Austin's+Tip+of+the+Day

= = = = =118.= =117. See Your File’s Hidden Info= Want more info on your files than the standard icon view provides (after all, it just gives you the file’s name in icon view)? Then turn on Show Item info. This adds an extra line of information below many files and folders that can be very useful. For example, now not only do you get a folder’s name, but just below the name (in unobtrusive light-blue, 9-point type), you’ll see how many items are in that folder.

If the file is an image, the Item Info shows you how big it is. MP3 files show how long the song is, etc. To turn on Item Info for your current Finder window, press Command-J to bring up its View Options. Then turn on the checkbox for Show Item Info. If you want to show the item info for every window (globally), then choose the All Windows button at the top of the dialog. =116. Faster Than Slide Show for Finding a Photo= By now you’ve heard that if your search results contain photos, you can see a slide show of those photos (by pressing Enter or clicking on Show All in the Spotlight menu once you’ve entered a search term, and then in the Spotlight dialog that appears, you can click on the little Play button to the right of the Images category).

The slide show thing is handy, no doubt, but you can also use it to get to a particular photo you want quickly. Here’s how: Start the slide show (click the little Play button), and then immediately click the Index Sheet icon in the slide show controls that appear along the bottom of your screen. This tiles thumbnails of all the photos in your slide show onscreen (giving you an Index Sheet view), so you can jump right to the photo you need, saving you the frustration of slowly wading through a slide show when you just want to quickly find one particular photo.

=115. Searching by Color Label=

Besides the visual benefits of having certain files tagged with a Color label, there’s a hidden benefit: You can search for files by their color. For example, let’s say you misplaced an important file for a project you were working on. You can press Command-F to bring up the Find function, and from the top-left pop-up menu, choose Color Label.

Then, click on the color for the files you labeled in that project, and it will instantly find and display all the files with that color. Searching by color—only Apple is cool enough to come up with a search like this!

= = = = =114. Hide in Plain Sight= Whether you have a sudden desire for privacy, want to conceal confidential information, or just like to feel organized, sometimes you need to clear your Mac’s desktop in a hurry. Here are some handy methods.

Clicking the minimize button in the center top left corner of an open window or document makes it vanish from the desktop and hide in the Dock. You can do the same thing by typing Command-M. Either way, click the window’s icon in the Dock to return it to full view.

Need to conceal an entire application? You can hide most Mac apps in their entirety, no matter how many individual windows or documents are open, by typing Command-H. The windows don’t move to the Dock, but they reappear when you click on the application’s icon in the Dock. All Apple apps behave this way, though some third-party programs use different commands. (Adobe Photoshop, for example, uses Command-Control-H.) You can find an application’s Hide command in the application menu.

Want to quickly make iTunes, iChat, Safari, and your mahjong game disappear while leaving that budget spreadsheet open? Hide every open program except the one that’s currently selected (in this case, make sure it’s the spreadsheet app) by typing Command-Option-H.

To hide everything instantly, use the Desktop command that’s built into Exposé in Mac OS X. The default assignment is the F11 key, but you can reassign it by choosing System Preferences from the Apple menu and clicking the Dashboard & Exposé tab. Press the same key again to make everything reappear. = = =113. PDF: The Smaller PDF Secret Control= This is another one of those “secret, buried-in-a-vault” killer tips that addresses something Mac OS X users have complained about: The file sizes of PDFs that Mac OS X creates are sometimes too big (vs. Adobe’s Acrobat PDFs). believe it or not, there’s a way to get smaller PDFs. Here’s how: launch TextEdit, then choose Print from the File menu. From the PDF pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, choose Compress PDF. That’s it. It’ll compress the PDF and call it a day.

However, if you’re charging by the hour, and let’s pretend you are, you have a wonderful time-consuming option: Choose Print from the File menu, and from the second Presets pop-up menu choose ColorSync. From the Quartz Filter menu that appears, choose Add Filters. Click on the three-oval icon in the top-left corner of the dialog that appears, click on the filter named Reduce File Size, and then click-and-hold on the arrow button to the right of the filter and choose Duplicate Filter. This creates an unlocked filter you can edit.

Now click on the triangle to the left of the duplicate filter to show its options; this is where you choose what you want. I recommend clicking on the arrow to the left of Image Compression and dragging the magic slider that lets you control the amount of JPEG compression your PDF images receive. For smaller file sizes, drag the Quality Slider toward Minimum. Now go back to TextEdit and in the Print dialog, choose Colorsync from the second Presets pop-up menu, choose your new filter from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu and click Print. That’s it. (Whew!) = = =112. Look Inside Multiple Folders Automatically= Need to see what’s inside more than one folder while in List view? Do it the fast way—Command-click on all the folders you want to expand, then press Command-Right Arrow. All the folders will expand at once.

If the file you’re looking for isn’t there, just press Command-Left Arrow (you can do that, because your folders are still highlighted) to quickly collapse them all again.

=111. Need the First Available Printer?= If you’ve got a print job on your hands and you need it as soon as possible, but all the printers on your network are often busy, you can pool these printers together so your document will automatically print to the first available printer. Just go to the Printer Setup Utility (in the Applications folder, within the Utilities folder), Command-click on all the printers you want to pool together, then go under the Printers menu and choose Pool Printers. A dialog will open where you can name your pool (the default name is “Printer Pool”), and it shows a list of printers that are in that pool.

You can click-and-drag the printers into the order that you want and then click Create, which adds a new printer in your Printer list called Printer Pool. Choose that as your printer, and then when you choose Print, Mac OS X will start looking for the first available printer.

=110. FOR THOSE OF YOU THAT USE APPLE MAIL Resizing Photos for Emailing= Have you ever noticed how freaked out relatives get when you email them high-res photos from your six- or eight-meg digital camera? For example, your grandmother in Minnesota may not have Photoshop CS2, and so dealing with that 26MB, 41-inch-wide photo you shot with your eight-meg camera might put a strain on her system. That’s why you might want to reduce the size of those photos you’re about to email. You don’t even have to launch Photoshop — because you can do the resizing right within Mail.

After you attach a photo to your email message (you can just drag-and-drop the image into the New Message window), take a look in the bottom-right corner of your email message window, and you’ll see a pop-up menu where you can choose the Image Size you’d like to send. As soon as you choose a size (other than Actual Size), the image is immediately scaled down right within the email message window so you can see the exact size of the photo you’re sending. =109. One-Click Long-File-Name Fix= If you’re working in a window set to Column view, you’re going to run into this all the time — files with long names have the end of their names cut off from view, because the column isn’t wide enough. That doesn’t sound like that big of a problem, until you start working with more descriptive file names, and you can’t see which file is “European Front End Silver Car” and which is “European Back End Silver Car” because everything from “European” to “Silver Car” is cut off.

Luckily, there’s a quick fix — just double-click on the little tab at the bottom of the vertical column divider bar, and the column will expand just enough so you can see even the longest file name of any file in that column. Option-double-click on the tab, and every column expands to show the longest name in each column. = = =108. Can’t Remember the Password?= If you can’t remember a password for a website (or anything else for that matter), all your passwords are saved in the Keychain Access utility (which probably isn’t news to you), but the cool thing is you can do a Spotlight search from right within Keychain to quickly find the password you’re looking for.

Start by looking inside your Applications folder for the Utilities folder, and inside of that double-click on Keychain Access. When it opens you’ll see a search field in the upper-right corner. Type the name of the site you’re looking for, and it will appear. Double-click on the result and an info dialog will appear, and to see your password, turn on the show Password checkbox.

=107. Making ZIP Files (Compressed Files) in One Click= One of my favorite Mac OS X features is the ability to create ZIP compressed files from within the OS (basically, this shrinks the file size, ideal for files you’re going to email — smaller file sizes mean faster file transfers). To create a compressed file, either Control-click on the file and choose Create Archive (which is Apple-speak for “make a compressed ZIP file”). Or you can click on a file, then go to the Action menu (the button that looks like a gear up in the Finder window’s toolbar), and choose Create Archive from there. Either way, it quickly creates a new file, with the file extension “.zip.” This is the compressed file. You can also compress several different files (like three, for example) into one single archive file — just Command-click (or Shift-click contiguous files) on all the files you want included, then choose Create Archive of X Items from the Action menu. A file will be created named “Archive.zip” (that’s it!). By the way, if someone sends you a ZIP file, don’t sweat it — just double-click it and Tiger will automatically decompress it.

=106. Really Empty the Trash= It’s simple to delete unwanted files using Mac OS X Leopard: Just drag the files onto the Trash icon in the Dock (or select them and type Command-Delete), then choose Empty Trash in the Finder menu (or type Command-Shift-Delete). Alternately, you can double-click on the Trash icon to open it, then click on the Empty button.

Emptying the Trash in this manner clears room on your Mac for other files. But the data hasn’t actually been removed from your computer — the space occupied by these files is simply available to be overwritten by new information. Until this happens, it may be possible for someone to use data recovery software to restore your “deleted” files. And if this information is sensitive or confidential, it could potentially end up in the wrong hands.

That’s why Mac OS X Leopard provides another option for deleting data: the Secure Empty Trash command. Meant for those occasions when you want to permanently and immediately delete files, Secure Empty Trash overwrites your data with digital gibberish, ensuring that your deleted data is gone for good. It may take a few moments longer, but it’s a good choice for deleting data you’re sure you don’t need — and don’t want anyone else to see.

To delete your Trash securely, go to the Finder menu and select Secure Empty Trash. A pop-up will ask you to confirm that you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash. Click OK, and these files will be gone forever. =105. Speed Navigating in Save As= Want to speed things up by using the keyboard to get around in the Save As dialog? There’s just one thing you have to do first — press the Tab key. That removes the highlighting from the Save As naming field, and changes the focus on the sidebar (notice the blue highlight rectangle around the sidebar shown here). Once the sidebar is highlighted, you can use the Up/Down Arrow keys to move up and down the sidebar. Press Tab again and the search field is active. Press Tab once more and the Column (or list) view is highlighted, and you can use the Arrow keys on your keyboard to quickly get right where you want to be. When you get there, press the Tab key again to highlight the Save As field so you can name your file, and then hit the Return key to “make it so!”

Note: if you don’t see the sidebar or viewing modes, click on the little blue down-facing arrow button to the right of the Save As field. =104. Keep an Eye on Things, Live From the Dock= Do you like to know what’s going on “under the hood” of your Mac (stuff like your CPU usage, disk activity, memory usage — you know, total geek stuff)? If you do, you can keep an eye on things right from within the dock using Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor. It’s found in the Applications folder, under Utilities. Once you’ve found it, drag it into your dock, then click on it to launch it. Once it’s launched, click-and-hold for a moment on its dock icon. A menu will pop up, and you’ll see a dock icon menu item. This is where you choose which activity you want to monitor from its live dock icon. Choose it, and a live graph will appear in the dock that’s updated dynamically as you work. =103. Stickies: Saving Your Text Colors= You’ve been able to colorize text in Stickies since at least Mac OS 10.1, but did you know that you could save your favorite colors and apply them with just one click? (Obviously, I’m hoping you didn’t or it really kills this tip.)

To do so, just highlight a word, then go under the Font menu and choose Show Colors. When the Colors dialog appears, choose the color you’d like. Then, click-and-hold in the horizontal color bar up top (where the color you’ve created is displayed), and start dragging slowly — a tiny square will appear under your cursor. Just drag-and-drop this square onto one of the white square boxes at the bottom of the Colors dialog.

This saves that color for future use, so when you want it, all you have to do is click once on that square (no more messing with the color wheel). This is a great place to save commonly used colors like red, solid black, white, etc. =102. Get to Your Top Hit Fast= If you do a search and notice that the file it chose as your Top Hit in the Spotlight menu is actually the file you were looking for (hey, it could happen), just press-and-hold the Command key to jump right to the Top Hit, then press Return to open that document (or song, email, etc.), which closes the Spotlight menu. See, it even tidies up after you. So basically, just press Command-Return to instantly open the Top Hit. Easy enough.

=101. Dropping Text on the Dock for Fast Results= Let’s say you’re reading an article online, and you read a sentence that you want to email to a friend. Don’t do the copy-and-paste thing. Instead, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it right on the Mail icon in the Dock. It will open Mail and put that sentence into a new mail message. This tip also works in other Cocoa applications like TextEdit, Stickies, and Safari. For example, if you’re reading a story and want to do a Google search on something you’ve read, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it on the Safari icon in the Dock. It will launch Safari and display the Google Search Results. =100. The Smaller PDF Secret Control =
 * this works for pictures as well***

This is another one of those “secret, buried-in-a-vault” killer tips that addresses something Mac OS X users have complained about: The file sizes of PDFs that Mac OS X creates are sometimes too big (vs. Adobe’s Acrobat PDFs). believe it or not, there’s a way to get smaller PDFs. Here’s how: launch TextEdit, then choose Print from the File menu. From the PDF pop-up menu in the bottom-left corner of the dialog, choose Compress PDF. That’s it. It’ll compress the PDF and call it a day.

However, if you’re charging by the hour, and let’s pretend you are, you have a wonderful time-consuming option: Choose Print from the File menu, and from the second Presets pop-up menu choose ColorSync. From the Quartz Filter menu that appears, choose Add Filters. Click on the three-oval icon in the top-left corner of the dialog that appears, click on the filter named Reduce File Size, and then click-and-hold on the arrow button to the right of the filter and choose Duplicate Filter. This creates an unlocked filter you can edit.

Now click on the triangle to the left of the duplicate filter to show its options; this is where you choose what you want. I recommend clicking on the arrow to the left of Image Compression and dragging the magic slider that lets you control the amount of JPEG compression your PDF images receive. For smaller file sizes, drag the Quality Slider toward Minimum. Now go back to TextEdit and in the Print dialog, choose Colorsync from the second Presets pop-up menu, choose your new filter from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu and click Print. That’s it. (Whew!)

=99. Folders to Add to Your Dock= Adding folders to the right side of your dock can be a real timesaver, and two of the most popular folders to add to the dock are your home folder and your Applications folder. Another thing you might consider, rather than putting your entire Applications folder on your dock, is to create a new folder and put in aliases of just the applications and system add-ons (such as the Calculator, etc.) that you really use. Then you can access these by Control-clicking on the folder in the dock and a pop-up menu will appear that looks a lot like the Apple menu from OS 9.

=98.Giving Your Photos Keywords= If you’re using Preview to sort your digital camera images, here’s another helpful feature — the ability to add keywords to your photos. These keywords will even show up in Spotlight, so if you want to search your hard disk for images using keywords, you can.

Here’s how it works: When you have an image onscreen that you want to rate, just go under Preview’s Tools menu and choose Get info. Click on the Keywords tab, then click the Add button to add a field. Enter your keyword in the highlighted field, click in the white space to finalize your keyword, and you’re done. = = =97. Saving Documents and Web Pages as PDFs= Adobe’s PDF format offers a great way to save and send electronic documents, from formatted business letters to product brochures. PDF documents appear identically on all computers, so you don’t have to worry about things like whether the recipient has access to the same fonts as you or if your company logo and other graphics will display properly.

PDFs are also an excellent way to quickly save “snapshots” of web pages for future reference. Since some web pages change frequently, PDFs are a useful way to capture or archive content that might be hard to find again later.

To save a document or web page as a PDF, open it and press Command-P, just as though you’re going to print the page. But instead of clicking Print or pressing the Return key, click the PDF button in the lower left corner of the Print dialog. Choose Save as PDF at the top of the menu, navigate to the location you’d like to save to, and click Save.

The PDF button also contains other useful options. Mail PDF opens a new message in Apple’s Mail program, with the PDF already attached. Encrypt PDF lets you protect your file with a password. And Compress PDF creates a more compressed version of the file — great for emailing large, multi-page PDFs.

=96. How to Make the Sidebar Work Like the Dock= You can customize the sidebar of the Finder window by adding other icons that make it even more powerful. For example, if you use Photoshop a lot, just open the window where your Photoshop application resides, drag the Photoshop icon right over to the sidebar, and the other icons in the sidebar will slide out of the way.

Now you can use this window kind of like you would the dock — to launch Photoshop, just click on its icon in the sidebar, plus like the dock, you can even drag-and-drop images you want to open right onto the sidebar’s Photoshop icon. =95. The One-Click Trick to Moving the Dock= Okay, so you’re working in a program like Final Cut Pro or iMovie, which takes up every vertical inch of the screen, and when you go to adjust something near the bottom, the Dock keeps popping up. Oh sure, you could move the Dock to where it’s anchored on the left or right side of the screen, but that just feels weird. But what if you could move it temporarily to the left or right, and then get it back to the bottom when you close Final Cut Pro, in just one click?

Here’s how: Hold the shift key, click directly on the Dock’s divider line (on the far right side of the Dock), and drag the Dock to the left or right side of your screen. Bam! It moves over to the side. Then, once you quit Final Cut Pro, just shift-click on that divider line and slam it back to the bottom (okay, drag it back to the bottom). A draggable Dock — is that cool or what! =94. Managing Your Login Items= Your Mac lets you decide which, if any, applications open automatically each time you log into your account in Mac OS X Leopard. For example, you might want iChat and Mail to open every time you sign on. These automatically opening programs are called Login items, and here’s how to manage them.

From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences and click on the Accounts button. Click on your account name (if it’s not already highlighted), then click the Login Items tab. A list of all Login items appears.

You can remove programs by selecting them and clicking the minus sign, or add new ones by clicking the Add (+) button and navigating to the desired application. If you check the Hide box next to the program name, the application will open automatically, but won’t be displayed onscreen until you select it in the Dock or via the Command-Tab key command (which cycles you between all open applications).

Login Items don’t have to be applications. You can also choose to automatically open individual documents, folders, or disks.

As you might expect, adding Login Items increases your startup time. Also, note that only a user designated as the computer’s Admin can modify Login Items. =93. Speed Tip: Faster Full-Name Viewing in List View= When you’re looking for files in either List view or Column view, it’s almost certain that some of your files with long names will have some letters (or even full words) cut off from view. Here is a tip that will save you from having to resize your List or Column view columns — just hold your cursor over the file’s truncated name for a few seconds and eventually its full name will pop up. So what’s the problem? The “few seconds” part. Instead, hold the Option key, then put your cursor over the file’s name, and its full name will appear instantly. = = =92. Copy and Delete at the Same Time= If you’re archiving a file to disk (let’s say to an external FireWire drive for example), you can drag the icon of the file you want to archive directly to that drive and the Mac will write a copy to that drive. However, your original file still lives on your current hard drive. If you want to have that file deleted from your drive as soon as it’s copied to another drive, just hold the Command key as you drag your icon, and the Mac will do two tasks for you — copy the file to the new drive and delete the original from your drive. =91. Switching Apps Within Exposé= Once you have Exposé invoked (you pressed either F9 or F10), you can toggle through your open applications and Finder windows by pressing the Tab key. Press the Tab key once and the next open application and its miniaturized windows come to the front. Press Tab again, it goes to the next open app. Want the previous app? Press Shift-Tab. =90. Why Use Open Types Fonts= One of the oldest myths in desktop publishing is “never use TrueType fonts for professional publishing.” Perhaps that was true in the early 90’s, but there’s no reason to avoid them now. However, there’s an even better type of font format you should be using: OpenType. OpenType fonts are great for a number of reasons:


 * They have just one file per font, eliminating the need to manage separate screen and printer font files.
 * They’re cross-platform — you can use the same font on both Mac and PC.
 * They can contain thousands of characters, so you no longer need separate expert fonts.
 * They can contain intelligent characters, such as automatic fractions, special characters, and character pairs that change depending on where they appear in a word (such as a swash character).
 * They allow OpenType-aware applications to follow special instructions inside the font called glyph variants and automatically swap out characters when relevant. For example, in a script typeface, the application would be smart enough to use one kind of “t” when it appears at the beginning of a word and a different version when it’s in the middle of a word (so that it smoothly attaches to the letters around it). Applications that are not OpenType-aware — such as older versions of QuarkXPress or PageMaker — will still work with OpenType fonts, but without the advanced glyph features and intelligence.

=89. Forcing a Document on an App= Sometimes docked apps don’t want to open your document, even though they may be able to, so you have to coax (okay, force) them to give it a try. For example, let’s say you created a document in WordPerfect for Mac a few years back. if you drag that document to Microsoft Word’s icon in the Dock, chances are it won’t highlight (which would be the indication it can open that document). If that happens, just hold Command-Option, then drag the document’s icon to the Word icon in the Dock, and you can force it to try to open that document. =88. The Secret Screen Capture Shortcut=

Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want. (I use this to paste screen captures right into Photoshop.) =87. Lock Your Data with Disk Images=

Chances are you’ve encountered disk image files (indicated by the extension .dmg) when installing software on your Mac. When you double-click on this type of file, your computer mounts it as though it were a DVD or hard drive. In fact, you can think of mounted disk images as virtual drives.

The Disk Utility program in Mac OS X Leopard allows you to create your own disk images. Used to format, verify, repair, and partition disks and volumes, Disk Utility also lets you make safety copies of important CDs and DVDs, back up your hard drive, or create a virtual copy of a physical CD. (For example, you can make a disk image of the CD that authorizes your favorite computer game, so you don’t have to insert the physical disc each time you play.)

Best of all, you can add password protection to disk images when you create them. Without the correct password it’s nearly impossible to read the contents of an encrypted disk image, so it’s a great way to transfer data securely via email, FTP, flash drive, CD-ROM, or DVD-ROM. This format is especially useful if you need to send sensitive information to a colleague, or travel with files you want to keep confidential.

To create a disk image from a folder on your Mac, first open Disk Utility. (You’ll find it in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.) In the File menu, select New, then New Disk Image from Folder (or type Command-shift-N). Navigate to the desired folder, then click Image.

A pop-up menu prompts you to choose a name and save location for your disk image. It also includes two pull-down options: Image Format and Encryption. If you’re going to transfer your disk image (for example, as an email attachment), select Compressed under the Image Format pull-down. If you want to add password protection, select 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption under the Encryption pull-down. (128-bit encryption is extremely secure; it would probably take a password-guessing computer many lifetimes to crack it. The second option is even more secure, but takes longer to create.) Lock Your Data with Disk Images

Click Save, and Disk Utility begins to create the new disk image with the name and preferences you’ve specified. If you chose to add encryption, a password pop-up appears. Enter and verify the password of your choice. (As always, the best passwords are at least eight characters long, mix letters and numbers, and avoid dictionary words.) Disk Utility evaluates the password’s strength and gives you the option of remembering the password in your Mac’s keychain.

Now you can transfer the disk image easily and securely via email or other means. The only way to access the data inside the disk image is by entering the correct password.

Disk Utility can make disk images from folders, but not from individual files. If you want to create a disk image for a single file, just create and name a new folder, place your file inside, and make a new disk image from that folder using the steps above.

Please note: Don’t lose that password! If you do, you’ll probably never be able to open your disk image.

=86. Cool Inverse Trick = This tip is really useless but it looks really cool.

What this tip does is changes the whole look of your screen. All the colors turn opposite. For example : black would be white, and blue would be orange. Like negative. You can always change the color back to normal.

All you have to do to make your mac’s color change to inverted is hold down: the apple key, the option/alt key, and the control key (cmd-opt-ctrl-8). Then with those held down, you tap the letter 8 on the top of the letter I.

Remember: hold the apple key, control key, and alt key (all the to the left of the space bar) then while still holding them down you hit the 8 key. If you don’t like it just press the key combo again to restore it back to original colors. This is really cool. Try it. =85. Finding the Right Special Character= Okay, let’s say you’re in Mail, and you’re writing the word “résumé,” which used properly should have that little accent over the “é” like I have it here. You know it needs an accent, but you have no idea which keyboards combination will create an “e” with an accent above it.

Here’s a trick for finding any special character: When you’re typing, and you need that special character, stop typing and click the Fonts button at the top of the Mail window. When the Font dialog appears, go to the Actions pop-up menu (its icon looks like a gear near the bottom-left corner of the dialog) and choose Characters to bring up the Character Palette. At the bottom of the Character Palette dialog, you’ll see a small search fIeld. Type whatever you need, such as “acute accent” (without the quotes), and in just a moment a menu of different accents will appear. Double-click on the accent you want and the palette will jump to the mark you need. Close by you should see the character you need. Click on it and then click on the Insert button (or Insert with Font button if you’re searching in Glyph View) just to the right of the search fIeld. Now that letter “é” will appear in just the right place in your email message.

=84. Instant Slide Shows Wherever You Are =

Let’s say you open a window and there are 20 photos in that window. Want to see a quick slide show of those photos? Just press Command-A to select all the photos, then Control-click on any photo and from the contextual menu that appears, choose slideshow. A full-screen slide show of those photos (complete with a nice smooth dissolve transition) will appear onscreen.

If you want to see only some of the photos in a slide show, instead of selecting all the images, just Command-click on the photos you want in your slide show before Control-clicking on one and choosing slideshow. To quit the slide show in progress, just press the escape key on your keyboard.

=83. Folders to Add to Your Dock =

Adding folders to the right side of your dock can be a real timesaver, and two of the most popular folders to add to the dock are your home folder and your Applications folder. Another thing you might consider, rather than putting your entire Applications folder on your dock, is to create a new folder and put in aliases of just the applications and system add-ons (such as the Calculator, etc.) that you really use. Then you can access these by Control-clicking on the folder in the dock and a pop-up menu will appear that looks a lot like the Apple menu from OS 9

=82. Dropping Text on the Dock for Fast Results = Let’s say you’re reading an article online, and you read a sentence that you want to email to a friend. Don’t do the copy-and-paste thing. Instead, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it right on the Mail icon in the Dock. It will open Mail and put that sentence into a new mail message. This tip also works in other Cocoa applications like TextEdit, Stickies, and Safari. For example, if you’re reading a story and want to do a Google search on something you’ve read, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it on the Safari icon in the Dock. It will launch Safari and display the Google Search Results.

=81. Custom Desktop SLideshow= Changing your Desktop picture is easy: Just click the Apple menu and choose System Preferences. Select Desktop & Screen Saver and click the Desktop tab. Then select Choose Folder and navigate to the folder containing the picture you desire.

You can also create a custom desktop slideshow by putting the images you’d like to use inside a new folder, navigating to it as described above, and selecting one of the images. Before you close the Desktop & Screen Saver window, select the Change Picture checkbox. Using the pull-down menu, specify how quickly you’d like the images to change and whether you’d like the images to cycle in random order.

To keep things tidy, you may want to store your new custom picture folder in the same location as your default Mac OS X desktops. They reside in your root-level Library folder, in the folder called Desktop Pictures.

=80. Burning Multiple Times to the Same CD= Generally, when you burn files to a CD once, you’re done — you can’t burn to that CD again. Unless you use this little trick: First create a new folder and give it a descriptive name (something like “burn baby burn!” Kidding). Now put the files you want to burn into that folder, then go to the Applications folder and open the Utilities folder. Double-click on Disk Utility. When it comes up, go under the File menu, under New, and choose Disk Image from Folder, and then when the Open dialog appears, find that folder with the stuff you want to burn and click the image button. A Save dialog appears in which you can leave the name as is or choose a new name (leave the other controls alone), and then click Save. In a few moments, a disk image of your folder’s contents will appear in the list on the left side of the Disk Utility dialog. Click on that icon, and then click the burn button at the top left of the Disk Utility dialog.

When you click the Burn button, a dialog will appear asking to insert a disc. Do so, and then click once the blue downward-facing triangle on the right side of this dialog to show more options. Click on the checkbox for Leave disc appendable, then click the Burn button. Your data will now be written to that CD. To add more files later, just insert that same CD and then you’ll use this same process all over again, but when you get to that final burn dialog, the button won’t say “Burn” this time, instead it will say “Append” because you’re adding these files to the same disc. By the way, don’t forget to remove the files you already burned to this disc from your “burn baby burn!” folder (and the DMG file it creates) before you make your next disc image =79. Finding Where the © and ™ Symbols Live = Since nearly the beginning of Mac-dom, when you wanted to find out which key combination produced a font’s special characters (stuff like ©, ™, £, ¢, ‰, ƒ, etc.), you used a utility called KeyCaps. More than a decade later, KeyCaps is still a part of Mac OS, but a better way to access these special characters is through the Character Palette. You can access it two ways: (1) From within Mac OS X business apps (like Mail, TextEdit, Stickies, etc.), just go under Edit and choose Special Characters or click on the Actions pop-up menu at the bottom of the Font Panel and choose Characters; (2) add Character Palette access to your menu bar, so you can access it when you’re working in other applications (like Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign). You do this by going to the System Preferences in the Apple menu, under International, and clicking on the Input Menu tab. Turn on the checkbox for Character Palette and it will appear in the menu bar along the right side.

Either way you open it, here’s how you use it: When you open the Character Palette, choose All Characters from the View menu, then click on the By Category tab. The left column shows a list of special character categories and the right column shows the individual characters in each category. To get one of these characters into your text document, just click on the character and click the Insert button in the bottom right-hand corner of the dialog. If you find yourself using the same special characters over and over (like ©, ™, etc.), you can add these to your Favorites list, and access them from the Favorites tab in the Character Palette. To see which fonts contain certain characters (they don’t all share the same special characters), expand the Character Palette by clicking on the down-facing arrow next to Font Variation on the bottom-left side of the palette. This brings up another panel where you can choose different fonts. you can also ask that this list show only fonts that support the character you have highlighted.

=78. Video Camera to Quicktime=

There’s a very cool feature that sneaked into QuickTime Pro 7 that has kind of flown below the radar so far. It’s the ability to record directly from your digital video camera (or a microphone) right into a QuickTime fIle, without having to go through iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or a third-party application.

Just connect your digital video camera (or even your iSight camera), launch the QuickTime Pro Player, then from the File menu choose New Movie Recording. A QuickTime window will open showing you a preview of what your camera is seeing. Now just click the round red record button at the bottom of the QuickTime window and it starts recording. Click the stop button when you’re done and you’ve got an instant QuickTime movie. It works the same way for recording audio using your Mac’s built-in microphone (provided of course that your Mac actually does have a built-in mic), but instead of choosing New Movie Recording, you’ll choose New Audio Recording. Note: you have to upgrade from the standard QuickTime to QuickTime Pro to have access to this feature.

=77. Go with the Flow= Leopard gives you the option of viewing your files in an iPod-style “Cover Flow” view—so now you can flip through your files like a stack of CDs. This view is especially useful for searching through photos and other graphics files.

You may already know how to switch Finder windows between Icon, List, and Column views by using the keyboard shortcuts Command-1, Command-2, and Command-3, respectively. (If not, try it! It’s guaranteed to accelerate your Desktop chops.)

To switch a Finder window to Cover Flow view, just type Command-4. You can also change views by clicking the Icon, List, Column, and Cover Flow icons at the top of each Finder window, but key commands are generally faster. Cover Flow

Once you’re in Cover Flow view, here’s how to navigate:

= = =76. Creating Web Clip Widgets= [|View As Web Page] Leopard makes it easy to create a Dashboard widget from a segment of a web page. For example, you can capture a “new releases” list from a media website, or the “latest posts” field from an Internet discussion group. These Web Clips appear, automatically updated, whenever you open Dashboard.
 * Click any image to select it and bring it to the foreground. Double-click to open it.
 * Scroll through the images using your trackpad or your mouse’s scroll wheel, or by dragging the onscreen navigation bar beneath the images.
 * You can flick through the files one at a time using your Down- or Rght-Arrow key to move left to right. Use the Up- or Left-Arrow key to move in the opposite direction.
 * If your folder contains many items, you may find it useful to scroll through the contents without changing your selection. To do so, move your cursor to the list view beneath the cover images, and scroll up and down with your trackpad or scroll-wheel mouse.
 * Clicking a Sidebar item in a Finder window jumps you to that location without exiting Cover Flow view. If you browse through certain folders on a regular basis, you may want to create Sidebar icons for them. To do so, just locate the folder in a Finder window and drag it into the Sidebar. To remove a Sidebar item, simply drag it out of the Sidebar

Here’s an example, using www.macmusic.org, a cool music software website. We navigated to their home page in Safari and clicked the Web Clip button (next to the address field).

The entire page darkens save for a bright rectangle. Drag the rectangle from its center and edges until it covers the segment you want to capture. Then click Add and Safari sends your Web Clip to Dashboard.

(If Safari doesn’t display the Web Clip button, choose Customize Toolbar in Safari’s View menu and add the button to Safari’s toolbar.)

Now the Web Clip appears as a new widget in Dashboard. You can still edit it: Move your cursor over the widget’s lower-right corner until a small letter i appears. Click it to resize or reposition the content, or customize its border using built-in styles.

=75. Focusing Your Searches= By default, Spotlight pretty much searches everything on your Mac, from songs to email, to contacts and system preferences. It’s annoyingly thorough (if it were human, it would make a great book editor). Anyway, if there are certain areas you don’t need it to search (for example, if you don’t want it rummaging through your songs), you can tell it what to search through and what to ignore. You do this by first going to Spotlight’s Preferences. Just click on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar, type a search word, and from the bottom of the list of found items choose Spotlight Preferences. When the dialog appears, turn off the checkboxes for the areas you don’t want searched.

=74. Look Inside Multiple Folders Automatically = Need to see what’s inside more than one folder while in List view? Do it the fast way—Command-click on all the folders you want to expand, then press Command-Right Arrow. All the folders will expand at once.

If the file you’re looking for isn’t there, just press Command-Left Arrow (you can do that, because your folders are still highlighted) to quickly collapse them all again. =73. Changing the Desktop Background in Mac OS X= Power users like to tweak their Mac OS X Desktops just so, with that menu color, this background, and those applications in the Dock. Non-computer types just can't understand the importance of the proper arrangement of your virtual workplace: When things are familiar and customized to your needs, you're more productive, and things get done faster. In fact, if you've set up multiple users on your computer under Mac OS X, the Big X automatically keeps track of each user's Desktop and restores it when that person logs in. (For example, when you use the Mac, you get that background photo of Farrah Fawcett from the '70s while your daughter gets Avril Lavigne.) You can produce a Desktop that's uniquely your own.

You may be wondering whether you really need a custom background. That depends completely on your personal tastes, but most computer owners do change their background when presented with the opportunity. Favorite backgrounds usually include


 * Humorous cartoons and photos that can bring a smile to your face (even during the worst workday)


 * Scenic beauty


 * Photos of family and friends (or the latest Hollywood heartthrob)


 * The company logo (not sure it does much for morale, but it does impress the boss)

If you do decide to spruce up your background, you have three choices: You can select one of the default Mac OS X background images, choose a solid color, or specify your own image. All three backgrounds are chosen from the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, located within System Preference. (apple to left corner of screen - System preferences)

Figure 1: To select a background, go to System Preferences.

You can also hold down Control, click the Desktop, and choose Change Desktop Background from the pop-up contextual menu (or right-click, if you're using a mouse with multiple buttons). Picking something Apple

To choose a background from one of the collections provided by Apple, click one of these groups from the list at the left:


 * Apple Images: These default backgrounds range from simple patterns to somewhat strange and ethereal flux shapes.


 * Nature: Scenic beauty: blades of grass, sand dunes, snowy hills . . . that sort of thing.


 * Abstract: Even weirder twisting shapes in flux, this time with bright contrasting colors. Good for a psychiatrist's office.


 * Solid Colors: For those who desire a soothing solid shade.


 * Pictures Folder: This displays the images saved in the Pictures folder by the active user.


 * Choose Folder: You can open a folder containing images and display them instead.

If you see something you like, click the thumbnail, and Mac OS X displays it in the well and automatically refreshes your background so that you can see what it looks like. (By the way, in the Apple universe, a well is a sunken square area that displays an image — in this case, the background image that you've selected.)

Notice your iPhoto albums in the list? That's no accident — Tiger automatically offers your iPhoto Photo Library so that you can choose images from your iPhoto collection.

Mac OS X automatically manipulates how the background appears on your Desktop. If an image conforms to your screen resolution, fine — otherwise, click the drop-down list box next to the well and you can choose to


 * Tile the background. This repeats the image to cover the Desktop. (This is usually done with pattern images to produce a smooth, creamy, seamless look.)


 * Fill the screen. This can be used with a solid color to get uniform coverage. The original aspect ratio of the image is preserved, so it's not stretched.


 * Stretch the background to fit the Desktop. If your Desktop image is smaller than the Desktop acreage, this works, but be warned — if you try to stretch too small of an image over too large a Desktop, the pixilated result can be pretty frightening. (Think of enlarging an old Kodak Instamatic negative to a 16 x 20 poster. Dots, dots, dots.) The original aspect ratio of the image is not preserved, so you may end up with results that look like the funhouse mirrors at a carnival.


 * Center the image on the Desktop. This is my favorite solution for Desktop images that are smaller than your resolution.

Note that this drop-down list appears only if the Desktop picture that you select is not one of the standard Apple images. All the pictures in the Apple Background Images, Nature, Abstract, and Solid Colors categories are automatically scaled to the size of your screen.

To change your Desktop background automatically on a regular basis, enable the Change Picture check box and then choose the delay period from the corresponding drop-down list box. To display the images in random order, also enable the Random Order check box; otherwise, Mac OS X displays them in the order that they appear in the folder. Choosing a solid color

If you want your favorite color without the distraction of an image as a background, you can choose from a selection of solid colors. You can choose from these colors the same way that you'd pick a default Mac OS X background image. Selecting your own photo

You can drag your own image into the well from a Finder window to add your own work of art. To view thumbnails of an entire folder, click the Pictures Folder (to display the contents of your personal Pictures folder) or click Choose Folder to specify any folder on your system. Click the desired thumbnail to embellish your Desktop. = = =72. Know Your Status= The status bar (the thin little bar that shows how many items are in your window and how much drive space you still have available) was at the top of every Finder window back in Mac OS 9. In earlier versions of Mac OS X (including Jaguar), the status bar was off by default, so you had to turn it on, and then it appeared at the top of your Finder windows. In Tiger you’ll find the status bar info displayed at the bottom center of every Finder window by default (well, that’s true as long as your toolbar is visible). If that’s the case, why is there still a menu command called Show Status Bar? That’s because, if you hide the toolbar, it hides the status info at the bottom of the window, so you need the old status bar back. It’s still off by default, so to turn on the status bar, first open a window, hide the toolbar (see previous tip), then go under the View menu and choose Show Status Bar. (Note: If you don’t hide the toolbar first, Show Status Bar will appear “grayed out.”)

=71. Become a Spaces Cadet!=

Spaces, one of the coolest new features of Mac OS X Leopard, lets you switch among multiple desktops. For example, you might create a communication workspace for Mail, iChat, and Address Book, another for media programs like iTunes and iPhoto, and a third for video games. Then, instead of hiding/showing programs or dragging them around onscreen, you’d simply switch desktops. If you’re the sort of user who tends to have many applications open at once, Spaces is a godsend.

In fact, Spaces and Expose share a control panel. To access it, select System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose Exposé & Spaces. Click the Spaces tab.

This is where you set the key commands for activating Spaces and switching between your desktops. You can also specify the number of desktops and how they’re arrayed in columns and rows. (If you check “Show Spaces in menu bar,” you can switch desktops using the menu bar icon as well as key commands.)

You also have the option of permanently assigning a program to a particular desktop. If, say, you always want iTunes to open in its own window, click the Add (+) button, navigate to the iTunes application, and click Add. Click-hold in the Spaces field to assign it to a desktop. Here, for example, whenever iTunes is opened, Space 4 will automatically be displayed.

Whenever you type your Spaces key commands, you’ll see a translucent overlay depicting the available desktops. Switch between them using the key commands you’ve assigned in the Preferences panel.

If you get confused about what’s assigned where, don’t panic — just press the Activate Spaces key command (the default assignment is F8). This opens a global view of all your desktops. Just click within any desktop to open it. You can also move items from one desktop to another simply by dragging them between windows.

=70. Adding a Photo as Your Window’s Background = Heres a really cool tip I had found just a bit ago.

As long as your Finder window is in icon view, you can add a photo as its background. You do this by going under the View menu, under show View Options, and in the background section (at the bottom of the dialog) choose Picture. Click on the select button and the standard Open dialog will appear in which you can choose the image you’d like to appear as the background of your window. Click OK and that image will appear. Note: This works only when viewing the window in icon view. if you change to list view, the image will no longer be visible.

=69. Knowing When to (Force) Quit=

With the Force Quit command in OS X, you can escape from “frozen” applications on your Mac without shutting down the whole computer or disrupting work in other programs.

If an application hasn’t responded for a while to mouse clicks, trackpad scrolling, or other persuasive actions, click on the Apple menu and select Force Quit.

A pop-up window lists all the applications you currently have open. Stalled applications are listed in red and say (not responding) after the application name. Scroll up and down through the list with the arrow keys, or just click on an application name to select — then click Force Quit to exit only that program. You can restart the application from your Dock or Applications menu, but any unsaved changes may be lost.

But there’s an even easier Force Quit trick: Simultaneously press Command-Option-Esc and the Force Quit pop-up appears — an especially useful trick if your Finder has frozen and you can’t select the pull-down Apple menu.

=68. Drag-and-Drop Desktop Printing = =__Want the ability to print a document right from your desktop (without opening the application first)? Go under the Apple menu, under System Preferences, and choose Print & Fax. When the preference pane appears, click on the Printer you wish to setup. Simply click and drag onto the desktop. Your printer should no appear in this desktop. To print a document, just drag-and-drop it on this icon. Some documents, such as TextEdit files and PDFs, will go straight to the printer. Other files will launch their default application and open the Print dialog.__= =67. Tame Your Tabs With Key Commands = If you sometimes find your desktop cluttered with multiple browser windows, try using tabs in Safari.

Tabs let you open multiple web pages in a single Safari window, so you can easily flip between them. They’re one of the best ways to amp up your web-browsing experience — especially once you’ve tamed them via a few simple key commands. This tip covers the basic moves.

First, make sure Safari is configured for tabbed browsing. From the Safari menu, select Preferences and click on the Tabs icon. Select the “Opens a link in a new tab” option, but leave the others unchecked for now. But take a moment to read the fine print, since it covers some of the tricks we’re about to tackle.

Now open a web page in Safari and try it out. Click on a link while pressing the Command key, and the link opens in a new tab nestled behind the current page. Holding down Command-Shift creates a new tab and brings the new page to the front. You can also open an empty tab by typing Command-t, then type in a URL or load a bookmarked web page. To close a tab, select it and type Command-w, or click on the small x on the left side of the tab.

You can reorder tabs within the Tab Bar simply by dragging them to the left or right. And you can switch from one tabbed page to another via key commands: Type Command-shift- ] (or Command-Shift-Right Arrow Key) to move forward to the next tab to the right, and Command-shift- [ (or Command-Shift-Left Arrow Key) to go to the next tab to the left.

For more cool tab tricks, try Control-clicking on any tab. Or simply right-click Mighty Mouse, and use the contextual menu that appears to create new tabs, close them, move them to new windows, reload them, or bookmark them.

=66. What If You Don’t Want To Open The File = The idea behind Spotlight is that it will find the file you want, and then open that file for you, so you can start working on it immediately. But what if you just want to know where the file is, and not necessarily open it? (For example, what if you just want to know where it is, so you can burn a backup copy to a CD?) To do that, once the results appear in the spotlight menu, just hold the Command key and then click on the file. This will close Spotlight and open the Finder window where your file is. Or if you want Spotlight open, just click on the file and press Command-R, which will open a Finder window with the file selected, leaving the spotlight dialog open.

=65. Find Files Faster with Keywords =

Savvy web surfers know that web pages, blog entries, and images posted online are often tagged with keywords: terms that help identify and locate relevant content via web searches. These keywords might not even appear in the text or file names—they’re simply attached as metadata, so search engines can “see” them.

In a similar sense, you can use keywords on your Mac to help you find any file when conducting searches via Spotlight. In Mac OS X Leopard, you can add your own keywords to text documents, audio files, images, or any other type of file.

For example, let’s say you’ve received a PDF of the latest company newsletter, which features an amusing photo of your boss, Mo, and the CEO, Bill. You’ve saved the newsletter on your computer, and you’d like to be able to locate this document in future using a Spotlight search. But the names Mo and Bill don’t appear anywhere in the newsletter—instead, the two men are identified in the photo as Mauricio and William.

Fortunately, you can easily add the keywords “Mo” and “Bill” to the document yourself. Select the document in the Finder and choose Get Info from the File menu, or just type Command-I. At the top of the Get Info window that appears, there’s a blank field titled Spotlight Comments. (Click the disclosure triangle to reveal the data field if it’s not already visible.) Simply type your desired keywords here, separating the terms with commas, then close the Get Info window.

Now when you search for these keywords in Spotlight, your newly tagged file will appear.

=64. Exposé= Showing off Exposé to a friend or co-worker who uses a PC is more than a blast, it’s your duty, because even Windows XP still has nothing like it. But if you really want to be a major hambone, before you press F9 to invoke Exposé, start a QuickTime movie clip, have a DVD playing, or have iTunes playing a song and click on the Visualizer (heck, have all three going at once). When you press F9, the QuickTime clip (DVD, iTunes, etc.) keeps playing even when miniaturized. It’s fun to watch their face as it changes from “Cool!” to “Why doesn’t Windows have that?”

=63. Arrange That Icon = There are several different ways to clean up and arrange you desktop so that everything looks all neat and tidy. The first way, while in finder, click view (at the top of the screen), click arrange by, Then select the desired way of arranging. Walah! Way number two, simply right click (crtl+Click) on the desktop (anywhere with blank space), Select arrange by, and once again select the desired way of arranging your icons. Simple huh?

=62. Creating Aliases Without the Word “Alias" = Do you find it as annoying as I do that Mac OS X adds the word “alias” every time you create an alias? (I know, previous versions of the Mac OS did that as well, and it annoyed me there too.) Well, you can bypass the “adding-the-word-alias” uglies altogether by holding the Option and Command keys and clicking-and-dragging the original file outside the Finder window it’s currently in (I usually just drag mine to the desktop).

This creates an alias without the word “alias” attached. (Note: Don’t worry, you’ll still know it’s an alias, because its icon will have a tiny arrow at the bottom left-hand corner.)

=61. Welcome to Wikipedia=

Your built-in Dictionary application now includes not only an excellent dictionary and thesaurus, but also instant access to Wikipedia. That means you can conduct Wikipedia searches from within any OS X Leopard application that supports Dictionary, including TextEdit, Mail, and Pages.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is a revolutionary online encyclopedia written, edited, and revised by its users. Though inaccurate information inevitably creeps in at times, on the whole it’s remarkably reliable. And since it’s continually updated, it’s a great source for updates on current topics that haven’t yet made their way into traditional reference books. (Note that the Wikipedia data is not stored on your computer, but is accessed via the Internet, so you need to be online to use this feature.)

Try it! Open the Dictionary application, type in a search item, and click the Wikipedia tab. Double-click on the entry that best relates to your search.

You don’t even need to open the Dictionary application to initiate a Wikipedia search. In a text document such as a TextEdit file or an email, just select the term you want to look up. (If it’s a single word, there’s no need to select the text —simply place the cursor on top of it.) Control-click the word or phrase (or right-click if you have a two-button mouse) and choose Look Up in Dictionary. This allows you to look up the term in the Dictionary, a Thesaurus, an Apple glossary, or Wikipedia.

=60. Mouse-Free Folder Moves=

One of the best tricks for speeding up your computer work is to keep your hands on the keyboard, not the mouse.

It’s not a macho, anti-mouse thing, but a simple matter of efficient motion. Using the mouse or trackpad means moving your hands off the keyboard, locating the cursor, making your move, and then shifting your hands back to the keys. If you can skip these steps, things tend to go faster.

There’s no better example than navigating folders within Finder windows. You can select, open, and browse folders from the keyboard for greater speed and less multi-window clutter.

Test it out yourself: In Finder, open a new window by pressing Command-N. To view the folders in List view, press Command-2. (Command-1 lets you view by Icons, while Command-3 changes the view to Columns.)

In List or Columns view, choose a folder that contains several subfolders, and open it by pressing the right arrow key. You can move up and down between folders or documents by pressing the up and down arrow keys. Close folders (or navigate backwards, if you’re in Columns view) with the left arrow key.

When you’ve located the file you want, speed your work even more by opening it with Command-O instead of double-clicking. In most Mac applications, you can close the file again by typing Command-W.

Once you’re accustomed to navigating through folders and files with key commands, you may be surprised by how fast you can move around, mouse-free, on your Mac.

=59. Create Your Own Shortcuts= Keyboard shortcuts are such huge time savers, but sadly, not all Finder commands have them. But they can, because you can create your own. Here’s how: Go under the Apple menu, to System Preferences, and choose Keyboard & Mouse. When the dialog appears, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, then click the plus (+) sign at the bottom left of the dialog. Another dialog will appear. Choose Finder from the Application pop-up menu, and then type the exact name of the menu command you want to add a shortcut for. Now type the shortcut you want to use and click the Add button. It’s that simple.

=58. Opening With= In most cases, double-clicking a file on your Mac automatically opens it in the appropriate application. But sometimes you may want to overrule your Mac and open a file in something other than the default.

For example, say you’ve edited a series of images in Photoshop, and now you want to take a quick look at them. You might prefer to view them in Preview, a Mac OS X program that opens in an instant, rather than the larger, slower-to-load Photoshop application.

To quickly specify your app, Control-click the item you want to open, then choose Open With from the pop-up menu that appears. This takes you to a list of every application your Mac considers capable of reading the file. Choose the name of the application you want, and the file opens in that program.

If you think you’ll be opening the file repeatedly in that program, you may want to specify an ongoing Open With preference. To do so, select the file and press Command-I to see the file’s Info window. Click the Open With tab and choose your program. Now the file will always open with your preferred application. And if you click the Change All… button, every file of the same type will open with this application.

=57. See-Through Notes = One of my favorite Stickies features is the ability to make a sticky translucent. Just click on a sticky and press Command-Option-T (Translucent Window). Then you can see right through your sticky to the items behind it. This is really handy if you want to see items in Finder windows that would normally be covered by any open Stickies. To turn off the transparency (pardon me, translucency), just press the shortcut again when Stickies is active.

=56.= [|View As Web Page] If you’d like a particular application to open every time you log into (or start up) your Mac, now all you have to do is Control-click (or click-and-hold) on the application’s Dock icon and choose Open at Login from the pop-up menu.

Now restart your Mac and the application will launch automatically. If you want to hide the application after it automatically launches (so it stays hidden from view until you click on it in the Dock), here’s how: Go under the Apple menu (or to the Dock) to System Preferences. In the System Preferences pane, click on the Accounts icon, then in the Accounts pane, click on the Login Items tab. Now click on the Hide checkbox next to the application’s name. Close the dialog and your application’s set.

=55. Editing Word Files — Without Word= It’s easy to work with Microsoft Word files on your Mac, even if you don’t have Microsoft Word installed on your computer.

TextEdit, your Mac’s built-in word processing program, can open MS Word files (which are often distinguished by a “.doc” or “.docx” suffix). Simply double-click the document icon. It will automatically open in TextEdit if that’s the only word-processing program on your computer. If you have several, you can specify which program to use by Control-clicking on the file icon (or right-clicking if you have a two-button mouse) and selecting your desired program.

Now you can edit the file just like any other document. However, if you want to share your file with MS Word users, be sure to save your work in Word format. Here’s how.

From the File menu, choose Save As… or type Command-Shift-s. Click-hold on the File Format tab and choose one of the Word formats. Press Save.

If you own iWork ’08, you can use similar techniques in Pages, Apple’s advanced word processor. But instead of using the Save As… command, select Export from the File menu. Choose the Word option and press Next.

Finally, navigate to the destination where you’d like to save the document, and press Export. = = =54. Make the Most of Quick Look= One of the biggest time-savers in Mac OS X Leopard is the Quick Look, which gives you an instant preview of any file. It’s great for finding the right document, image, or mp3 when you’re not sure which is which, or choosing the correct version from a series of files with similar names.

To use Quick Look, simply select an item in the Finder and press the Space bar, or type Command-Y. An image of the selected item appears. (In the case of mp3s, the sound file also plays.) You don’t even need to open the document’s usual application. If it’s a photo, for example, you can see it without waiting for iPhoto or Preview to open.

To close the Quick Look preview, simply press the Space bar again, or click the x in the preview window’s upper-left corner. Alternately, you can type Command-Y or Command-W to close the image.

A few more tips to help you get the most from this amazing feature:


 * If you want to preview additional items, don’t close the preview window. Just highlight a new file in the Finder, and the open preview window displays the newly selected object.
 * Quick Look lets you view multiple-page documents. For longer files, a navigation scroll bar appears along the preview window’s right margin. It even works with PDFs and Keynote presentations.

= = =53. Two Seconds to Sleep= Want the fastest way to put your Mac right into a deep, sleepy-bear hibernation-like sleep (no whirling fan, no dialogs, no sound — nuthin’ — just fast, glorious sleep). Just press Command-Option and then hold the Eject button for about 2 seconds and Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It doesn’t get much faster than that.
 * You can preview multiple items simultaneously. Just select several items in the Finder by lassoing them with your cursor. Or open one item in Quick Look, then use the up- and down-arrow keys to display other files in the same folder.
 * You can combine searches and Quick Look. Simply type keywords into a Finder window’s Search Box to reveal files whose names or contents match the search terms. Select some or all of the results, open Quick Look via space bar or Command-Y, and use your up- and down-arrow keys to switch between the selected previews.

= = =52.= [|View As Web Page] Attached is an Excel cheat sheet. I have found this very useful when working with spreadsheets.

=51.= When you download something, it will just open right up for you once its done downloading. But have you ever wondered what happens to the actual file? When something is downloaded, it usually goes to your download folder unless you tell it otherwise. But if you never delete them, well they're taking up space on your HD. Here is a few quick and simply steps to remove them.

-Click on your Macintosh HD in the top right corner. -Once open locate your "house" with your name next to it. (will be under places, left of menu) -Double click on downloads -hit Apple+A (Select ALL) -Right click (ctrl+Click) Select move to trash

Then all you have to do is empty your trash. = = =50. Where Did That Download Come From?= If you download a file from the web, you can usually find out exactly where that downloaded file came from (including the exact web address) by pressing Command-I when you have the file selected. Once the info dialog appears, click on the right-facing arrow beside More Info to expand that panel and it will display a Where from header, and to the right of that it will show the exact web address from which the file was originally downloaded. =49. Screen Shot= In Mac OS X Leopard, you can capture an image of your entire screen by typing Command-Shift-3. Typing Command-Shift-4 lets you choose a specific part of your screen to save as a screenshot: Click and hold to place the small cross-hair cursor at one edge of the area you want to capture, then drag horizontally and/or vertically to select. When you release the cursor, the screenshot is saved to your desktop. Screenshot 1

But creating screenshots this way often means you need to crop or clean up the edges of the image later. That’s especially true if you’re planning to use it as a graphic element in a document or presentation. Fortunately, Mac OS X Leopard offers a way to save clean screenshots of individual elements on your desktop — such as Finder windows, menus, icons, or the visible portion of an open document — without capturing anything else in the background.

Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required. (see image below)

[|http://images.apple.com/pro/tips/images/screenshots1.jpg]

=48.= Use your Laptop as a Baby Monitor If you have a laptop and another Mac, start a one way video chat with the laptop and set it in place where it will monitor your sleeping baby. From the other Mac you can both see and hear your child =47. View Side by Side= View Lots of Images Side by Side Full Screen Have you ever wanted to view and compare 10, 15, or 30 images side by side? You can by grouping your images together in a folder, selecting them, and then either Control-Clicking or using the Action Menu in the finder widow to select "Slideshow." That will bring up the first image and the slideshow controls. Using the controls, click the Index button, the icon of four boxes. This will scatter all the images in a grid set against a black background.

=46. Create Your Own Icons= You don’t have to live with the icons your Mac displays by default. Instead, personalize your folders, files, and drives with custom icons using just about any graphic file you desire, whether it’s a jpeg, gif, png, Photoshop or Illustrator file, or even a PDF.

First, choose an image you want to use and open it in Preview. If the file doesn’t open in Preview by default, select the image in Finder, select Open With from the File menu and then select Preview from the drop-down list.

Once your image has opened in Preview, press Command-C to copy it.

Next, select the file, folder or drive whose icon you want to change, and press Command-I to show its Info window.

Click the file, folder, or drive icon at the top left corner of the Info screen, then press Command-V to replace this icon with your chosen image.

Close the Info window. The new image should appear in place of the old icon on your desktop or Finder window — even in List view.

To make your icons appear larger or smaller, go to the Finder and select View Options from the View menu. Use the slider in the pop-up window to change your icons’ display size on the desktop or in Finder windows.

You can also copy icons from the Info window of one file, folder, or drive to another. Just select the desired icon, copy it, then select the icon you want to replace and paste. Want to revert to the default Mac icon? Select your custom icon in the Info window and press the Delete key.

More Icon Tips: The most successful icons are clear, small images without too much detail, like a close-up photo of a face or a flower. You may want to crop an existing image down to a single detail in an image-editing program to create a better-looking icon — or use one of the thousands of purpose-made icons available in various online collections.

Keep in mind that using a large image as an icon increases the file size of your destination folder or file. For example, using a 3.4 MB photo as an icon for a 36 KB document increases that document’s total file size to 92 KB. Try creating a lower-resolution or smaller version of your image instead. =45. Summarize Your Stories=

When laying out a long story in a newsletter or magazine, it’s often helpful to summarize a story, or a section of a story in a pull-quote or abstract. But how to find the best quote when you’re on a deadline and need it fast? Fortunately, Mac OS X offers a great tool that almost no one knows about: Summary Service.

To find this utility, select some text in Adobe InDesign or some other program that supports this Mac OS X Service (such as TextEdit) and choose Summarize from Services under the Application menu. You can adjust how long you want your summary (in number of sentences or paragraphs) in the Summary dialog box. Drag the Summary Size slider to the left to get a more focused summary; for a pull-quote a one- or two-sentence summary is best.

You wouldn’t expect a computer to be able to analyze some text and provide a good summary but Summary Service is surprisingly good. Try it!


 * The Summarize service only works in Cocoa apps - meaning it will work in most Mac apps, but won't work for favorites like Firefox - but you can copy and paste text from non-Cocoa apps into TextEdit if you still want to use the Summarize feature.**

=44. Is That Task Done Yet? The Dock Knows= Let’s say you’re working in a power-crunching app like Photoshop, and you go to apply a filter to a high-res image, and it’s going to take a minute or two to process your command. You’re going to get a progress bar so you can see how long the process is going to take, right?

Well, thanks to Mac OS X’s way-cool Dock, you can switch out of Photoshop to work on something else and the Dock will let you know when the filter is applied. How? Well, when a progress bar appears in Photoshop, the Dock automatically adds a tiny little progress bar to the bottom of the Photoshop icon in the Dock so you can keep an eye on the progress, even when you’re doing something else (like checking your mail, shopping online, or writing a letter). =43. Album Cover Screen Saver= Album Art Screen Saver Many aspects of the Mac are just mesmerizing to look at. The iTunes Artwork screen saver is one of those. You can select it in the Screen Saver Preference Pane by clicking on iTunes Artwork. A grid of 30-40 album covers will cover your screen, cycling through your album art by flipping the "covers" one by one. Try it out at your next party.

=42. The Ultimate Customize Toolbar Shortcut(folder)=

If you want to customize the items in your toolbar (and there’s nothing wrong with that), just ctrl+click the Grey colored part in any folder (outer part, on top), and a menu will appear. Select the Customize Toolbar, right there in your window. Now you can just drag-and-drop icons onto the toolbar. This tip can be very useful of you find yourself creating many folders or deleting files/folders. GIVE IT A TRY!

=41. Make Anything a PDF File= Make Anything a PDF Any file that you can print you can make a PDF of by using the PDF button/menu in the Print dialog box. One great benefit of this is that text in your new PDFs can be searched and found by Spotlight. Unfortunately, this great universal function is hidden away in a menu that looks like a button. =40. Make my Mac Zoom= On any page, program, or folder, You can zoom in to view things a bit closer. Now note, this does distort the picture a bit, and this will NOT enhance or enlarge photos for print functions. Simply click and hold ctrl and use 2 fingers on the track pad (move up or down to zoom in and out).

=39. DVD in iDVD= OneStep DVD When you need to just transfer your movies from your miniDV video camera to a DVD without the frills, just click the OneStep DVD button in iDVD opening screen. iDVD will automatically rewind the tape and burn the video to a blank DVD in your new Mac. = = =38. Watch out for spam—and spim.= Email isn’t the only thing that can bring you a phishing scams, viruses, spyware, or other electronic infections.

Unsolicited email messages (known as spam) have a close cousin—unsolicited Instant Messages (IMs), or “spim.”

So just as you should never click on links in emails, even when they appear legitimate, you should also avoid clicking on links in IMs you weren’t expecting. Those, too, could be phishing scams, or could give you a virus or spyware—or worse!

To avoid getting spammed and spimmed in the first place, closely guard your IM screen name and your email address. Treat them as personal, confidential information that you wouldn’t give out to just anyone.

Another smart option is to use a “throwaway” or free email address for junk mail and unimportant site registrations. This way, at least all the spam goes to one place!

=37. iTunes Tip of the Day= This is a fairly simple, but necessary tip for iTunes users. If you need to email an MP3 to a friend, select the song you want in iTunes. Hit Command (Apple) R on your Mac (or CTRL-R on your PC) to "Reveal" the file on your computer. The file's folder will pop up and you can drag the file to your mail client. Much simpler that searching through the folder on your computer. =36. Coupon Tip of the Day= So the savvy shopper picks through the coupons they get in the mail and throws out the rest. But sometimes the coupons are so good and they are to places you would visit anyway that you wish you had more. Well now you do. If you get Family savings Magazine ( [|http://www.familysavingsmagazine.com/] ) in your area, they reprint online. (Just click on the "Now in Digital Online" button.) Love getting a Burrito from Sonic for 99¢? Now you can get one every day! You are only limited by your printer paper!

=35. Blade Tip of the Day= If you need to replace your wipers (because what you attempted in the previous tip didn't work) don't buy them until you've successfully read this tip. You see, in an attempt to scam the general public, auto manufactures have attempted to dupe those who know little about cars. In actuality, wipers consist of essentially two parts. The wiper itself, and the wiper blade. The wiper is the entire mechanism that attaches to the wiper motor. The blade is simply a $3 piece of rubber that slides in. Most times, it's the insert that goes bad. So, before you rush out to buy an $18 set of wiper blades, try replacing the blade inserts first. And when you go to Wal-Mart, use their computer to enter in your car's make/model/year to find the correct part. Tell 'em Austin sent ya.

=34. Here is a list of the top computer terms and their definitions.= Adware Advertising program often installed along with other programs Attachment A file attached to an e-mail message for sending between computers Blog Web log. Personal web page where the author can post their views and experiences and receive comments. BMP Bitmap. The most common graphics file type for Windows PCs Bookmarks List of your favourite web sites Browser Software that displays web pages such as Internet Explorer and Firefox Compression A method of reducing the storage space a file takes up. Files must be decompressed to be used again Cookie Data that tracks visits to web sites and remembers user preferences Crash Occurs when a program causes your computer to stop responding Demo Free demonstration version of software that allows you to try before you buy Directory An index of web site links arranged in categories Disk Space The size of the area on the hard disk where files can be stored Domain name URL or Address of a web site on the Internet Download Transfer a file from another computer to your own Driver Software required for Windows to use a piece of hardware such as a graphics card E-mail Electronic mail passed between computers Favorites List of your favourite web sites Firewall Program or device that blocks or allows Internet access to a network or a PC Flash Software to create and play web site animations Font Text of a particular size and style Freeware Software that is free to download and use for as long as you like Hardware Physical parts of a computer system such as the hard disk, keyboard and printer HTML HyperText Markup Language. The code that makes up a web page Home Page The main page of a web site, often a welcome page Hyperlink A text or graphic you click on to go to another page or a different web site Internet A collection of inter-connected computer networks Install To load and copy program files onto a computer JPG / JPEG Compressed graphics file for sending across the Internet Link A text or graphic you click on to go to another page or a different web site Malware Malicious software such as virus or spyware programs Modem Device that links a computer to the Internet through a telephone line MP3 Compressed audio file to save disk space and for transfer across the Internet Netiquette Acceptable behaviour online Online Connected to the Internet Phishing Fraudulent e-mails and web sites trying to trick you into giving out personal details Plug-in Extra programs that can be installed into larger programs to handle special tasks, such as playing certain types of movie files in a browser Podcast Internet audio broadcast that can be played back on PCs or MP3 players such as the iPod. Pop-Up Small window that appears on a web page, often used for advertisements. Program A set of instructions to make a computer carry out a task Rootkit Software that hides system files and can allow attackers to access your computer undetected Router Device used in home Internet networks to send data from the web to specific computers RSS Really Simple Syndication - a system to feed you news stories from web sites Search Engine Tool that searches the Web for keywords and provides relevant links Server A computer that holds Internet data such as web site files and can send it to another computer when requested Shareware Software that is free to download but you pay a fee if you want to continue using it after the trial period Shortcut A link you can click to go straight to a particular program or web page Social Networking Web sites based on communication and relying on users to add content Software A program or a set of instructions to make a computer carry out a task Spam Junk mail messages to e-mail addresses Spyware Software that tracks your movements on the Web for advertising purposes without your knowledge Stream Start playing music or video as soon as it begins downloading Surfing Moving from one web page to another Trial Software that allows you to try before you buy Trojan Malicious virus program disguised as useful software Uninstall Remove program files from a computer Upload Send a file from your computer to an online destination URL Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a web site on the World Wide Web Virus Destructive program that infects and damages computer files Vlog Video web log VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol - voice conversations across the Internet WAV The standard audio file type for Windows PCs Web Page Individual page on a web site Web Site A collection of connected web pages located at a particular domain name Wiki Web site that can be edited by users to add information Windows Microsoft operating system installed on most PCs World Wide Web (WWW) Information space on the Internet stored on servers across the world containing documents connected together through hyperlinks Worm Malicious code that uses an infected PC to spread itself to others Zip Compressed file format to reduce diskspace needed by a file and to transfer it between computers more quickly

=33. Tip Of The Day: Stickies= Stickies, as the name suggests, is an application readily available on your Mac to let you stick your thoughts - in a form of small notes - on your Desktop. Stickies reside inside Applications → Stickies.

Not only limited to making notes, but with Stickies you can also perform several tricks, such as embedding picture, scrolling down notes, making stickies translucent, and many other tricks.

Upon continuing reading this article, you will see several tricks for using Mac Stickies. Embed Picture on Stickies

Embed Pictures on Stickies

To embed picture on your Stickies:

1. Find your image file 2. Drag and drop it into your stickies pane 3. Adjust its position with Spacebar / Tab 4. The picture is not resizable

Changing Stickies Color

You have several color selections for your Stickies background: Yellow, Blue, Green, Pink, Purple and Gray. To change your Stickies background to one of these colors:

1. Go to Stickies menubar 2. Click on Color 3. Choose Your Preferred Color

However, it's too troublesome if everytime I need to go there to change my Stickies background color. Therefore, I customize the shortcuts and make it so much easier for me to change the background color.

Customized Color Shortcut

Here is how I customize the Stickies color shortcuts:

1. Open System Preferences 2. Select Keyboard & Mouse and go under Keyboard Shortcuts section 3. Click on the [+] button near the bottom of the pane 4. Upon seeing the pop up menu, select Stickies as application, choose menu title from one of the six different colors and assign keyboard shortcut to each of them

You don't need to relaunch Stickies for the changes to take effect. Translucent Stickies

To make Stickies looks even cooler, you can make it translucent by using keystrokes Command-Option-T.

Translucent Stickies Floating Stickies

Trigger Floating Mode: Command-Option-F

Floating Stickies is the type of Stickies that will always float on top of other windows. This is particularly useful if you have a really important notes, like reading UsingMac in a daily basis. Switching Stickies

If you have more than one Stickies open at a time, keyboard shortcut Command-[~] can help you switch to other Stickies - it rotates through all Stickies. Creating Stickies' List

List is always welcomed by most people. To insert list into your Stickies, press down Option-Tab and you will see a bullet appear on your Stickies. Save Your Stickies

Unlike other types of documents, save button is not provided for Stickies. In order to save the stickies you've just created, you need to:

1. Close the Stickies (Command-W) 2. Upon seeing the dialog box, choose Save… 3. Select your destination and you're set

Get Stickies Info

Last but not least, you can always get the info of your Stickies by using your mouse to hover on the Stickies pane for a short duration.

=32. CD / DVD cleaning= Why? Dirty CDs can cause read errors and/or cause CDs to not work at all.

Procedure: Cleaning CDs and DVDs should be done with a cleaning kit but can also be done with a normal clean cotton cloth or shirt. When doing this with a clean cotton cloth or shirt, wipe against the tracks, starting from the middle of the CD or DVD (the hole) and wiping towards the outer edge. Never wipe with the tracks; doing so may put more scratches on the disc.

Cleaning a CD and DVD disc

It is recommended when cleaning a CD that water is used. However, if the substance on a CD cannot be removed using water, pure alcohol can also be used. =31. Cleaning your computer= Cleaning your computer and your computer components and peripherals helps keep the components and computer in good working condition and helps keep the computers from spreading germs. To the right is an example image of how dirty the inside of your computer case can get. This example is a dirty computer case fan.

Depending on the environment that your computer operates in determines how often you should clean your computer case. The below list is our recommendation and may change depending upon your computer's environment. Dirty computer case fan


 * User who does not smoke and has no pets - Clean the computer every five months.
 * User who does not smoke and has pets - Clean the computer every four months.
 * User who smokes but has no pets - Clean the computer every three months.
 * User who smokes and has pets - Clean the computer every two months.
 * Business with clean office environment - Clean the computers every five months.
 * Business with clean office environment; however, multiple users use each computer - Clean the computer every three months.
 * Business that is a factory environment or allows smoking - Clean the computer every two months.
 * School computers with young adult users - Clean the computer every three months.
 * School computers with pre-teen users - Clean the computer every month. In some cases, this may need to be weekly or daily.

General cleaning Tips

Below is a listing of general tips that should be taken when cleaning any of the components or peripherals of a computer as well as tips to help keep a computer clean.

1. Never spray or squirt any type of liquid onto any computer component. If a spray is needed, spray the liquid onto a cloth and then use that cloth to rub down the component. 2. Users can use a vacuum to suck up dirt, dust, or hair around their computer on the outside case and on their keyboards. However, do not use a vacuum for the inside of your computer as it generates a lot of static electricity that can damage the internal components of your computer. If you need to use a vacuum to clean the inside of your computer, use a portable battery powered vacuum designed to do this job. 3. When cleaning a component and/or the computer, turn it off before cleaning. 4. Never get any component inside the computer or any other circuit board damp or wet. 5. Be cautious when using any type of cleaning solvents; some individuals may have allergic reactions to chemicals in cleaning solvents and some solvents can even damage the case. Try to always use water or a highly diluted solvent. 6. When cleaning, be careful not to accidentally adjust any knobs or controls. In addition, when cleaning the back of the computer, if anything is plugged in, make sure not to disconnect any of the plugs. 7. When cleaning fans, especially the smaller fans within a portable computer or laptop it's suggested that you either hold the fan or place something in-between the fan blades to prevent it from spinning. Spraying compressed air into a fan or cleaning a fan with a vacuum may cause damage to some fans or in some cases cause back voltage. 8. Never eat or drink around the computer. 9. Limit smoking around the computer.

=30. Hide and Unhide Columns=

=29. Keyboard cleaning= If you're trying to clean a laptop keyboard see document ( [|http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000780.htm] ) for additional help and information. *All of the below information applies to standard desktop computer keyboards.*

Why? Dirt, dust and hair can build up causing the keyboard to not function properly.

Procedure: Many people clean the keyboard by turning it upside down and shaking. A more effective method is to use compressed air. Compressed air is pressurized air contained in a can with a very long nozzle. Simply aim the air between the keys and blow away all of the dust and debris that has gathered there. A vacuum cleaner can also be used, but make sure the keyboard doesn't have loose "pop off" keys that could possibly be sucked up by the vacuum.

Why? If the keyboard has anything spilt into it (ie: Soda, Pepsi, Coke, beer, wine, coffee, milk, etc.), not taking the proper steps can cause the keyboard to be destroyed.

Procedure: Below are a few recommendations to help prevent a keyboard from becoming bad once a substance has been spilt within it.

If anything is spilt onto the keyboard turn the computer off immediately. Once the computer is turned off, quickly flip the keyboard over helping to prevent the substance from penetrating circuits. While the keyboard is upside down, shake the keyboard over a surface you do not mind getting wet or that can be cleaned up later. While still upside down, use a cloth to help clean out what can be reached. After you you have cleaned the keyboard to the best of your ability leave the keyboard upside down for at least one night allowing it to dry.

If a keyboard does not work after trying it again later it is recommended that it be replaced. If the keyboard works but some of the keys are sticky or cannot be pressed in you can attempt to do additional cleaning in attempt to resolve the issue. Unfortunately many times when any sticky substance such as a non-diet pop is spilt directly onto the keyboard it's usually a loss unless you plan on spending dozens of hours attempting to clean each key.

Why? A keyboard that is used by multiple people, such as students or different employees, may need to be disinfected to help the spread of germs.

Procedure: Turn off the computer. Spray a disinfectant onto a cloth or damp a cloth with alcohol and rub each of the keys on the keyboard. As mentioned in our general cleaning tips, never spray any type of liquid onto the keyboard. =28. Tip Of The Day: Reconnecting to the network= If you get disconnected from the solehifs2 (your network drive) and need to get reconnected you can go to the Go pull down menu in the Finder (click on the desktop/background area if you are in another program) then go all the way to the bottom and select Connect to server. Alternately, you can type Apple or Command + K. When prompted for a server address type: smb://solehifs2.solehi.sd and click the + sign to the right to permanently add to your choices, then click the Connect button. If you need to connect to the student drive type: smb://solehifs2.solehi.sd and do the same as before.

=27. Below is a list of our top ten Google tricks many users don't know about.= 1. Definitions - Pull up the definition of the word by typing define followed by the word you want the definition for. For example, typing: define bravura would display the definition of that word.

2. Local search - Visit Google Local enter the area you want to search and the keyword of the place you want to find. For example, typing: restaurant at the above link would display local restaurants.

3. Phone number lookup - Enter a full phone number with area code to display the name and address associated with that phone number.

4. Find weather - Type weather followed by a zip code or city and state to display current weather conditions and forecasts for upcoming days.

5. Track airline flight - Enter the airline and flight number to display the status of an airline flight and it's arrival time. For example, type: delta 123 to display this flight information if available.

6. Track packages - Enter a UPS, FedEx or USPS tracking number to get a direct link to track your packages.

7. Pages linked to you - See what other web pages are linking to your website or blog by typing link: followed by your URL. For example, typing link:[|http://www.slsd.org] displays all pages linking to SLSD Website.

8. Find PDF results only - Add filetype: to your search to display results that only match a certain file type. For example, if you wanted to display PDF results only type: "dell xps" filetype:pdf -- this is a great way to find online manuals.

9. Calculator - Use the Google Search engine as a calculator by typing a math problem in the search. For example, typing: 100 + 200 would display results as 300.

10. Stocks - Quickly get to a stock quote price, chart, and related links by typing the stock symbol in Google. For example, typing: msft will display the stock information for Microsoft. =26. Have to many bookmarks?= Or just tired of being so unorganized with them? Here's a neat little tip that I found very useful. As you know we can create tab bookmarks (Last TOTD) well you can also create folders to store those BM's in, right on the browser bar!

-Simply right click right under the Url Browser bar (light grey) area. -Select New folder -Name it

-Then click/hold/drag your bookmarks right into the folder

if done correctly you should be able to click on your BM folder and see your BM you just placed in there.

=25. Technical support phone calls= When calling technical support or customer service it's often frustrating having to go through each of the voice prompts just to reach a human who can assist you, which today's tip is a link to gethuman( [|http://gethuman.com/] ). This site is a database of 500 of the top companies, their phone numbers and how to get directly to a human.

For example, when calling Dell Technical Support you would press 3; say "agent" at each additional prompt, ignoring messages to get directly to someone who can assist you with your problem. =24. Tip of the Day: FireFox Tabs= Read attached file

=23. 1. Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer or Safari Mozilla Firefox has revolutionized internet browsing -= if you aren’t already using it you are way behind. Forget the default Internet Explorer; Firefox is safer, more efficient and much more intuitive. There are a myriad of reasons as to why Firefox is better than the old IE. Here are just a few of them: * Its safer: Firefox does a much better job at blocking spyware from jumping on to your computer through your browser window. * Block pop ups: Know those little pop ups that come along every time you visit a cheap site? Firefox, for the most part, kills these bad boys before they arise. * Remembers passwords: And not in the way IE “does” it. It really remembers them. Very handy. * Extensions: The major advantage of Firefox is all the wonderful plugins and extensions that you can use. These extensions are written by coders for specific reasons and often save you a lot of time. For example, I have an extension that allows me to edit a websites coding and see the changes in real time. Great for a web designer! Have a look at some of the extensions here. * Very intuitive: Firefox seems natural. That was one of the first things that struck me about it. It is easy to use and feels like “home” in no time at all. = = =22. iTunes Tip of the Day= This is a fairly simple, but necessary tip for iTunes users. If you need to email an MP3 to a friend, select the song you want in iTunes. Hit Command (Apple) R on your Mac (or CTRL-R on your PC) to "Reveal" the file on your computer. The file's folder will pop up and you can drag the file to your mail client. Much simpler that searching through the folder on your computer. =21. Regifting Tip of the Day=

If you are a regifter, then make sure you don't give the gift to the person who gave it to you. I had this happen one time... I received a gift that I gave to someone. It wasn't a big deal, but this could be traumatic. It's a bit awkward and rather humorous. So, if you are serious about regifting, then you should keep a log of who gave you what. You also have to be careful of what circle of friends/family, you regift things to. They might recognize your patterns. Better to be safe than sorry.

=20.= Keep your application software and operating system up-to-date.

The mummy lives! If the software on your computer is old enough to live in a sarcophagus, it’s time to make a change. That’s because the older a program gets, the more opportunities hackers have to find the security holes in it.

So if the application software on your computer (Internet browser, word processor, graphics software, even your anti-virus program) is more than a few months old, check out the vendor’s Website for upgrades or patches that can make the program safer to use. And keep checking back periodically! Holes in such programs can be exploited by hackers and your whole computer could be compromised.

Do the same for your operating system (OS), the program on your computer—such as Windows XP, Mac OS X, or Linux—that runs all the other programs. Keeping your OS up-to-date is absolutely critical for safe computing.

Think that your OS is already current? Don’t be so sure. Microsoft and Apple have both released critical security patches quite recently! So, be sure your computer is configured to automatically update its OS, so you don’t have to remember to keep checking.

=19. Tip Of The Day: EULA= Read through the end user license agreement (EULA) before clicking “I Accept” and installing unfamiliar software. Yes, it’s a pain...all that fine print!

But...if you don’t, you may be sorry. By law, the EULA is where companies disclose what they’ll do with your private information (if they share it at all, you may start receiving a lot of spam, for example); what other software they may be packaging with your download (beware—many times what’s packaged with it is essentially spyware!); and any hidden fees or costs.

And if you can’t find or can’t understand the EULA, think twice before proceeding: the program’s creator may be trying to hide something from you.

=18.= Creating folders in web outlook mail: goto your inbox. click the drop down box in the top left that says messages click down to folder choose name for your folder and click create To save mail into these folders: goto your inbox select desired mail to move (check box) click the first icon next to the drop down box that says messages select inbox then select desired folder Now to check your work: goto your inbox see if folder is there if it is congrats if not, follow the steps and see where you may have gone wrong  =<span style="color: rgb(215, 15, 15);">17. Photo Tip of the Day = It's 2008, so practically everyone has a digital camera (Grandma, check) or a phone with a camera in it. So now the trick becomes showing your photos off. You can always have them printed, but that's a tip for another time. The quickest and cheapest way is to post them online for the world and your friends to see.

Here are some sites that offer free photo hosting that I'd recommend looking into. They serve different needs so just find the one that you like the best.

to pay for more space. the all your photos on your computer. of them. It is easy to limit access as to who can actually see your picture, but if you use that feature your friends have to sign up for Facebook too.
 * Flickr.com - owned by Yahoo!, is very popular but you can max out the free storage they offer quickly, after that, you'll have
 * Picasa Web Albums - owned by Google, so you can use your same login as your Gmail. Picasa is also a desktop program to organize
 * Facebook - Has a fairly good photo album feature. Plus your "friends" on Facebook will be notified when you post new pictures

There are many many more out there, but those a good start. =<span style="color: rgb(218, 22, 22);">16. Tip Of The Day: WINDOWS (PC) SHORTCUTS = ATTACHED is WORD document which has a list of most of Window's shortcuts. All of these, just like the Mac ones, should be helpful in making your computing experience faster and easier. Here is a link that has ALL of the Windows (PC) shortcuts [|http://www.computerhope.com/shortcut.htm].



=<span style="color: rgb(215, 15, 15);">15. Tip Of The Day: Back Up Your Files = No, it’s not fun or exciting. But if you get a virus or other electronic infection and your system crashes or has to be wiped clean, you’ll be so glad you did. For us, the easiest way is just to save to the server:

Macintosh HD Servers tab -> click all Look for Solehifs.2 (click) Home HW Find your name and save.

Most of you may already have shortcuts set up so this way may not be needed to get there.

You may also make copies of essential documents, photos, music files—anything you would be distraught to lose. You can use a variety of media—CDs, DVDs, thumb drives or “memory keys,” external hard drives, a server or Internet site that allows you to store documents, etc. Also, be sure to keep any software CDs that came with your computer, in case your hard drive is ever wiped clean and you have to reinstall everything from scratch.

If your hard disk fails—and if you use it long enough, eventually it will—you’ll need those backups! =<span style="color: rgb(245, 15, 15);"> = =<span style="color: rgb(245, 15, 15);">14. TSA Tip Of The Day = You can bring a bottle of water past security at airports, you just have to drink the water first. Then you can simply refill the bottle with water fountain on the other side of the law. =<span style="color: rgb(238, 17, 17);">13. Tip Of The Day: APPLE (MAC) SHORTCUTS = ATTACHED is an Excel document which has a list of Apple's shortcuts. The top 15 are the ones that I find myself using the most. Hope these are helpful in making your computing experience much faster and easier, I know they sure have for mine. Here is a link that has MOST of the Apple (MAC) shortcuts [|http://www.sharpened.net/resources/mac_shortcuts.php] available.

=<span style="color: rgb(237, 12, 12);">12. Photo Editing = Want to touch up your photos before you post them online, but don't have iPhoto and there is no way you're going to shell out hundreds of dollars for Photoshop? Adobe has released Photoshop Express ( [|https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html] ). It is all online so there is nothing to install plus it's free! It has an impressive range of features, including removing red eye and stylizing pictures. Plus it integrates with Facebook and Flickr.

=<span style="color: rgb(223, 17, 17); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> = =<span style="color: rgb(223, 17, 17); font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; color: rgb(223, 17, 17);">11. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Elf Tip of the Day = <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Now it can be very confusing when it comes to figuring out which small mythological humanoid type creatures are to blame when things aren't as you remember leaving them. At work when you come in the next morning and one of your files you know you saved the day before is mysteriously missing, you can likely assume gnomes are the cause of the trouble. All gnomes are mischievious, but not all gnomes are necessarily evil like gremlins. Gnomes, such as the garden variety, are inherently good, but still mischievous. Just imagine what would happen if you put the Travelocity gnome and the Orbitz marionettes in the same room.

Now on the other side, if something good happens, you can pretty much make a safe bet and say that Elves did it. A) Elves are always good B) Elves have a past history for making things on humans' behalf. Now it is important to note that there are really three main types of elves. There are the little elves, such as those who make cookies and shoes, Santa's elves who are tireless workers, and full-sized "We are really good with arrows and generally hot-looking" Lord of the Rings elves.

So, in summary: Gnomes are mischievous, but if your desk is more organized then you remember it, it was probably an elf, but probably not Orlando Bloom.

=<span style="color: rgb(223, 17, 17);">10. Text Clipping = I ask [my Windows-using friends] how would they save a piece of text from the document they are viewing at the moment, for example a web page.

Their answer is usually something like: "Oh easy. You select the text, right click and copy. Then you go to desktop, right click and select New | Text file, give the file some name and click away. Now you double click the file to open it, paste the text in there and save it."

Then I show them how I do it on Mac. I select text, click and drag to desktop and that's it. Now you have the text you just selected in a text document. EASY HUH?

=<span style="color: rgb(212, 8, 8);">9. Google 411 = Refuse to pay $1.79 to call 411? Google has a great little solution for you. Call 1-800-GOOG-411 and they'll give you the 411 on whatever business you're looking for info on. If you are trying to get to that business just say "map it" and you'll get a Text Message with the Map. Now instead of being owned by your cell phone company for $1.79, you'll just get owned for 25¢.

=<span style="color: rgb(235, 40, 40);">8. Tip Of The Day: Dictionary =

Dictionary - With Dictionary as a part of Mac OS X (10.5) there is a feature that not too many Mac users know about. When in any of the Cocoa (Mac native) applications you can hover your mouse above the word and press Ctrl-Cmd-D on your keyboard. You will get the Dictionary description for that word. Just move your mouse over to any other word and the Dictionary description for that word is displayed instantly.

And no, you don’t need to have Dictionary open at all.

A few examples of applications where this works are; Safari, Mail.app, MacJournal, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, and iWeb. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with any of the Mozilla applications, including Firefox, Camino and Flock.

=<span style="color: rgb(223, 17, 17);">7. Tip Of The Day: Thankful Food = With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I was searching on the History Channel and I thought that this was pretty interesting...Here are some of the foods that may have been on the Pilgrims' Menu as to THE HISTORY CHANNEL.

Seafood: Cod, Eel, Clams, Lobster Wild Fowl: Wild Turkey, Goose, Duck, Crane, Swan, Partridge, Eagles Meat: Venison, Seal Grain: Wheat Flour, Indian Corn Vegetables: Pumpkin, Peas, Beans, Onions, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots Fruit: Plums, Grapes Nuts: Walnuts, Chestnuts, Acorns Herbs and Seasonings: Olive Oil, Liverwort, Leeks, Dried Currants, Parsnips What Was Not on the Menu

Surprisingly, the following foods, all considered staples of the modern Thanksgiving meal, didn't appear on the pilgrim's first feast table:

Ham: There is no evidence that the colonists had butchered a pig by this time, though they had brought pigs with them from England. Sweet Potatoes/Potatoes: These were not common. Corn on the Cob: Corn was kept dried out at this time of year. Cranberry Sauce: The colonists had cranberries but no sugar at this time. Pumpkin Pie: It's not a recipe that exists at this point, though the pilgrims had recipes for stewed pumpkin. Chicken/Eggs: We know that the colonists brought hens with them from England, but it's unknown how many they had left at this point or whether the hens were still laying. Milk: No cows had been aboard the Mayflower, though it's possible that the colonists used goat milk to make cheese.

If you have some free time, check out: [|http://www.history.com/minisites/thanksgiving]

=<span style="color: rgb(246, 50, 35);">6. In-law Tip of the Day = Everyone's families are quirky. But no one's family is more quirky than your husband/wife's or boyfriend/girlfriend's. Here are a few tips to help you minimize the awkwardity of the holiday season when you'll undoubtedly interact with some very weird individuals if the family is nice enough to invite you to join in the festivities. And remember, your significant other has had likely 20+ years to get used to these odd fellows. You're just meeting them. 1. Find an overly-gabbing, self-glorifying nincompoop to talk to. By finding one such person, you yourself can avoid small-talk. Just smile, nod, and let the holiday tryptophan kick in. 2. Sidestep the "Booby Hug." Every family's got one. The "booby-hugger." The person who insists on hugging WAY too close. Turn a booby-hug into a side hug and avoid the awkward press. 3. Wait for the awkward in-law to determine the greeting. Will it be a hug? A hand-shake? A kiss? Let the person you're meeting determine it. Nothing's worse than going in for a hug when the person only wants a shake. 4. When in doubt, ask any older male relative about "the war." 5. On second thought, avoid "the war." Could be a sensitive subject. If someone brings up "the war" it's OK to talk about. If they don't, you shouldn't be the one to ask. 6. Prepare yourself for insolent reactions from the little ones. If you ever say to a child called Laird, "Laird, this is my girlfriend Christine! Isn't she pretty?" He just might say, "NOOOOO....." He doesn't mean it. 7. Brace yourself for every form of stuffing known to man. 8. Brace yourself for a slam on every possible race, nationality, gender, religious creed, and/or sexual orientation. 9. You can spend at least 3 hours milling around talking to everyone in earshot about how good the food is. Great conversation starter. 10. For fun, make crap up and tell it to old people. Tell them you won the lottery. Tell them you use to be a mummer. Tell them you know how to ride a unicycle. If they ever call you out on it, just claim THEY'RE making crap up. They're too old. <span style="color: rgb(181, 8, 8);"> = = =<span style="color: rgb(181, 8, 8);">5. Screen Capturing = Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd(apple)-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png

You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd(apple)-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen. Then select the area you wish to capture. =<span style="color: rgb(243, 32, 18);"> = = = =<span style="color: rgb(243, 32, 18);">4. File Naming Dos and Don'ts =

Every day you do this task without giving it a second thought: naming files and folders. Yes, it's easy to name things in as x, but there's a bit more to it than meets the eye.

Don't Start with a Period — If you try to use a period at the beginning of a file or folder name, the Finder will let you know that such a name is "reserved for the system" (it makes any file or folder whose name begins with a period invisible in the Finder).

Don't Use a Colon — You can't use a colon anywhere in an item's name. That's because Mac as x uses the colon to indicate a directory (or folder) in the as x file sys­tem-for example, Applications: Utilities. If you try, you'll get a somewhat cryptic error message about the length of the item's name and its included punctuation (see "Illegal File Names"). The object's name won't change.

If you try to use a colon in a file name when you're saving from within a program, most of the time your Mac will replace the colon with a minus sign (-). In some pro­grams, such as Microsoft Word, you'll just hear a beep and the colon won't appear.

Do Create Cross-Platform-Friendly Names — Even though the colon is the only character you can't use in as x, you might want to avoid some others: the asterisk (*), angle brackets « and», double-quotation marks ("), forward and backward slashes (/ and \), the semicolon, the pipe (I), and the question mark (?). Microsoft Windows XP reserves all these characters for its own use, so putting them in as x file names may cause problems if you then send those files to Windows XP users.

Do Keep It Short — The Mac limits how long your file name can be. Thankfully, the limit is quite high-255 characters. That's longer than this paragraph!

Do Give Descriptive Names — Instead of pushing that 255-character limit, use names that make things easier to find. For instance, while Beef Recipe may seem like a perfectly adequate file name, it won't seem quite so precise when you reach

Beef Recipe #17. Instead, try something more specific, like Braised Beef with Broccoli [5 stars].

=<span style="color: rgb(239, 21, 21);"> 3. Personal Space Tip of the Day =

You're standing in line. The person behind you feels that if there is more than half an inch between you that the place in line will get stolen. This perfect stranger is standing so close to you that you can tell that he's a smoker, likes onions, and doesn't believe in deodorant. Your personal space bubble is about to pop. You glance behind you to make sure that it's not an inanimate object that doesn't know better. Nope, it's a real person who apparently was never taught to give people a little breathing room. Here's what you do to make them back off.

then.
 * Continually look back with the evil eye. Maybe he'll pick up the hint.
 * Start rocking back and forth. You might "accidentally" bump him, causing him to take a step back.
 * Use your purse or luggage to create a natural barrier. Swinging these are helpful.
 * Start telling a story using gestures, the more erratic the movement, the better. Think large arm movements.
 * If all else fails, start acting a bit crazy - talk to yourself, starting dancing in place, make a random scream every now and

=<span style="color: rgb(223, 21, 17);"> 2. Find a Word = Internet browsers have a feature that allow you to find a word on the page. You go to the Edit Menu -> Find on this Page or Ctrl+F on your keyboard (PC) and Apple+F (Mac). Anyway, it will search through the page to find word your looking for. By clicking next, you can see all the occurrences on that page. If you choose to click highlight, it will simply highlight all occurrences on that page.

This may be an obvious tip for some, but I didn't learn it until a couple years ago and it is quite helpful.

=<span style="color: rgb(230, 15, 15);"> 1. Tip Of The Day: How to Make Your Mac Talk to You =

You may not know that Macs have the built in capability to talk to you. Picture_1_2 This nifty feature is built in to Mac OS X. You simply highlight the desired text, follow the easy steps below, and away you go. You can also set up a key combination in Speech preferences to hear the text spoken.

This feature is handy not only for the visually impaired, but it can also be used when you'd rather listen to something rather than read it. For instance, you can have your Mac assist with proofreading documents such as Wills or Deeds. I find it helpful sometimes to close my eyes when listening to something to get a different, unimpeded "view" of it.

Here's how you can make your Mac speak selected text :

1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Speech 2. Click “Text to Speech” Tab 3. Select the “Speak selected text when the key is pressed” check box 4. Type one or more modifier keys (Command, Shift, Option, or Control) and another key to set the keys you’ll use to hear selected text **I normally use APPLE + S** 5. Click OK when the key combination you typed appears in the text field 6. Ex out of the menu 7. Time to put it to the test

Highlight the text you wish to have read and press your special keys. ( apple + s )