UsingMac.com - Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users

Faking Folders Icon

Actually, the outcome of this trick won't give you any great significance to your skill in using Mac. What I intended here is to share several useful tricks and wrap them up in a fun way. I hope in such a way, you can memorize them better.

For a teaser, let's see the outcome for this fun tip:

The Outcome

As I've said previously, the outcome is less important than what you will get during the process. As Steve Jobs said, "The Journey is the Reward".

Let's get started.

1. Detect Location

Dock is separated into two portions, which the first one can contains applications and the other one can only contains folders. Here, you will be guided to mirror applications and folders. To get things quickly done, it will be best to change the folder's display rather than another way round.

As you cannot access the file information directly from the Dock, it's essential to know where is the file location.

Control-Click on the folder/application
Choose Show in Finder from popped up contextual menu
New Finder window pointed to that item will pop up

Commonly Overlooked Things

I encountered many unique and interesting events today, such as my Windows user friend is using my Mac, my Mac cannot log out automatically, etc and from these incidents, I got more knowledge on operating my Mac, such that:

Look Up the Synonym

You should have known that using Command-Control-D you can mouse hover a word and directly see the definition of the word without the need to open your Mac Dictionary.

However, this trick is widely known. But I can't even find any single source talking about feature like Look Up in Thesaurus. Here is how to do it:

Open your Dictionary
Go to its Preferences Pane
Drag the order of Thesaurus to the first one

Download Media Files with Least Effort

More and more stuffs of people interest flowing around the web, people are starting to seek and download those stuffs. However, most of the time the permalink to the storage place are unavailable, especially for media files.

Instead of wasting time searching from Google, smashing the web or even begging the creator of the file, it'll take the least of your effort by using the following tricks which perfectly work on Safari (such as downloading YouTube Video for free) and Firefox.

Safari Web Browser

Open Activity Window
In order to open activity window, you can use the paths Safari: Window ▸ Activity (keystrokes: Command-Option-A).
Recognizing the File
You will see a whole bunch of files displayed inside the pane. Hopefully, movie files stand out of the crowd as those kind of files usually appear in big file size.
Cast the Magic
So, the file you want to download has been spotted. Use this trick: Option-DoubleClick on the file name. The file will be downloaded and put into your Downloads folder.
You don't need to rename the file you've just downloaded. Right after the downloading process is finished, the file is ready to be used.

It's quite different for Firefox…

Change Default Application

Common Mistake…

Most of the time, the contextual menu labelled Always Open With will be used in order to open file as default application. And this leads to mistake being made most of the time.

Why…?

When a file is set to always be opened with particular application, the change will only apply to that particular file. Let's say there are hundreds files of the same type, changes will be needed for all of those files, what a waste of time!

Solution: Use Info Pane

If the changes are to be made for every single files with the same type (same extension name), Get Info pane will be required. Here are the full and complete steps:

Select a file
Open Get Info pane of that file (keystrokes: Command-I)
Find section with name Open with: and choose appropriate application to open that type of file
Click on Change All… button
Finish! That application will now be set as current default application

Categories: Tips and Tricks
Tags: Application, Change, Default

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[System Preferences] Changing Mac Appearance

Basically, you can change your Mac's appearance from inside Apple ▸ System Preferences ▸ Appearance. Inside this pane, you can change your Mac color appearance, window behavior, recent items or even font smoothing.

Let's see what you can do with it.

Mac Benefit 1: You don't need to click Apply like Windows. The changes will be applied instantly.

Color Appearance

Inside this pane, you will see that you have the default value for Appearance: Blue and Highlight Color: Blue.

Adapt Mac Shortcuts for Windows Switchers

Once you change from a geeky Windows user to a professional Mac user, first you will encounter a problem regarding to keyboard shortcuts. I've experienced it before, though some of the shortcuts are the same but most of them are different.

Here are several tips and shortcuts that I think you will feel it useful if you really want to transform your Mac shortcuts into old Windows arsenals.

Change Modifier Keys

Maybe you've noticed, in most of the shortcuts CTRL key in Windows has the same function as the Command key in Mac. Basically, by swapping the action performed by Command and Control of your Mac, you can get most of your new Mac shortcuts suitable for Windows switchers.

To change the action of modifier keys, there are only several steps need to be done:

Click on the Apple on menubar
Go inside System Preferences...
Choose Keyboard & Mouse and go under Keyboard section
Find the button labelled Modifier Keys... and hit it
Select Control key to act as Command key and Command key to act as Control key
Confirm by punching the OK button
Now, you've done most part of your Mac to Windows transforming process

10 Handy Mac Preview Application Tricks as Image Editor

Preview is the default image editor for your Mac. Even though it's shipped along with your Mac for free, but it's surprisingly useful for Mac users, especially for those who have upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard.

First, I will guide you to learn the very first and important technique of using Preview application, i.e. opening multiple images at once in one Preview window.

1. Opening Multiple Images at Once

Before you opened many images file with your iPhoto, think first. You will give heavy load to your Mac. It's better for you to open all of those images file with Preview application.

When you're going to open many images at once, don't forget to set your Preview Preferences (Command-Comma) to open all selected images in one window (if not, all images will be opened in separate windows).

Display Random Wallpaper

Up to this point, we have showcased many beautiful wallpapers. Maybe you will get confused about what wallpaper should be used for your Desktop. Luckily, you can set your Mac to display random wallpaper with any interval of time.

The setting can be done inside System Preferences ▸ Desktop & Screen Saver ▸ Desktop. And the next step:

Preparing a folder where you will put all wallpapers you want to rotate through
Add that folder with the + button near bottom left hand corner of the pane
Tick the options Change picture and Random order on the bottom pane
Set the time interval for the wallpaper to change. Here I set it to 5 seconds because I've almost 500 wallpapers on my collection
You can see the screenshot below for illustration

Categories: Tips and Tricks
Tags: Display, Random

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Change Mail Alert Sound

Two days before, I just discussed about how you can Change Flag Icon of Mail. I know if you've chance, you will try that.

And now, I'm going to introduce you how to change your Mail alert sound. If you notice, your Mail has four types of alert sound, i.e. Mail Fetch Error, Mail Sent, New Mail and No Mail. The function of these types of alert sound are self-explanatory so I am sure I don't need to explain further.

These alert sounds are stored in your Mail application package with the format AIFF. Before going further, I will give you a brief explanation of this audio format.

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)

According to wikipedia, AIFF is..

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was co-developed by Apple Computer in 1988 [1] based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF, widely used on Amiga systems) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems. AIFF is also used by Silicon Graphics Incorporated.

This audio format is non-compressed, lossless format which uses much more disk space than MP3 but helps you in streaming in multiple audio files from disk to your application. Hm.. A bit difficult to understand it, maybe this can help you, "It's fast yet expensive audio format."

You can go to Simply the Best to get the various sound effects in AIFF format.

And next, you're going to be directed to the location of these sound files.

History of Lord of the Ring

So, today, 24 July, is the day when the ring comes to Bilbo. How could I know this?

I saw that from calendar of Lord of the Ring. This calendar has been stored inside my Mac. You can also find the calendar here: Macintosh HD ▸ usr ▸ share ▸ calendar. You can use this command line to see the calendar:

cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr

Change Flag Icon of Mail

When browsed through your inbox with your Mail application, sometimes you need to flag certain useful email for future reference. With simple keystrokes, Shift Command L you can flag selected mails.

And now, do you want to change the icon of the flag as shown in screenshot below?

Mark As Starred

Search for Word in Text Document

Command F is the most common used keystrokes among Mac users. It can help you search for particular text in your document. But there are some of the trick you may not know before reading this article.

Search for Words Under Selection

Let's consider a worst case scenario, you have a thousands lines of words in your document and you want to find certain keyword from that text document. Usually you will just hit Command F and type in the word. It works fine, but if you do like this: Highlight part of the document and when doing the searching Command F, press Control Option.

You will notice that now Replace All button will be changed into In Selection. But it's only showing you some parts of the magic, actually it's saying like this Select All Keywords In Selection. And it will look like screenshots below.

Screen Capture a Window

We all know that by using Shift Command 3 we can take the capture the whole screen and using Shift Command 4 we can select the region to be screen captured.

Capturing Screen Window

There is a hidden trick behind screen capture, if you're pressing Shift Command 4+Spacebar, you will be able to capture a window hovered by your mouse along with the shadow.

You can also capture your menu bar, Dock and even additional menu extras of your Mac. I think you should try it. It's fun.

Screen Capture

Mac How To : Hide Everything

Hide Menu Bar and Dock

We're now introducing you the trick to hide your Mac menu bar. It's useful when you're trying to mimic the way Windows users do to their menu bar. But for real, by hiding (getting rid of) your menu bar, you can get extra 20 pixels for your display.

And after your hardwork in tweaking, you don't need to care about what's the most suitable color for your menu bar; Invisible is the most suitable color.

Before starting, I'd like to tell you that you will need to have a free application so called Property List Editor. This application is already packed inside your Mac. In case you've deleted it, get it back now.

Here is the basic idea, you tweak the Info.plist file of certain application. This application, when launched, will hide the menu bar for you. It's also named as Full Screen Presentation Mode by Apple developers.

Enough of the explanation, I think. Let's jump to details:

Transparent Login Picture

Even though we have put transparent image as our login pictures, the white square box will still be there. This indicates that there is lack of transparency in displaying our login pictures.

But now, it's not a problem. Mac OS X Hints has put up a really interesting topic about how to enable this transparency. All of the steps are done in Terminal.

In their article, Show User Pictures with Transparency, I can conclude three main steps used in adding transparency to login pictures.

dscl . -read /Users/[your username] Picture
This will help you identify which image you're currently using for Desktop picture. As a response, Terminal will return the path of the picture.
Picture: /Library/User Pictures/Animals/Butterfly.tif
Don't forget to copy the path to this file, as you will need it later.
sudo dscl . -delete /Users/[your username] JPEGPhoto
As explained inside the article, we will have a JPEG version of the image. This JPEG version is the culprit behind the inability to display alpha transparency. With the command line above, this JPEG version will be removed.
sudo dscl . -change /Users/[your username] Picture '/Library/User Pictures/Animals/Butterfly.tif' '/Library/User Pictures/New/Smile.tiff'
The first parameter under the single quote is the path to the current login picture. This is the path that you've copied to clipboard at the 1st step.
The second parameter is the path to new login picture that you want to use. Obviously, use new login picture with some transparencies. You need to provide the full path of it. (Hint: You can use drag and drop to accomplish this task)

As usual, logout for the change to take effect.

I cannot fully guarantee that this trick will not harm your Mac. The only thing I can prove is that this trick didn't harm my Mac. So, you can try it for your own risk.

Recover Deleted Desktop Picture

I have set up a cool image as my Desktop picture and that precious file is accidentally deleted. And I will be really confused if someone came and asked me to send that image file I used as Desktop picture.

I spent my precious two-hours time digging through folders to find where the file is saved inside my Mac and ended up in vain. But then I realized, I can use one trick to recover that deleted Desktop picture. Here is how the trick works:

Open System Preferences
Choose Desktop & Screen Saver and then go under Desktop section
Simply drag out the Desktop picture thumbnail and you will get the copy of that picture file. It works like a charm

For additional illustration, I have embedded the video tutorial for this trick.

Firefox Trick: Nested Fox

This morning, I stumbled on this article: Firefox inside Firefox. That article brought up a really cool Firefox trick which you can open a Firefox browser in a Firefox browser. Technically speaking, it's a nested Firefox, or in short: Nested Fox.

And to my surprise, it's easy to do the trick, you only need to type and run this url: chrome://browser/content/browser.xul.

There are some limitations on how many Nested Foxes that you can make:

You feel extremely bored
You can't type on the last Nested Fox url bar
Your Firefox crash
Your Mac has run out of battery
You are drunk and got someone waiting on the bed

Mac Widget: The Hidden Region

When the first time you bought my Mac, I know you will be really amazed with those Dashboard Widgets, especially the weather widget. In my early days owning a Mac, I even gazed at my Widgets for thirty minutes every half an hour.

Let's make things more interesting, do you know the widget that display weather report of certain region? You can select which region you want to display the weather report, but there is one region that I bet you can't find: Nowhere!

Change Safari Default Search Engine

Nowadays, we depend on search engine to get information from around the web. I myself depend very much on search engine. Currently, Safari is using Google as its default search engine.

But here comes the issue, a setting will never satisfy the mind of several millions people surfing the web. Some of us maybe want to use Google UK as our default search engine, some maybe prefer using Yahoo!

With Inquisitor 3 installed on your Safari, you will be able to change your Safari default search engine easily.

Here are the steps you need to do :

Download Inquisitor and follow the installation instruction
After you've finished installing Inquisitor, relaunch your Safari for the change to take effect
Go to Safari ▸ Preferences
Click on Search section to modify settings for Inquisitor
In the last option box, you should be able to choose your default search engine

Standard Function Keys

If you're using MacBook keyboard, you will see a Fn key. When this key is pressed, F1-F7 keys will become standard function keys.

Fortunately, you can change this behavior so that without pressing down Fn key, F1-F7 keys are already functioning as standard function keys.

The good thing here is, you can easily perform keystrokes that include these keys, such as Control F1.

Here are the steps to change these function keys' behavior:

Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users