Silvermac

Have you used Help in Leopard? Not yet? Well, I think you should, because it’s so cool. Go and try it now, it’s really fun.

Open Safari and, let’s assume you have no idea how to view the source of the web page, click on Help and type ‘view source‘

All other operating systems, including OS X Tiger and earlier versions, would tell you how to do it, something like “In menu bar, select view, then scroll down and select View Source…”

However, Leopard will show you how to do it. So once you type ‘show source‘, just hover your mouse over the first result line in search menu and voilà, Leopard opens the View menu and shows you where the option is.

So just click on it and Bob’s your uncle.

I’m sure there are quite a few Mac users who like the 3D Dock in Leopard but can’t stand the glowing dot indicating application that is running. I’m also sure that quite a few users would love to see the return of the black triangle indicator to the Dock.

It’s possible, and in fact fairly easy. Ready to do some drilling into the OS X ?

First, you need the triangle, of course. Download indicators.zip and unpack it on your Desktop. The files are:

• indicator_large.png (42 x 14 pixel)
• indicator_medium.png (32 x 11 pixel)
• indicator_small.png (14 x 8 pixel)

Why three of them? You will notice later that, continue reading…

Some users have experienced the blue screen of death while installing Mac OS X Leopard. Installation goes fine until your Mac reboots, but then you are stuck with the blue screen, with your mouse pointer being the only thing working.

A cold restart doesn’t help either, you come back to the blue screen again. Some users have contacted Apple and have been told to wait for 2 – 3 hours and the installation will continue (oh, yeah right!), but this seems to be going nowhere.

The problem seems to be a process or an application that loads at start up and then hangs. In many cases, including myself, the application causing this problem is Application Enhancer (you had the Clear Dock installed, haven’t you?).

If you are reading this before upgrading your computer, go and remove the Clear Dock now. If you are already at the stage of pulling your hair – worry not, there is a bit of work to do, but it’s likely to be fine after that.

Reboot your Mac while holding Cmnd-S on your keyboard. Your computer will boot into the single user mode, no graphics, only the good old command line.

To modify files you need to type the following

/sbin/fsck -fy (then press return)
/sbin/mount -uw / (then press return again)

You can either go straight to their respective folders to delete these four files, or you can do it in one go by typing the following commands and pressing return on your keyboard after each line:

rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework
rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/ApplicationEnhancer.bundle
rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

Now reboot your Mac from the installation DVD, open Disk Utility and repair the permissions. Reboot again, this time your Mac should boot into Leopard.

iMovie HD (06) has a nice little function that splits the video clip at any point you want.

With iMovie 08 there is very little reason you would want to split the clip, so the oh-eight doesn’t have this option. But if you really want to do it, there is a way around. The entire work is done in the event pane, the lower half of the screen.

Here is a clip that we want to split in two.

First, we need to spread the clip wide in order to enhance the selection precision, continue reading…

iMovie 08 has finally got its own file management system, or rather the library management (just like iPhoto and iTunes), and things look better than ever before. You open the iMovie and all you need is right there.

But there is one problem with this – the size of the library. Try importing half a dozen of your DV tapes onto your hard drive and you’ll see what I mean. One hour of digital video takes about 10GB on your hard drive.

Thankfully there is a way to get around this. Nik Friedman has developed a script that will compress your videos down to approximately 30% of its original size, with a minimal loss of quality.

Head over to iNik.net and get the script, it’ll cost you only a thank-you-Nik line.

In iPhoto 08 (iPhoto 7) you can preview the photos contained in an Event by slowly moving the mose pointer left-right while hovering, somewhat similar to the coverflow in iTunes. But if you have many photos in an Event, it may be a bit tricky moving your mouse pointer pixel by pixel.

So what do you do? You select the Event thumbnail and then preview the contents with the left and right arrows on your keyboard.

While previewing photos this way, you may want to change the key photo as well. There are two ways of doing this, one is to right-click and select ‘Make key photo”, or simply press spacebar and the current photo will be set as a key photo.

I’ve just noticed a strange change when in edit mode. When editing a photo, you can always preview the original and compare it to the edited one before saving.

In iPhoto 06 you do this by pressing Control key. In iPhoto 08, for some reason you have to press Shift key. I wonder why.