I just found this nice little feature to show recent items in Dock. The choice is: recent documents, servers, volumes, items and my all favourite – recent applications.
To enable it you will need to use Onyx. What, you don’t have Onyx? Alright, shhhhh… I won’t tell anyone, go quickly to Titanium software website and get it. It’s free.
Open Onyx, select Parameters > Dock and click on Add next to Recent/Favorite items Stack. Enjoy!
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.
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.
A few days ago a friend of mine, a recent switcher to Mac, asked me – Why there is no hard disk activity indicator on Macs? I couldn’t tell him why, but I could feel the pain. When I switched to Mac a few years ago, I had the same issue, not knowing what the hard disk was doing was driving me absolutely crazy.
Fortunately another friend of mine suggested using MenuMeters, a tool that sits in the menu bar and displays the hard disk activity, network activity, CPU load and memory usage. Simple, unobtrusive and very efficient way to show exactly what I wanted. I have used it from the day one… OK, from the day 60 or so, and I couldn’t live without it.
This is what my menu bar looks like:
From left to right – Gmail notifier, MenuMeters network activity (top: upload speed, bottom: download speed), MenuMeters CPU load (can show individual cores or combined, as in my case) then the MenuMeters hard disk activity (the red arrow-down indicates h/d writes and the yellow up-arrow indicates h/d reads) and the rest are the well known AirPort, battery, time and Spotlight.
I don’t use MenuMeters memory usage indicator for one simple reason – if my Mac is low on memory I’ll feel it soon enough.
I know there are some other tools out there, but I found MenuMeters perfectly suited for exactly what I need, nothing too much, and nothing to miss. MenuMeters is free tool and you can download it via Raging Menace.
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.
If you are happy to do a little code editing, you can modify the labels in the sidebar of your Finder (Leopard only). You can change the labels to the lower case, e.g. from PLACES to Places, or you can completely rename them.
You need to log in as an administrator (root) then navigate this way:
/Macintoch HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app
Right-click on Finder.app icon and select Show Package Contents the select Resources/English.Iproj
Once in this folder, locate the file LocalizableCore.Strings and copy it somewhere else, (e.g. Option-Click and drag it to the Desktop) just in case things go wrong.
Now, back to your Finder and edit the file LocalizableCore.Strings (double-click)
Scroll down to lines 50-53 where you can modify the following values:
“SD5″ = “DEVICES”;
“SD6” = “SHARES”;
“SD7” = “SEARCH FOR”;
“SD8” = “PLACES”;
and change them any way you like. I have changed mine to
“SD5″ = “Devices”;
“SD6” = “Network”;
“SD7” = “Search for”;
“SD8” = “Places”;
Once you have saved the file you need to either log out and log in, or simply restart the Finder. Open Terminal and type killall Finder and press return.
You can do the same with the iTunes, however the path is slightly different:
/Macintosh HD/Applications/iTunes then right-click and Show Package Contents, then select Resources/English.Iproj and edit the file called Localizable.strings. (You have already backed it up, haven’t you?)
Find the lines 162 – 165
“135.011″ = “LIBRARY”;
“135.012″ = “DEVICES”;
“135.013″ = “STORE”;
“135.014″ = “PLAYLISTS”;
and make the changes any way you like.
