InDesign's Master Pages are quite powerful, and make long documents easy to keep consistent. They do have their difficulties though when you try to alter items that are contained on the Master Pages themselves.
The easy fix is to select all the pages you want to alter the Master Page items on in the Pages panel (Shift + Click to select more than one, or Command + Click to select noncontiguous pages), then select Override All Master Page Items from the Pages panel flyout menu.
Rather than using your mouse to invoke Photoshop's color/patter Fill dialog box, you can use the quick keyboard shortcut, which is Shift + Delete.
Google recently released the first public beta of their Chrome browser for Mac. While it's speedy as heck, it lacks many basic features such as bookmark management/organization. Another popular feature the Mac version lacks is extension support. That is, until now.
As Christmas day approaches, I want to thank everyone who has visited The Graphic Mac - and wish you all a safe and joyous holiday. I hope you all get everything from Santa that you had on your wish list!
Smashing Magazine is offering a handful of free Christmas theme images for download. You can grab them here.
A feature I love about InDesign is the ability to click any graphic frame with the text tool and begin typing in it immediately. However, not everyone likes their graphic frames converted to a text frame automatically.
For those who wish to turn the feature off, simply visit your InDesign preferences (Command + K) and select Type in the source list on the left. Then uncheck the box labeled "Type Tool Converts Frames to Text Frames."
The League of Movable Type has released Junction, a beautiful sans serif typeface with an old-style serif look to it. Junction is an OpenType font with upper and lower case letters, punctuation and numbers; and is free to use for personal and commercial projects.
If you're a Mac OS X user who hasn't upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, but you want more control over the volume and sound output sources, PTH Consulting has a great little app that offers the same functionality as Apple's built-in volume control menubar widget found in Mac OS x 10.6.
PTHVolume 2 is a menubar application that not only allows you to adjust the volume of your Mac, but offers you the ability to switch the sound output sources without making a tiresome trip to the OS X System Preferences.
PTHVolume (free) is particularly useful for Mac OS X users who, like me, have a nice set of external speakers set up on their Mac, but also like to use headphones at night or when anyone around you isn't particularly interested in listening to your personal taste in music.
As you can see in the screenshot at the left, you can adjust the volume for each source individually; something you cannot do with Apple's built-in widget in Snow Leopard. Up until Snow Leopard, I was using this utility for a long time with no stability issues at all. It works perfectly.
I must admit, Mac users are a bit strange... or at least, some of them are. Here's the one hour documentary film, MacHeads, that covers the life and times of Mac users.
If the design you're working on requires a rectangle with rounded corners, don't use Adobe Illustrator's rounded rectangle tool. Instead, use the regular (square) rectangle tool, then go to Effect>Stylize>Round Corners in the menubar. From there, you can set the exact roundness amount you want, as well as enjoy the option of adjusting it later via the Appearance panel.
One more advantage of doing it this way is that you can stretch the rectangle box later without altering the roundness of the corners.
