Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) brought many refinements to the operating system that aren’t immediately apparent to most users. A lot of tinkering around reveals some very cool additions. One of those hidden features is the ability to view invisible files in Open/Save dialog boxes.
View invisible files in Open/Save dialog boxes
If you’ve updated to Snow Leopard, you may be interested to know that you can use Quick Look in Open and Save dialog boxes; just select the image you wish to view and hit the Spacebar. Of particular interest to designers, this tip also works in the Place dialog box in all the Adobe Creative Suite applications. This means you can now get a better/larger preview of the image(s) you’re going to place in your document. If you’re still running a G5 Mac, you can’t upgrade to Snow Leopard, but you can get this feature using Default Folder X – my all-time favorite piece of shareware!
If you find yourself taking screenshots a lot, you no doubt dumped Mac OSX’s built-in screen capture utility long ago. My preferred screen capture app is Snapz Pro. But the one area that few apps do well is capture an entire Web page (including the portion not currently on screen). There are a few stand-alone apps that can do this, but most require you to manually type the URL into the app for it to work.
Simple screen capture in Firefox
Pearl Crescent Page Saver Options
Pearl Crescent Page Saver offers plenty of flexibility
Apple’s Time Capsule can make an excellent media drive to house your movies, photos and music. David Appleyard over at TheAppleBlog provides an excellent guide that will take you step-by-step through the process of turning your Time Capsule into a media drive and explain what works well and what simply won’t. As someone who recently purchased a Time Capsule for this very reason, I found the article to be quite helpful.
Long-time Mac users probably remember the day when Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the only games in town. With Mac OS 9 and the early days of Mac OS X, IE was the lean, mean, speed-machine; while Navigator was continuing its fast slide to irrelevance. But with OS X’s Unix underpinnings, and its sleek new GUI, it wasn’t long until developers started porting old browsers, or releasing all new ones to run on Apple’s shiny new OS. One of the earliest non-MS/Mozilla browsers was OmniWeb. It was easily faster than most anything out there, had a slick interface, and boasted features few other browsers offered at the time, such as tabs on the side, per-site preferences, built-in ad-blocking, and more. Due to Microsoft’s barely-an-effort port of IE to OS X, and Netscape Navigator suffering from never-ending software bloat, the time was right for other vendors to make their move. OmniWeb’s popularity exploded, and with it came a (welcome) blistering onslaught of Web browsers available for the Mac. (more…)
I’m a huge fan of Adobe’s CreativeSuite icons. I like their simplicity, they just stand out in the dock. I’ve customized a few of my icons to take on a similar look, which I call HeadsUp. So here’s the HeadsUp – Apple icon set, containing 7 color variations (plus a Graphic Mac logo version). The icons are 512 pixels and should scale well for virtually any resolution screen. Free of charge, don’t steal, blah, blah, blah… Candybar users can download the iContainer version here. – Or – You can grab the standard OSX folder version here.
While PC users sweat, complain and ponder which over-priced version of Windows 7 they’ll be forced into buying to fix everything wrong with Vista, most Mac users are likely licking their chops at what Snow Leopard will bring, and how little it will cost. I’m pretty excited about the update, but oddly enough, it’s the little things that are getting fine-tuned that interest me the most. I’ve covered them in my article at TheAppleBlog titled Snow Leopard, Finely Tuned. As designers, the one thing that will impact us the most is probably going to be the Gamma default change to 2.2 from 1.8.
UneasySilence reports to have all 35 of the OSX Snow Leopard desktop pictures in full 2560×1600 resolution available for download. Grab ’em while they’re hot!
In my two latest articles on Macworld.com, I take a quick look at two fantastic Social Networking applications for Mac OSX that are heavy on features and light on the pocketbook. With all the social-networking services out there like Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit – not to mention RSS feeds, you can easily find yourself spending more time switching between Web sites than you do actually using them. Rather than jumping back and forth, save yourself some effort by using one application to bring your entire social network to your desktop for less than $20. For more control over the Internet’s favorite social photo-sharing site, I’ve got a fantastic Flickr app that’s sure to please amateurs and pros alike.
My wife is an iTunes freak. She has everything categorized, cataloged, and rated. I don’t quite understand her obsession, but that’s another story. One thing she wished she could do was rate a song with half-stars rather than full. So many songs, she claimed, were nearly perfect, but not 100% worthy of a full five stars. Fortunately for her, there is a simple way to do this in iTunes that doesn’t require the use of any third-party applications. To enable the half-star feature in iTunes, fire-up the Terminal application and paste the following text, then hit return: defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE You can now launch iTunes and start rating. To assign a half star rating, simply click in the tiny space between stars.