
Ways to Relaunch Finder
If something happens to our Finder (freeze, perhaps), without the provision of quit option we will be certainly forced to restart our Mac. But that won't be the case if we have the know-how to relaunch Finder.
There are many ways to relaunch Finder, until now I've found 4 ways for relaunching Finder. Let's master all of them.
Stunning Mac Setups 3: The Minimalist Effect
It's an undeniable fact that minimalist mac setups can draw our productivity to its fullest. Some of my favorites mac setups are those with clean, big desk supported by comfortable lighting condition.
If you want to decorate your cubicle or even turn it to be your productivity workplace, these setups will give you some inspirations to start with.
Finder Tweaks 2: Extra Toolbar Items
Sometimes when we are working around with Mac Finder, we need to have some quick shortcuts to quickly launch application or to navigate to particular application. From the Finder itself we can customize the toolbar.
You can actually drag and drop most used tools like Path, New Folder, Get Info, Eject, and Delete as main toolbar for most of quick file actions. To arrange toolbar, we can add one or more separators or flexible spaces.
Twiddle with Terminal Command Prompt
The tendency to use Terminal seems obvious to most Mac users. Unlike many others, today we are going to go through some fun stuffs with Mac Unix Command, with the way we use Terminal.
Lock Your Mac Desktop (Part II)
In case you haven't noticed it, this is the continuation of Lock Your Mac Desktop but also the compilation of all useful resources from our readers. In the earlier part, we have covered about locking Mac desktop by enabling security password upon waking up and going to login window with fast user switching. If you have yet to know those two, I recommend you to check it out. (Though I doubt most of you will…)
In this article, we will tap on readers' suggestions on locking Mac desktop, including using active screen corners, utilizing keychain access, installing lock widget, and one more quick trick.
Tweaking Mac Login Window
In my previous articles, I've touched on three interesting login window tweaks, which are:
Applying these three killer tricks, I am sure that your Mac can stand out from the crowd since its booting up. Before throwing you with new trick on login window: changing Apple logo, let me review a bit on the past three tweaks.
Enhance Your Music Life with iTunes
iTunes has often been carved deep inside our mind as one of the coolest music player that we have on our Mac. Apart from playing music, many useful features also can be added to your iTunes experience. From the music shuffling to music sharing over network, from tweaking rating system to setting music duration, will be discussed in this article as well as some other cool features.