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.

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.

In January 2006 I wrote an article about some cool things you can do on your Macintosh computer. One of the things I discussed was screen capture in Mac OS-X, and in many comments, both on Digg and my website, I’ve noticed that number of people didn’t quite understand its full potential. Some Windows users’ comments go along the lines of ‘In Windows you just press “Print Screen” on the keyboard, how’s that for a cool feature?’ or even ‘Print screen is all you need for a screen capture in Windows.”

Let’s think about this for a moment. Firstly, the key label ‘Print screen’ itself is wrong. One thing you would expect from it is to, well – print the screen. You press it and the content of the screen gets printed on your printer. But no, all you get is screen content copied into the clipboard. For the new computer users pressing it usually leads to “What the…” situation. At least on Windows, I’m not so sure about Linux.

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Dictionary has been part of Mac OS X  since 10.4 and there is a feature that not many Mac users know about.

When you are in any of Cocoa (Mac native) applications you can hover your mouse above a word and press Ctrl-Cmd-D on your keyboard. You will get the Dictionary description for that word. Just move your mouse over to any other word and the Dictionary description for that word is displayed instantly.

You don’t need to have the Dictionary open at all.

A few examples where this works are; Safari, Mail.app, MacJournal, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, iWeb, etc.  Unfortunately it doesn’t work with any of the Mozilla applications, including Firefox, Camino and Flock.

Invert screen

Another function that not many Mac users know is “Invert screen”. Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard and see your Mac invert its colours.

One could ask – Why would you ever want to do this? It comes very handy when your eyes are tired and some genius has been experimenting with background and text colours on his or her website … MySpace anyone?

It is also irreplaceable tool in photography, during the post production editing. If you have a large, bright picture and you are trying to locate any dark spots that you need to clone out (e.g. sensor dust, birds in the sky, etc.) it gets really tough on your eyes after a few minutes. Reverse colours and look for bright spots on the dark background – they stand out like Christmas lights at night.

It would be funny if you did this in Apple store and watched the salesperson freaking out.

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…

Slow motion

When you want to minimise a window,  simply click on the yellow button in the top left corner. The window quickly goes down to the right end of your dock using either scaled or genie effect.

But  if you hold down the shift key while clicking  the window will minimise in slow motion, approximately five times slower than the normal speed.

Text clipping

I love telling this to my friends Windows users. I ask them how would they save a piece of text from the document they are viewing at the moment, for example a web page.

Their answer is usually something like: “Oh, easy. You select the text, right click and copy. Then you go to the desktop, right click and select New | Text file, give the file some name and click away. Now you double click the file to open it, paste the text in there and save it. Simple, isn’t it?”

Then I show them how to do it on Mac. I select the text and drag it to the desktop and that’s it. Dropped jaws everywhere.

If you want to include this text somewhere, say in an email, you simply drag the file into your composed email. Simple as that.

 

Screen capturing

This is my favourite of the Mac goodies. There are few ways to capture the screen on Mac.

Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png.  As of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) this file is named Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png.

You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small cross hair selector on your screen.

Select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png. As of Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) you also get the infomration on the picture size (in pixels) which changes as you move the crosshair.

And finally you can capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the cross hair, press the space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-spot. You can even capture the window that is in the background, as long as a part of it visible and allows you enough room to hover the camera icon over it.  Click on it and the window will be captured.

Again, the file will be safely placed on your desktop as … good guess, Screenshot-<date>-<time>.png

However, if you’d like to capture the screen (or part of it) to the clipboard rather than to desktop, simply hold the Control key down while capturing, i.e. Shift-Ctrl-Cmd-4.

This is very handy when you need to paste it straight into an email or any other document.

See some More cool stuff on your Mac

 

Sometimes we all wish to have a different icon for a folder, file type or application. And there are plenty of places to download them (like InterfaceLIFT ) but how to install them ? The answer is – easy.

Let’s have a look at my dock, the colour of the Firefox default icon just doesn’t fit in there. How about something blue ?

To change this we firstly need an icon. I downloaded icon from InterfaceLIFT and placed it onto my desktop. Now we open Finder, go to Applications and find Firefox. Right click on the icon and select Get Info. This will open the following window.

Now we need to go back to desktop and right click the icon we downloaded and select Copy.

Back to the Firefox info window where we need to click the Firefox icon once (left click). The icon will be selected and will have small shadow behind although barely visible.

All you need to do now is to paste your new icon, simply key in Command-V on your keyboard and you get this.

Now my dock looks a whole lot prettier.

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