Category: Mac Treat

Last week, I wrote about Googling (I love how that’s a verb now) the problem I had with the Illustrator icon. Well, I found the answer to my problem, as well as a few other nuggets of information—specifically a way to take a screenshot with the mouse included. The tip comes from Anil at Nixtechnica,…

On the Mac, there are two easy keyboard shortcuts for selecting multiple files at a time. These shortcuts work in most OS X applications, including Address Book, Mail, iTunes, and iPhoto. I use these shortcuts while scrolling through iPhoto to quickly select photos for a photo album; I use these shortcuts while scrolling through iTunes…

By default, Mac OS X shows a generic, white icon when displaying a thumbnail of an image in a folder or on the Mac’s desktop. Many people find this frustrating, especially switchers who are used to the way Windows shows a little preview thumbnail of the actual image. Fortunately it’s very easy to change this,…

Did you know that you can perform simple calculations with Spotlight in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard? (NOT 10.4 Tiger, as earlier reported, sorry!) All you have do is enter the numbers you’d like to add, subtract, multiply or divide in the Spotlight bar, and Spotlight will automatically update on the fly with the answer. I…

Did you know you can open files by dragging them onto an application icon, including icons in your Mac’s dock? For example, let’s say you want to open a Word file in Text Edit. Simply drag the Word file onto Text Edit’s icon, and blammo, it opens right up. I use this to quickly open…

What? What did you say? One in three American adults has some form of hearing loss. While this is largely age-related, the problem is statistically exacerbated by overly-loud personal audio devices, such as the iPod. Indeed, the iPod and its signature white earbuds are often singled out as a cause of noise-related hearing loss. There…

Dashboard Widgets found in OS 10.4 and 10.5 are featured as a means to keep information within a one-click reach. One of the cool features of 10.5 with Safari 3 is that you can select pieces of a webpage to become Widgets. Upon testing this out, I just discovered a cool feature the other day…

We have mentioned this tip in the past, but I was reminded of it last week when I had to put my data back together on the new computer. I had a backup of my iPhoto Library I wanted to restore, but I also wanted to keep the new one I had created in the…

This week’s treat is not necessarily a Mac OS treat, but it’s one that saved my proverbial life a couple of days ago, so I thought it warranted a mention. It’s courtesy of Jayson from Circus Ponies, the purveyors of NoteBook, my favorite organizational tool for the Mac. I use NoteBook for my passwords, to-do’s…

by Matt@smalldog.com and Ed@Smalldog.com FROM MATT: If you’re working on a confidential document and someone walks into the room who shouldn’t see your screen, you can instantly turn the screen down to minimum brightness (totally dark) by pressing ctrl-shift-eject. To turn the brightness back to where it was, press any key. This is a small…