Silvermac

Even though Mac is a very fine operating system and arguably far more stable and secure than other OSs, Mac has its own woes. It happens sometimes that Mac starts behaving strangely, locking up, endless ‘beach balls’, applications settings making no sense and serving you with similar annoyances. So what’s wrong ?

There are three usual suspects; disk errors, permissions and cache.

So lets have a look at how to fix each of them. Please note, these are ‘usual’ suspects, there might be something else wrong with your computer but fixing these three will give you a very good chance of happy life afterwards.

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If you are typing something in any cocoa application and you are not sure how to spell the word, Mac OS X has a nice feature giving you some suggestions.

For example you are trying to write that ridicul.. redicuou… ridicuol … errr … ridiculously complicated word, and for a million dollars you wouldn’t be able to get it right just now. All you need to do is to type part of the word and hit escape on your keyboard (or F5, thanks Jeff). The list of suggestions drops down and you just pick the right one, that simple.

I have tried it in Mail.app, iChat, TextEdit, RapidWeaver, iWeb, Mac Journal and few other applications, and it works fine.

Have you ever encountered a strange icon in your System Preferences, like the one below ?

If you did, here is a simple way how to fix this.

Close the System Preferences and open the Finder. Navigate to your
Home folder > Library > Caches. Find the following files:

• com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
• com.apple.preferencepanes.searchin­dexcache

and delete them.

Now empty your Trash can (right click > Empty Trash)

Open System Preferences, your problem should be fixed.

[tags] OSX System preferences, icon [/tags]

In January 2006 I wrote an article about some cool things you can do on your Macintosh computer. One of the things I discussed was screen capture in Mac OS-X, and in many comments, both on Digg and my website, I’ve noticed that number of people didn’t quite understand its full potential. Some Windows users’ comments go along the lines of ‘In Windows you just press “Print Screen” on the keyboard, how’s that for a cool feature?’ or even ‘Print screen is all you need for a screen capture in Windows.”

Let’s think about this for a moment. Firstly, the key label ‘Print screen’ itself is wrong. One thing you would expect from it is to, well – print the screen. You press it and the content of the screen gets printed on your printer. But no, all you get is screen content copied into the clipboard. For the new computer users pressing it usually leads to “What the…” situation. At least on Windows, I’m not so sure about Linux.

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A picture of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, taken in 1976.