This is the summary of some tips for new Mac users I have posted in my blog over the past 18 months. If you are new to Mac, I would recommend you read them, you may find some of them very handy, a few maybe quite fascinating.

Installing applications on Mac is somewhat different to the installation you may have experienced on Windows. While some new users struggle to get it at first, it is incredibly simple and easy. [details]

The Dock provides easy access to some of the applications on your Mac, displays which applications are currently running, and holds windows in their minimized state. But if you see it only as a pretty strip of cool bouncing icons, then you’re dead wrong. There is so much more to Dock then you could imagine. [details]

What’s the jelly bean’s job in OS X – We all know about that jellybean on the top right corner of OS X windows. And we also know that clicking it will toggle the toolbar on and off. But what if we wanted to customise the toolbar even further. [details]

Shortcut to Desktop – Sometimes, when saving the file, we’d like to have it saved directly to the Desktop, but the option provided by OSX points somewhere else. This explains how to save the file to desktop in one keystroke. [details]

Accessing menus – If you come from Windows world and are used to using menus, you may feel a little strange that you can’t do it on Mac. Actually … you can. [details]

Zooming the screen – One of the great features of OS X (10.4) is that you can zoom in the screen, perfect when viewing small images. [details]

Slideshows in Finder – Imagine you have 80 photos on a CD and you’d like to preview them all. You can either double-click on each one to open them in Preview, import them all to iPhoto, or simply use Slideshow in Finder. [details]

Changing icons in OS X – There are trillions of beautiful icons for Mac out there, so why not use them, you can replace your default icon in a few simple step. [details]

Screen capture and text clipping – One thing I couldn’t live without is the screen capture, lets you select an area, window or full screen. And capturing text is even easier, just select and drag away. [details]

Switching windows and 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 there is something else that works even better. [details]

Other things you may find useful are Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts and Most popular Mac applications, as well as few handy tricks such as invert screen and slow motion.

We all know about Command-Tab function on Mac and Alt-Tab on Windows. But what if we have multiple windows of the same application, Safari for example, and want to switch between them?

Command-Tab won’t be of any help as it will give us only one window of each application to deal with.

I guess quite a few people didn’t know this, myself included. You simply press Command–~ (tilde). That’s the key just above the Tab key on your keyboard. Sweet and simple.

Another cool thing I figured out while fooling playing around with my Mac. If you are in any cocoa application and select some text, press Command–Shift–Y and the text is automatically stored in a sticky note on your desktop. A perfect reminder right before your eyes.

Not only this works with the text, but the hyperlinks will be stored as well, which is nice.

Images? Well… yes, see below. I was really surprised to see it capturing an image and also being able to save it.

Another way of capturing the selection is if you click on Application name in the menu bar, select Services and then Make New Sticky Note.

And no, it doesn’t work in Firefox.

Read my earlier article Cool things you can do on Mac for more tips.

[tags]OS X, Cool, Stickies, windows[/tags]

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