Capture your screen!!

Using GrabGrab is a utility that lets you take pictures of what is visible on your monitor, called screen shots. This book is filled with thousands of screen shots. If you’re a teacher, it’s great to include screen shots in your handouts. If you’re having trouble with something, you can send a screen shot to your favorite tech support person so they have a clearer idea of the problem. You can even use the Grab service to take a quick screen shot and drop it into an email or a TextEdit document.

To use Grab:

1. Double-click the Grab icon to open it.
2. To capture the entire screen, press Command Z.
   To capture a selected portion of the screen, press Command Shift A. You’ll get a pointer as shown below; press-and-drag to select the area you want to capture.

How Fast is your Internet? Really?

Test the speed of your Internet connection.

Curious how fast your DSL or Cable Internet connection is compare with other providers? There are a number of websites that let you test how fast your internet connection really is. Here is a link to the site we use most:

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

Follow the instructions and scroll down to pick a test server (we typically use the Speakeasy test server). The system will run a test to determine the speed of your Internet connection.

Here is mine at work. Pretty Weak!!

Subsribe to RSS News Feeds *Easy*

Subscribe to RSS news feeds in Safari.

Most blogs today offer news feeds using a technology called RSS. These feeds provide an easy way to stay updated whenever new articles (or tips) have been posted to your favorite blog.

We’ve created an animation showing how this process works in the latest version of Apple’s Sarafi web browser. The rest of this tip includes more detailed step-by-step instructions.

Emailing Web Pages

If you run across a web page you want to share with a friend, don’t send her a link to it — send her the page itself. Just press Command-I and a dialog will appear, asking for the email address of the person you want to send this web page to. Just enter her email address, along with your text message, and click send, and it will send the contents of that page (complete with graphics, formatting, links, etc.) to your friend. She’ll be able to see that page right within her email application.

One Click Tip to Adjust the Dock

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!

Run Your Own Movie, Book, Music Or Games Rental Service With Delicious Library

For USD$40, you can start your own rental business with Delicious Monster’s Delicious Library app. Although, USD$40 may sound like much at first, but after finding out the priceless features that ship with this cataloging app, you’ll realise that its well worth every penny.

Enabling Tabbed Browsing In Safari

Tabbed browsing has now pretty much become a standard user Internet browsing experience these days. Other than Apple’s Safari, most browsers support similar versions of tabbed browsing — Mozilla Firefox.

For those of you who’re still scratching your nogg’ins, tabbed browsing is the ability for an Internet browser to open multiple Web pages in a single Web browser. To keep things in order, most Web browsers present the multiple Web pages as tabs on the browser’s tool bar (see: Diagram 1.0). Not only does this save precious screen real estate but also enhances the user experience when it comes to Web research.

OS X Software: Quicksilver

 

For as long as I’ve been using OS X, LaunchBar has reined supreme as the one shareware application I could never use the operating system without, and the first download suggested to anyone switching over from Windows. For launching applications and accessing local content without grabbing the mouse, LaunchBar was the only game in town and worth every penny of the $39 registration fee.

But there’s a new gunslinger on the horizon — run, don’t walk, and download Quicksilver.

Copy Songs from your ipod to Mac

Senuti is a simple application for transfering songs from your iPod back to your computer.

There are many good reasons that someone would have to transfer music from her iPod back to her computer. There are many good ways to do it, too. Senuti is the only alternative that will give you the power and convenience that you need, wrapped in an interface that is extremely easy to use, at a cost that you can’t complain about.

• Lightning fast There’s a little file on your iPod called the iTunesDB file. What does that mean to you? Nothing. What does that mean to me? Everything. Every bit of information on every song on your iPod is stored in this little file. Every bit of information on your playlists is stored in this file, too. It’s how iTunes knows what’s on your iPod. It’s how your iPod knows what’s there, too. There isn’t a much faster way to figure out what’s on your iPod.

OSX Shortcuts

Mac OS X Shortcuts

Many of these shortcuts can be customized (eg the Exposé shortcuts), as explained in Customizing shortcuts below.

 

 

Symbols seen on Mac menus and non-US Apple keyboards, with their common names

command-option-esc	force quit
command-option-eject	sleep now
command-shift-Q	log out
command-shift-option-Q	log out without confirmation
command-control-eject	restart
command-option-control-eject	shut down
command-tab	cycle between open applications
command-`	*after* having pressed command-tab, it will cycle between open applications in reverse
command-shift-tab	cycle between open applications in reverse direction
command-`	cycle between open windows in the selected application
command-shift-`	cycle between open windows in the selected application in reverse direction
control-F4	cycle between open windows in all applications
control-shift-F4	cycle between open windows in all applications in reverse direction
F9	Exposé for all windows (Panther and newer)
F10	Exposé for all windows in selected application
F11	Exposé to reveal desktop
F12	Dashboard (Tiger only)
control-F2	activate keyboard control of the menu bar
control-F3	activate keyboard control of the Dock
control-F8	activate keyboard control of the Menu Extras (right side of menu bar)
command-space	activate Spotlight (Tiger) or switch between keyboard layouts (pre-Tiger systems)
command-option-control-,	decrease the screen contrast
command-option-control-.	increase the screen contrast
command-option-8	turn screen zooming on or off
command-option-=	zoom in (if screen zooming is on)
command-option–	zoom out
command-option-control-8	invert the screen colors
command-delete	delete file
spacebar	when dragging file onto folder it will spring open without the usual delay