Mac How-Tos

If you want to speed up your web browsing, you can assign hotkeys to websites instead of having to look  through that long list of bookmarks. Here’s how you do it.

1. In system Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts

2. Click [+] and in the Application menu select Safari

3. In the section “Menu Title” add the existing bookmark’s name

4. Assign the bookmark’s hotkey

After assigning the hotkey, you should see the hotkey next to the bookmark’s name on the menubar.

Sadly this shortcut doesn’t work with FireFox, my browser of choice. I hope this is useful for you Safari users.

- Alexander Garovi

If you want to block others from having access to your computer when you are away, you can simply hit Shift-Command-Option-Q to logout of your user. There are downsides to this – all of your open applications will quit. If you put your computer to sleep instead, running applications will stop and resume when the Mac wakes up. MacLoc is an alternative, allowing you to logout while still running applications.

MacLoc is a very simple application to use,  requiring just a few clicks to get working. When downloaded there are two MacLoc apps – One is the regular, dock based application and the other is MacLoc ME, the menubar-based icon. To activate MacLoc ME, simply click the menubar icon and select ‘Activate’.

After clicking on one of the MacLoc icons, you will logout. Your open applications will be right where you left them when you login. MacLoc is the perfect solution for busy environments, preventing others from using your Mac.

- Alexander Garovi

Since this is the first article I’ve written in the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d write about something new. Twitter, the micro-blogging service has numerous clients to update your twitter account. The two clients that I’m going to compare are Iconfactory’s Twitterific and Seesmic’s Twhirl. In order to compare the pros and cons of these clients, I’ve used a combination of both Twitterific and Twhirl over the past few weeks.

Twitterific is a menubar-based application that is relatively easy to use. One of the things I like most about Twitterific is its fantastic UI that sits above any other windows open, regardless of whichever window is selected. Twitterific can update your tweets at a minimum of 3 minutes, which can be quite slow. My biggest problem with Twitterific is the fact that there are constant “Twitter Errors” where the connection between Twitter and Twitterific times out. This can be very annoying and enough to drive one towards using an alternate client.

Twhirl is another twitter client that works well. It seems to update faster than Twitterific and not have nearly as many connection errors. However, the UI of Twhirl is not as attractive as Twitterific, not having a transparent appearance that sits above other windows. Twhirl also has a dock icon. The application is responsive and quite easy to use, available on both Windows XP and Vista.

The Twitter client battle comes down to this – do you want a great looking, menu-bar app that is easy to use, but takes a longer time to connect to Twitter, or do you want a simple application that updates faster and more frequently that is dock-based and doesn’t look as great. The choice is yours.

After comparing the two clients, I chose to stick with Twitterific. Despite the annoying error messages, I still prefer the UI of Twitterific over Twhirl and really like how it’s situated in the menu-bar.

- Alexander Garovi

Just a simple keystroke or two, and there you go – a screen captured image. In today’s tip I’m sharing some of OS X’s image capturing hot-keys. These keystrokes can be very useful, especially when you’re writing for a blog .

Capturing Certain Objects – [Command-Shift-4] + [Spacebar]
This keystroke allows you to capture individual objects such as windows and the dock. The object that is captured will be highlighted.

Full Screen Capture – [Command-Shift-3] or [Command-Shift-Control-3]
This keystroke simply captures everything on the screen. If you add control to the keystroke, the image will be sent to your clipboard.

Capturing in a Region – [Command-Shift-4] or [Command-Shift-Control-4]
Simply box in the region that you’d like to capture. [Command-Shift-Control-4] sends the image to your clipboard.

Timed Image Capturing (Using Grab) – [Command-Shift-Z]
Using the native OS X app, Grab, you can add a 10 second timer before the image is taken.

These keystrokes are helpful for capturing your desktop, windows, pictures etc.

- Alexander Garovi

Stickies is an app that allows you to jot down your thoughts and create to-do lists on your Desktop. Stickies is a native OS X app, so there is no downloading involved. With stickies, you can change the appearance of your stickies, embed pictures, have scrolling notes and more.

Changing The Color of Stickies
Stickies allows you to choose between the default yellow color, blue, pink, purple and grey.

1. Go to the Stickies menubar
2. Click ‘Color’ and select the color you want

The default sticky appearance

I selected blue as my color

Putting Images in Stickies
1. Find the image file you’d like in your sticky
2. Simply drag and drop the image into the sticky
3. You can adjust the location of the image with the ‘tab’ and spacebar keys

Having Translucent Stickies
You can also change the appearance of your stickies by making them translucent. Here’s how you do it.

1. With Stickies open, simply use the keystroke Command-Option-T

Having Important Stickies on top
1. Use the keystroke Command-Option-F to have your important stickies stay on top of other windows
Even Though Firefox is selected, the sticky is still shown

Get Info of Stickies
1. Simply hover the mouse over a sticky window

Saving Stickies
1. Click on the upper left corner of the window, or use the keystroke Command-W
2. Choose save and select your destination

Switching Between Stickies
1. Use the keystroke Command-~ to switch between your stickies

Bullet-Points in Stickies
1. Use the keystroke command Option-Tab

- Alexander Garovi

Have a web page that you would like to add to your dock? Fluid allows you to do that. With Fluid you can create individual site specific browsers (SSBs) and run them as separate applications in your dock.  Each SSB created has a menu bar and desktop icon. Fluid is a very simple application, that’s easy to use.  I access my online Napster account with it, next to my iTunes. Here is how you can add a web page to your dock.

Open Fluid

Insert the information for the website you’d like to use. I used Facebook as my example.

Click ‘Create’ and the new application will appear on the Desktop, or whatever location you selected.

You can keep the application on your desktop or the folder of your choosing. I chose the Applications folder.

Now the SSB is running and can be seen on the dock.

- Alexander Garovi