Silvermac

One of the very frustrating things in Mac OS X is that you cannot click a button and show Desktop. Well, you can … sort of. You have three options:

• Press F11, this will engage expose and move all windows to the edge of your screen,
• Click anywhere on your desktop while holding Cmnd-Option on your keyboard – this will hide all programs, except Finder if open, or
• You can use ShowDesktop, a free application by Everyday Software that sits in your dock or your menu bar and shows desktop by simply clicking on it.

One of the new functions of iPhoto 09 are Faces. When you select the Faces in the menu bar on the left you will see a cork board with the thumbnails of faces that iPhoto has identified in your library. The default thumbnail photo, or the key photo, is not always the best choice, so you’d like to change it.

There are two ways of doing this. Firstly, you can click on a little “i” icon in the bottom right corner of the photo, then skim through the photos until you find the one you like. Click on it and your new key photo will be set.

The other and easier way of doing this is simply to skim through the images (slide your mouse pointer over the thumbnail) while on the cork board, and once you see the photo you’d like to set as a key, just hit space bar. The new key photo is set. The same applies for the Events view thumbnails.

An extra tip – if you are skimming through the Faces, hold down the Option button, this will show you the entire photo, not only the face.

You can change your display contrast by using a simple keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl + Option + Cmnd + period (or >) to increase the contrast, or
Ctrl + Option + Cmnd + comma (or <) to decrease it.

Dock Spaces is an application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks and swap anytime you want from the menu bar. It will radically improve your productivity, and completely reinvent your user interface experience.

Spaces integration will offer you a different Dock depending on your Space. A native Cocoa application, FREE of charge and Leopard only.

Here is a very handy tip for all of you who like to have a messy and crowded desktop, with hundreds many windows open at the same time.

You are writing an article and referencing at the same time from another source, say the web browser. Now you need to move that browser window in the background, but it really annoys you that every time you do that, you lose the focus of your main window, or even a group of windows. Photoshop, anyone?

Don’t worry, doesn’t need to happen. Simply hold the Command key down, then click on the window in the background and move it.

The window will move in the background, without affecting the harmony of your desktop mess. You can even move it ‘through’ the foreground window, it will just keep going like there’s nothing in its way.

If you are one of a numerous victims of MacBook and MacBook Pro hard drive failures, there is a glimpse of hope that you can still have your data recovered. It involves removing the hard drive from its enclosure, from the computer in this case.

Removing the hard drive from a MacBook is a breeze, it takes good part of a few minutes.  However, MacBook Pro owners will need some bravery, surgical precision and, of course, lots of time. Be aware that opening the MacBook Pro will definitely void your warranty.

Sometimes the drive heads get stuck in a parking bay and consequently your hard drive fails to read or boot. There is no clear indication that would help distinguish between this and the genuinely dead hard drive, but since it’s not working anyway, you can still give it a try. Often this fixes the issue.

Remove the hard drive from your computer and hold it on the palm of one hand. Give it one flat-handed brisk slap on the top of the drive. Just one. Then place it back into your computer and see if it worked.

If it’s still dead then it’s bad news. If it works – you have a decision to make; leave it as it is, and continue with your life like nothing ever happened, or get the data off the drive as soon as possible and get a replacement drive. It’s really up to you.

You’ve also learned about the benefits of backing up, so go on and get that external drive, they’re cheap as chips now, and back-up, back-up, back-up …