Silvermac

If you are working on something (outside of your browser) and you need to get more information, the first thing that comes to mind is to search the web. Mac OS X has a very nice feature to search from the Dock, using Safari.

Let’s imagine you are writing a document about Napoleon, and you just can’t remember where he was born, so you want to ‘Google it’. Highlight the word ‘Napoleon’ and drag it onto Safari icon in Doc. Safari will open, search Google and return the results nearly instantly.

Dropping the text onto the Dock also works nicely with Apple Mail. Select any text, drag and drop it onto the Mail icon and a new email will be composed, already containing that text. Just add the recipient email address and the subject and send.

“… and iMac comes from the marriage of the excitement of the internet with the simplicity of Macintosh!” – these are the words that Steve Jobs introduced the all new Apple computer with back in 1998 – the iMac.

Below is the video of this historic event – enjoy.

Seems that some folks out there have some quite unique ideas.

Via Brisbane Times

If you are the Time machine fan, here is a very nice screen saver for your Mac.

You can download it via Deviant Art. If the screen saver is not enough, maybe a time machine wallpaper will set get you set for now.

Mac OS X has an in-built functionality of saving documents to a PDF file. This comes very handy in many situations and it doesn’t cost you a dime, unlike on some other platforms.

This is how you do it. Say you have a document in Apple Pages, a newsletter you have just created and you’d like to save it as a PDF file, so you can email it to the members of your club. In Pages click on File, then on Print, and the following box slides out:

Now click on the PDF button and you’ll see a few options. Select Save as PDF, name your file and select where to save it, and click Save. Simple as that.

One of the options I really like is Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder. When I pay for something online and get the payment confirmation page I simply select File / Print / PDF / Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder. The receipt is then automatically saved in ~/Documents/Web Receipts.

You can save a PDF of anything you could normally print; text documents, web pages, emails, screenshots, images, you name it.

One of the options that was available in Tiger (10.4) and has been removed from Leopard (10.5) is to compress the PDF document. However, there is a workaround, which unfortunately is not so obvious. Once you have saved the PDF, open it in Preview, then select File / Save as and from the Quatz Filter drop-down menu select Reduce File Size.

After abandoning the slow Office 2004 in favour of Apple’s iWork, I could hardly wait to get my hands on Office 2008. But the new Office performance is not where I have imagined it would be. It is slow, very very slow to lanch, and during the normal operation it feels somewhat faster than its predecessor, but not by any respectable margin.

I decided to run some tests just to see how fast does the new Office launch, and compared it to Apple’s own iWork.

The computer used for testing is a MacBook Pro with 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 2GB RAM. OK, it’s not the fastest rocket in the universe, but I guess it sits nicely somewhere in the middle between the latest C2Ds, and G4s and G5s, plenty of which are still out there.

I firstly timed the cold start; reboot the computer, wait for 2 minutes to make sure any background processes have finished and start the Word 2008. Then I closed the application (Cmd-Q) and reload it again several times. The time was measured from the moment I click the Dock icon to the moment the first character (u) is displayed in the application (I key in uuu as soon as the application opens on the screen).

I have repeated this 4 times and the figures below are the averages, however the results of individual measurements are very close.

The next step was doing the same four times with Excel 2008, four times with Pages and finally with Numbers.

Then I updated the Office to version 12.0.1 to see if there is any difference. Of course there is, just not what I expected. Repeated the test, rebooting four times for Word and for Excel, the cold start is much much slower, but the reload is a little faster.

I read a tip somewhere that you can speed up the launch of MS Word by disabling WYSIWYG fonts in Word preferences, and this is true. It reduced the launch time for about 7 seconds, but only the cold start, reload is of course unaffected. All tests were done with the WYSIWYG fonts turned off.