Contribution of Dane Baker
There is a high probability for Mac power users to execute Terminal commands in order to check for network status of particular domain, such as ping, traceroute, whois, etc.
However, if we are new to Terminal commands, it is not necessary to use any web based service for this particular purpose; we can always use Network Utility pre-installed to our Mac.
There are times when we want to walk out of our Mac yet still have many running tasks to stop us from logging out. Surely, these can become an itch-scratching issue if we have no knowledge on locking our Mac.
In this article, we will share you two ways of locking your Mac desktop.
I am sure there is at least one time you wish to make and record your own music. However, you are reluctant to come to the studio for the reason of inconvenience. Moreover, it will take you and people who help recording a lot of time and effort in order to make a rather perfect song.
Garageband can help solve this problem. With a Mac, an electric instrument (piano or guitar) together with a garageband software, the whole music world is in your hand.
Most new Mac switchers fired complaints on the strange behavior of green 'maximize' button that fails to maximize window to full screen. If you're one of them, it's time to rest assured and check out this nifty little freeware: Right Zoom.
"This free tool fixes an inconvenient behavior of green Zoom button in Mac OS X. It will always expand windows on a full screen instead of strange resizing", explained its developer, Blazing Tools Software.
The installation of this application is pretty straightforward: only unzipping and double-clicking are needed. However, as this application is running on background, you need to stop it by executing Terminal command: killall RightZoom
Categories:
Tips and Tricks
Tags:
Finder,
Mac
Contribution of Erik Thorne
For all fans of star wars, by connecting to telnet via Mac OS X Terminal an ASCII animation of Star Wars can be watched. It’s suspected that someone out there is extremely bored with his job or has too much spare time to spend on creating this ASCII animation (also named as 20th century text).
“This is the coolest thing ever”, claimed Erik Thorne himself.
Let’s try out this and see whether Erik is correct.
Besides helping Internet users to search for useful information online, Google also provides search for specific Mac sites to assist Mac users in gathering more Mac related information.
As far as I know, there are two ways to perform search on specific Mac sites.
By prefixing 'Mac' to your keyword search, there is a high chance to get returned results related to Mac. For example, to search for useful Mac keyboard shortcuts, you can use this search keyword: 'Mac Keyboard Shortcut'.
To narrow down your scope on Mac specific sites, you can always use Google for Mac. Inside this page, you will see the search button labeled as 'Search Mac Sites' instead of usual 'Google Search'.
However, I believe some of us may want to incorporate this Mac specific search with Safari search box. The rest of this article will explain this.
In one of your future presentations, I believe you will be required to create a double-sided chart that is particularly useful to represent data with minimum to maximum range. Though there is actually a Keynote template for it, but apparently we might have missed it.
Before continuing to guide you on creating double-sided chart, let’s first see what it looks like.
Perhaps previously you’ve modified many icons, yet now you’ve become bored with those changes you’ve made; now you want to revert back to your original icon.
The process of reverting back to original icon is quite easy. Let’s say you've transformed your folder icon into stack drawer icons two months ago, you could do the followings to restore back to original folder icon.
Upon importing our most memorable photos to iPhoto, duplication of original photos can't be avoided, sometimes even take up most of our precious storage space. I believe we won't let duplicated stack of photos fill up our free space.
In the case that you want to free your storage, you can delete your original photos. But beforehand, let's check whether those photos are already inside your iPhoto Library.
There is an usual place where you can find those mentioned photos…
Contribution of Chin Wei Lien
Having Quick Look shipped together with our Mac is such a fortune, not only it helps us quickly preview our files but also it illuminates our day with its great interface.
A little finding here is that if we select multiple pictures at one time in Finder and press space bar, a Quick Look window will pop up in an instant1.
Take notice of the option to view pictures in different format just next to scrolling arrows (after separator). Pressing on that turns Quick Look window into Index Sheet2. And in order to go back to normal view, escape key can be used.
Read more for screenshots…
After several times going further to the tweaking process, often we forgot the very basic usability that we will need in using our Mac, which is well-known yet often ignored, i.e. choosing dialog button with keyboard.
Setting needs to be done are very minor comparing to major advantages and boost in productivity that will be gained. Let's follow the instructions on how to use keyboard to select dialog
Some Mac users love to view content of stack as Fan View yet hating the fact that it can barely display ten or more applications. If you're one of those users, you will be very happy to follow this trick, which will make your stack background "invisible" and all icons inside that stack will be see as if they're "floating".
Only with a bit of Finder tweaking, Finder can be transformed into your most powerful tool in managing files and boosting productivity.
For this time, we will guide you in tweaking your Finder's toolbar, especially in adding extra items, connecting to Terminal, and renaming tools.
Let's proceed further…
Upon opening our System Preferences, straight away we know that there are some basic customizations can be performed to our Mac. But of course, this is the very general knowledge that even Tom and Dick know about it.
However, there are still some Preferences Panes created by developers yet buried down somewhere, probably they're not as popular as Secrets introduced by developer of Quicksilver but worth mentioned.
There are numbers of To-do List Managers available for your Mac: from to-do list managers that adopt minimalism to those that provide feature-rich services, from those with expensive pricing tags to those set as donation wares.
Though many prefer commercial apps that are assumed to be complete in feature, I personally feel like to explore free apps that sometimes can be used to substitute those commercial ones.
Some free to-do list managers listed below will help you in saving your pocket money as well as getting things done…
It's really exciting to experience the new iPhoto, especially the process of teaching iPhoto on recognizing faces. Indeed, it's rather difficult to get correct suggestion from iPhoto with limited number of photos (with human face) imported but to me, the process is the fun part.
Skipping the discussion on how to perform face recognition (which can be learnt from MacWorld Demo), this article will focus on discussing the magic of option key:
Let's proceed further…
Throughout this whole month, many articles have been posted on UsingMac, teaching many nifty tricks as well as interesting stuffs to enhance your Mac life.
Now, it's time for roundup of January 2009 resources.
Besides using Force Quit Applications to kill crashing or freezing applications, Mac users can also use Terminal to kill these persistent processes.
Like execution of End Process Tree in Windows Task Manager, using Terminal command to kill running process leads to the same effect (but in Terminal way).
Waste no more time, let's begin the assassination.
Speaking of tweaking Mac, Terminal commands are the simplest way of completing preferences tweak. However, try to avoid system tweak (command lines involving sudo) as the effect will be catastrophic if it fails.
This time, the tweaking will be done on Finder interface which the interface will be downgraded to its lowest level, as in Finder for Sharing-Only Account. Fortunately, this simple Finder isn't merely limited to Sharing-Only Account…
With its elegance Grid View and comprehensive List View, putting things on the right side of the Dock giving much more advantages than adding more clutters to Dock organization. Some stuffs of my interest to be kept on Dock are Preferences Stack, Menu Extras Stack and Groups of Applications.
Let me share with you how to make those stacks.
Every internet users loves to watch YouTube, but ironically only some groups of people know how to download free YouTube videos easily with least effort required.
Initially, we can only download free YouTube videos in FLV format which can be learnt from previous article, Free Download YouTube Video with Safari. Until not long ago, YouTube has released high quality MP4 video as an additional feature for its users. It will be really satisfying if those MP4s can be downloaded.
The good news is, we know two tricks that can be used to download HD YouTube Video. And we feel that it's such a great honor to share these.
Speaking of browser bookmarks, the nearest would be bookmarks menu attached to our browsers. Without accessing external sites for extracting out bookmarks, links to favorite sites can be obtained right from web browser bookmarks menu.
However, blazing fast access speed to bookmarked sites won't be achieved without bits of tweaking to browser settings and system preferences. The easiest tweak made to increase speed won't be far away from assigning new keyboard shortcuts.
Let's proceed on and get to step-by-step guide to adding new shortcut to browser bookmarks…
Years have passed since the first time I used my Mac. While using my Mac, by accidentally hitting wrong combination or purposely browsing for it, I'd discovered some hidden keyboard shortcuts.
Shortcut, as the name suggests, should bring us more productivity juice rather than drag us down. However, some shortcuts may suit you well, some may take more time for you to adapt; to adopt these new hidden shortcuts or to drop them, that's all depend on you.
As requested by our readers, today we'd love to share a quick tip on customizing the Dock. Your Dock will become like what's shown on the screenshot…
Though we've explored many nicely designed Apple wallpapers out there, new Apple wallpapers are popping out somewhere else. But we feel extremely delighted to know that we can further expand our collection of Apple wallpapers and share it with everyone.
You may want to see our previous collection of Apple wallpapers:
Either old walls or these newly discovered eye-candies will 100% suit your Desktop.
Can't believe us? Check it out…