Silvermac

We all know about Command-Tab function on Mac and Alt-Tab on Windows. But what if we have multiple windows of the same application, Safari for example, and want to switch between them?

Command-Tab won’t be of any help as it will give us only one window of each application to deal with.

I guess quite a few people didn’t know this, myself included. You simply press Command-~ (tilde). That’s the key just above the Tab key on your keyboard. Sweet and simple.

Another cool thing I figured out while fooling playing around with my Mac. If you are in any cocoa application and select some text, press Command-Shift-Y and the text is automatically stored in a sticky note on your desktop. A perfect reminder right before your eyes.

Not only this works with the text, but the hyperlinks will be stored as well, which is nice.

Images? Well… yes, see below. I was really surprised to see it capturing an image and also being able to save it.

Another way of capturing the selection is if you click on Application name in the menu bar, select Services and then Make New Sticky Note.

And no, it doesn’t work in Firefox.

Read my earlier article Cool things you can do on Mac for more tips.

[tags]OS X, Cool, Stickies, windows[/tags]

We all know about that jellybean on the top right corner of OS X windows. And we also know that clicking it will toggle the toolbar on and off.

For example in Finder, clicking the jellybean we go from this…

…to this.

Or the other way around, which is very handy when installing applications on OS X.

But what if we wanted to customise the toolbar even further. Sure, we can right-click on it, select ‘Customise toolbar’ and go from there. But there is something else we can do. Way easier and rather cool.

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Going through the site statistics today I noticed quite a few search keywords related to minimising windows in OS X. One particular query appeared four times over the past week – ‘slowing down genie effect’.

Well, here is the answer – hold down the shift key and click the yellow button in your window top bar.

There are actually a few other tricks you may do with minimising windows in OS X. In system preferences you can select either ‘genie’ or ‘scale’ effect. But there is another one, called ‘suck’. This one can’t be enabled via system preferences, but it can be via the terminal.

So open your terminal and type the following line:

defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect suck

and hit enter. Now close the terminal, log out and log back in, and voila – your windows … errr… well … ‘suck’.

To return to ‘genie’ or ‘scale’ simply go to the system preferences and select either, it will instantly change to the selected one.

What is the slow-genie good for? I’m not sure, if not just to show off. But if you want to do so, then you may better opt for an Expose show.

Open a few windows, hold down the shift key and activate Expose, usually by pressing F9 on your keyboard. Your windows are being tiled in a slow-motion and it looks so cool.

But I bet you didn’t know about this one!

Expose has a built-in keyboard window switcher. Try this; open a few windows, activate Expose and then repeatedly hit the tab key. Watch your windows switching like the cards in a deck. Once you have the window you want to use, just hit enter and the window is all yours.

For those finding a similar thing in Windows Vista, I hate to say – this has been part of OS X since 10.3 (Panther) release in October 2003, when Vista was still called Longshot Longhorn.

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…

Every so often someone asks me “How do I install this application on my Mac?” I must admit, I was also a little confused when I switched to Mac, so a little help from a friend was as good as gold.

There are a few ways to install applications on Mac. The most common one is with a dmg file, or the disk image. In an example below, we’ll try to install ImageWell, a nice little application that I use to edit images for this website, including the ones below.

First we download the application. The file is called imagewell3r241.dmg and will be saved onto the desktop. Now double-click the file,  this will mount the disk image in this case called imagewell3. It looks like a little hard drive on your desktop.

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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.