Silvermac

Most of us didn’t know that there is an advanced editing mode in iPhoto 06. I just learned it today and it’s rather useful. This is how it works.

Open iPhoto, pick an image and double-click on it to open it in the editor view. Now press Control-CapsLock-9 to switch the advanced edit mode. No, I’m not on drugs, it is Caps Lock key we use here.

Nothing has happened, now what? Select either Retouch tool and press the tab on your keyboard a few times. You will see the tool pointer (or cursor if you like to call it that way) will change between normal mode, enhanced mode (see below) and lighten mode.

When in enhanced mode, you can change the size of the pointer by pressing [ key or ] key (left or right square brackets). To change intensity, that is the number below the pointer, simply press { to decrease or } to increase it.

Similarly with Red Eye tool, if you press tab, the pointer will toggle between standard and enhanced mode. In the enhanced mode you can change its size by using square bracket keys again.

Once you close the iPhoto, the enhanced mode is off, so you’ll need to switch it on next time you need it.

One thing I don’t like about this is that Caps Lock stays on once you finished editing. If you are like me, you can type half the page without looking at the screen and then … argh!

Shhhhh … Don’t tell anyone, I am typing this on a Windows XP computer. What happened? – you ask. Well, here is a little adventure I have decided to go on for about 10 days.

My other hobby is ham radio and for that I need a PC with Windows to run a specific program, and to run it all the time, 24/7. It’s called Logger 32. At times I have to use another piece of software, which is also a Windows only application (N1MM logger), so I have decided to get myself a nice little PC and have it running on my radio desk. Having Windows XP running in Parallels on my MacBook Pro all the time is just not practical for me. continue reading…

Every now and then I come across forum posts asking how to resize images in OS X. While there is a function to resize images in iPhoto 06, it is far from being simple, particularly for the new user.

In iPhoto 06 you need to select an image, or images, click on File | Export, then specify image size, location and finally export. It would be much easier to be able to right-click on an image and select Resize. Hopefully Apple will do something about it in iLife 07.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of third party applications that come to the rescue.

The one I use is a very simple and free application – ImageWell. One thing I like about it is ability to add rounded borders to images. Totally cool, I use it all the time on this website.

Below are few others, some are free, some you have to pay for, but you can download trial versions and try it before deciding which way to go.

Sizerox is an application that resizes your “JPEG”, “TIFF”, “PNG” or “PSD” images and saves them as “JPEG”. You can easily resize, rename, crop, rotate and watermark your images from your digital camera or scanner to send them with e-mails, to use them on the web or to upload them to your iPod

EasyCrop is a small application that crops and resizes images, has a live preview, supports drag and drop and has built-in screen capture tool

EasyBatchPhoto frees you from repetitive tasks of converting, resizing and watermarking images by processing hundreds, or even thousands, of images with a single drag-and-drop.

iResize – Batch resize and compress images in .jpeg, .pict, .tiff,.gif, .psd formats.

SmallImage is a simple and efficient tool to batch process JPEG files, resize them, recompress them, remove embedded profiles and make them ready for the web or store them efficiently.

Then there are other options, such as Apple scripts that let you resize images by just dragging and dropping images onto a script icon (on Mac OSX Hints) or even Automator actions, one of which is Resize Pictures Suite.

And finally let’s not forget that Apple has done pretty good job when it comes to resizing images for emailing. Not perfect, but it works fine in most of the cases.

When in iPhoto, select an image, or several images, click on Email icon and choose from four options: small, medium, large or full size. You can do the same in an email window, look at the bottom right.

Of course, you can do resizing with applications such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Graphic Converter. But if all you need it to resize image, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on these applications.

Many new Mac users are slightly disappointed that Cmnd+Tab (Ctrl+Tab on Windows) is actually switching between Applications and not between the windows, as they used to do in the Microsoft world.

But many didn’t know that you can actually switch between windows within an application by pressing Cmnd+~ (tilde).

Problem here is that you have to have the application in the foreground so you can switch the windows.

This is where Peter Maurer’s Witch comes to the rescue. Witch lets you access all of your windows by pressing a shortcut and choosing from a clearly arranged list of window titles.

Witch is a freeware utility and works like a charm, so no reason not to try it. Download free universal binary on Peter’s web site.

Ever wanted to run Internet Explorer on Mac OS X? Or maybe Microsoft Word, Excel, FrontPage? Guess what, you can now. Well, sort of.

The new Parallels desktop lets you use a tool called Coherence, it runs Windows in the background, but lets you use Windows applications in the foreground.

When you start Parallels and bot Windows, click on Coherence tool and it will neatly ‘integrate’ your Windows application into your OS X desktop. One thing that looks ugly is the Windows task bar, sitting just above the dock, but there’s a cure for this, too.

Jasenko suggested to tell Windows to auto hide the task bar, and move the OS X Dock to the right, this way everything looks better.

The best is, the Parallels Desktop lets you switch between two applications on two different operating systems, just like any two applications on one o/s.

But this is where things get really interesting. You can log into the OS X, open Parallels and then boot the Windows installation from another partition, the one you created with the BootCamp.

This makes running Windows and OS X at the same time one whole step closer, something I have predicted to be a ‘Big secret’ in my earlier article MacWorld San Francisco 2007 prediction.

I know, it’s only virtualisation, but think of it this way; BootCamp loads at the base of the boot process, defines partitions and decides what OS to load. Once OS X has loaded, an application within OS X (Parallels) boots another OS from another partition and lets its application run on host OS desktop.

Apple now has dual core processors in all their computers. All they need to do is; enable BootCamp to control processor, that is – let it assign one core to each operating system, then boot OS X and let it allocate memory and manage devices availability, then boot Windows.

I think we are close to switching between operating systems just like we are switching today between user accounts, or maybe even between applications.

[tags]OS X, BootCamp, Parallels, Windows, MacWorld, IE7 on Mac [/tags]

I just helped a friend to install LaunchBar 4 on his Mac and he wanted to run it invisible, but for some reason it just kept coming back.

I searched the internet forums and the way to do this is to add a few lines to a plist.info

Close LaunchBar and then locate it in your Finder. Right-click and select ‘Show package contents’, open the Contents folder, select info.plist and open it with TextEdit.

Add this to the file:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>

Save the file, log out and then log in again. Even though this should work now, for some reason it doesn’t work on Tiger.

What you need to do is this: Close LaunchPad if stil running, go to Applications folder, move the LaunchPad somewhere else (e.g. Desktop) and then move it back again to the Applications folder. Log out and log in again. Enjoy.

[tags]LaunchBar, invisible, OS X, Tiger[/tags]