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.

When you press the volume-up or volume-down key on your keyboard you will see a volume control indicator on your screen. There are only 16 steps and if you want to ‘fine-tune’ you will have to go to the system preferences and move the volume control slider pixel by pixel.

Well, not really. You can still do some fine tuning with your keyboard. Simply press and hold Shift+Option keys and then press volume-up or volume-down. The 16 increments will suddenly become 64, as each step is divided into four. See the rightmost white square on the image above, it’s only half-off, another notch would make it 3/4 off and so on.

You can also toggle the volume feedback sound by simply holding the Shift key while changing the volume with the volume keys. And if you really need to access the sound settings in the  System Preferences, but feel somewhat lazy to reach for the mouse, just hold the Option key and press volume-up or volume-down on your keyboard.