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Mac OS X Leopard Server features
In addition to discussing several new features for the consumer edition of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple has disclosed some new functionality for Mac OS X 10.5 Server, also scheduled to ship in October. Among them: a wiki server; Podcast Producer; Spotlight (find content stored on other servers); and a new iCal Server, based…
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Alt-TAB application switching
This is one of the only things I’d missed about windows, since I started using OSX….the Alt-TAB application switching behaviour. I know, you can do switching under OSX using Command-TAB, but it’s just not the same. That’s where witch comes in. It’s a totally configurable donationware app that once loaded allows you to use Alt-TAB…
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Taking Screenshots
To take a screen shot, hold down the following keyboard shortcuts. * shift + command (the Apple key) + 3 for a shot of the entire screen. * shift + command + 4 for a way of clicking and dragging around the area you want a shot of. * shift + command + 4 then…
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Folder Actions…..Whhaaattt?
So I’ve been wondering about Folder Actions for a while now….they are actually quite neat, if you know what they do. This is a feature of the Finder that very few people use, yet it is so powerful. Folder actions allow you to perform an action to any file that is dropped into the folder.…
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Rectangular Selections
Many Mac OS X applications allow rectangular selections. That is, selecting multiple lines of text, without having to select up to the end of each line. This can be useful if you have created a text formatted table, and want to select an entire column, or if you want to modify the same thing on…
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Only on a Mac
So all you Mac freaks….here is something to show your PC friends. Set your system screen saver to something cool (RSS Visualizer) and run the Terminal. At the command line type the following command (make sure your Desktop’s background is not covered with windows): /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background Neat or what? You can stop it using Ctrl-C.
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Resizing Mac Partitions on-the-fly
As of OSX 10.4.6 you get a extra bonus if you use the terminal and run diskutil. The new addition is the function resizeVolume. Note that this command works only on Intel Macs with hard disks formatted using the GPT (GUID Partition Table) format with a journaled Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+) file system. This…
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Speed up Sheets…
Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime time where time is a time in seconds from, say, .001 to 2.
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Set/Change the default Umask…
Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key: defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences NSUmask # defaults write -g NSUmask -int # The first sets the system default, the second sets the per-user default. The NSUmask may not be honored by software that has not been adapted for OS X. # is the umask…
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Turn off Dashboard…
Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned” by the Dock, so to make your changes take effect, you need to restart the Dock. The…