Silvermac

We’ve all seen the common mistakes made by people new to OS X:

1) they close an application’s windows thinking the program has quit.
2) they’ll download Firefox and then run the browser from the disk image and then not be able to throw away the disk image because the program is still running. See number 1.
3) .exe files lie scattered around the desktop from aborted downloads of Flash Player or some screensaver-cursor-spyware doodad.
4) untitled folder. untitled folder 2. untitled folder 3…
5) Using Safari’s Google search field to get to hotmail.com.
6) Desktop Picture or Wallpaper is not a synonym for Screensaver.

I could go on, but you get the idea. What have you seen that are common mistakes made by people using Macs?

Source:  The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

I have put together a list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts (some are 10.4 specific) so this will hopefully be helpful to the new Mac users. You can access it by either following this link or simply select it from the “Pages” menu on the right.

Dictionary has been part of Mac OS X  since 10.4 and there is a feature that not many Mac users know about.

When you are in any of Cocoa (Mac native) applications you can hover your mouse above a 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.

You don’t need to have the Dictionary open at all.

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

Invert screen

Another function that not many Mac users know is “Invert screen”. Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard and see your Mac invert its colours.

One could ask – Why would you ever want to do this? It comes very handy when your eyes are tired and some genius has been experimenting with background and text colours on his or her website … MySpace anyone?

It is also irreplaceable tool in photography, during the post production editing. If you have a large, bright picture and you are trying to locate any dark spots that you need to clone out (e.g. sensor dust, birds in the sky, etc.) it gets really tough on your eyes after a few minutes. Reverse colours and look for bright spots on the dark background – they stand out like Christmas lights at night.

It would be funny if you did this in Apple store and watched the salesperson freaking out.

Get 5 GB of free cloud storage with a a bonus 500 MB if you register via SilverMac, so you can safely back-up, share and synchronise your documents, photos, videos, music…

Slow motion

When you want to minimise a window,  simply click on the yellow button in the top left corner. The window quickly goes down to the right end of your dock using either scaled or genie effect.

But  if you hold down the shift key while clicking  the window will minimise in slow motion, approximately five times slower than the normal speed.

Text clipping

I love telling this to my friends Windows users. I ask them 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 the 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. Simple, isn’t it?”

Then I show them how to do it on Mac. I select the text and drag it to the desktop and that’s it. Dropped jaws everywhere.

If you want to include this text somewhere, say in an email, you simply drag the file into your composed email. Simple as that.

Screen capturing

This is my favourite of the Mac goodies. There are few ways to capture the screen on Mac.

Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd-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.  As of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) this file is named Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png.

You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen.

Select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) you also get the infomration on the picture size (in pixels) which changes as you move the crosshair.

And finally you can capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the cross hair, press the space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-spot. You can even capture the window that is in the background, as long as a part of it visible and allows you enough room to hover the camera icon over it.  Click on it and the window will be captured.

Again, the file will be safely placed on your desktop as … good guess, Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png

However, if you’d like to capture the screen (or part of it) to the clipboard rather than to desktop, simply hold the Control key down while capturing, i.e. Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4.

This is very handy when you need to paste it straight into an email or any other document.

See some More cool stuff on your Mac

While iTunes MiniStore service was initially enabled by default in iTunes 6.0.2 it seems that Apple has decided after all to ask users for permission to start the service.

While BoingBoing claims The new version of the iTunes 6.0.2 installer pops up this screen before turning on the MiniStore, I’m not exactly sure how the change has occured. I have upgraded my iTunes to 6.0.2 about a week ago and the MiniStore was enabled, but I have disabled it the very first time I used it. Since then I used iTunes half a dozen times and have enabled MiniStore on one or two occasions just to have another look but disabled it in the end.

This morning, after reading BoingBoing article, I turned it on again but was surprised to see iTunes asking whether I’d like to turn it on or not. While that’s nice, I wonder how did they change the things around so I’m being asked this now? I didn’t run software update, and I didn’t do anything about iTunes. The software update is in fact enabled to notify me of the new software daily, but not to download anything, not even in the background.

Or could it be that the window with the blue background is the new “index” page of the Mini Store?

We all saw that video where the guys are comparing start up times between two iMacs, one running Intel and the other running G5 processor. If you are one of several people left on this planet who didn’t see it here is the link.

The difference in boot times is such that one gets impression that Intel chipped iMac blows the G5 away. Not so, I’m afraid. Whatever the guys did with the G5 it slowed it down considerably. And Intel iMac is actually hardly any faster than G5. How come? Simple, I used a stopwatch, that video and then my iMac.

Firstly, I have shut down my 20″ 1.8 GHz G5 iMac (rev 1), opened up the case and removed 256 MB of memory to have only 512 in it (I had 768 MB total, for those who don’t like maths:-). Then closed the case, booted it up and measured the times for different events by using the stop watch on my Sony-Ericsson T630 mobile phone. Processor setting is on ‘Highest’

First point is the Mac sound, second point is when Apple logo appears, third point is when “Starting Mac OS X” appears on the blue background and finally when the computer has completely booted – once the time is displayed in the menu bar (comes about a second or so after the dock has loaded)

And since I used stop watch on the mobile phone I performed the test 8 times and got the average times, even though the differences in measurements were minimal.

Then I played the video a few times and checked the times for same events on both machines. I can not pick up the time when the guy presses the buttons but my measurements from the moment he said “go” until the Mac sound give me 4.5 seconds. So I guess I might be wrong 0.5 – 1 seconds at most. But I’ll assume that the word “Go” is the starting point.

So, below are the scores for all three computers, you be the judge. Please note v G5 is the G5 from that video.

So if my G5 boots in under 41 seconds then the G5 in comparison video should boot in under 40 seconds, taking the processor speed into consideration (2.1 GHz).

Number of people made a fair comment – “Even though there seems to be something wrong with that G5 in the video, Intel’s boot time is astonishing!” I actually think it’s a bit disappointing after all the media fuss I expected more.

And that video … ah, never mind.

For quite a while now I’ve been considering buying wireless network adapter for my G5 iMac but the price just couldn’t justify the need. Occasionally I like to take my computer to the lounge room and use it from there, while the rest of the family is watching the movie or just hangs around. But dragging network cables all over the placce can be pain and the only other computer I have is an old 1.3 GHz Compaq laptop, running Windows XP with Netgear Wireless card. Even though the laptop does the job I prefer using the Mac in hot office than Windows in any climate.

Ah, it’s summer here in Australia and the longe is airconditioned while office is not and temerature difference might be as much as 10 degrees.

I looked up Apple’s AirPort Extreme card but at $119 it’s surely not an option. So I went and bought Assus WL-167 USB2 wireless network adapter. Everyone who lives in Brisbane knows that Game Dude is about the cheapest shop in town, but QLD Computer Group at Woolloongabba had it much cheaper, so I grabbed one for $39.

The adapter came nicely packed with manuals, installation CD, USB2 extension cable (about 30cm), a very handy USB universal joint and the neck lace. So I inserted CD and installed driver for Mac and rebooted. While rebooting I flipped through the manuals but couldn’t find a single word on Mac, it’s all about Windows, in six languages. But then again, manuals are like sex, good ones are great, bad ones are better than none.

After rebooting I opened the WLAN configuration utility (by Asus) but no matter what I did it wouldn’t detect my WLAN. Hmmmm… I thought the thing might be faulty so I quicklky got the laptop and installed Windows driver, after all the operating system is some five years old and any old driver should do, and it worked.

Back to iMac, short visit to Asus website and few minutes later I was installing a new driver. Another reboot and it’s all beauty, it works like a dream. It took me a couple of minutes to configure network and enter encryption key but the thing just works fine now. Ah, by the way, I discovered another two networks somewhere in the neighbourhood, something the Netgear adapter couldn’t find.

And here is the link for the driver (updated 26/04/2007, thanks Fred).  The one on the CD didn’t work but this one is OS X 10.4 driver and it seems to be just fine on G5 iMac.

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