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Tip 1
Control Windows
When switching among applications, windows are brought to the front differently
in Mac OS X than they were in Mac OS 9. In Mac OS 9, all the open windows
in an application come to the front when you switch to that application. In Mac OS X, this happens only when you use Command-Tab to switch applications, or when you
click on the application’s icon in the Dock. When you click on a window that
belongs to a different application, that application is activated, but only that one
window is brought to the front. This makes it possible to view windows from
two different applications at the same time.

Tip #2: you can move, resize, scroll, zoom in, or even click buttons in a background window — without bringing it to the front — by holding the Command key while performing these actions.
Rob Griffiths
www.macosxhints.com
 

Tip 2
Turn Off Previews
When you’re clicking through a column of files in a Finder window (in Column view), sometimes you don’t want to wait to see a preview appear every time you click on a picture file. To turn off the Preview, press Command-J and turn off the checkbox
labeled Show Preview Column. This will turn off the Preview column for only
that folder.
 


Tip 3
Add Login Items from the Dock
In Mac OS X, a “login” item is equivalent to a “startup item” in Mac OS 9 — an item that autolaunches when you log into your user account. You can add items in the
Account preference pane, but you can also add them directly from the dock. If
an item is in the Dock, possibly because it’s currently running, just click
and hold on its icon and choose Open at Login from the contextual menu that
appears.



Tip 4
Safari Confidential
Safari’s Private Browsing feature (Safari> Private Browsing) is handy when you don’t want nosey people to learn anything about your Web surfing. With Private Browsing enabled, Web pages are not added to the History menu, form information isn’t saved for AutoFill, search terms are not added to the pop-up menu in the Web search
box, and items are automatically removed from the Downloads window.
 

Tip 5
Drag-and-Drop PDF
Any file you could normally convert to PDF through Acrobat’s File> Create PDF>
From File menu item can also be converted by simply dragging it onto Acrobat’s
icon on the Desktop or Dock. It doesn’t matter whether Acrobat is running
or not — it will launch if necessary. One advantage to this approach is that you can drag multiple files onto Acrobat at the same time and each will convert to PDF and
open into a new window.
 


Tip 6
Extract Graphics from MS Word
If your client gives you a Microsoft Word document with embedded graphics,
you can extract all the graphics at once by using Word’s File> Save as Web Page
feature. This creates a text file that you can throw away, and a folder that contains
the full-resolution images in PNG format and lower resolution versions of
the images in JPG format.
Sandee Cohen
InDesign Magazine


Tip 7
Efficient Zooming
In InDesign or Quark- XPress 6 & 7, pressing Command-plus when not in a text box increases the zoom level, while pressing Command-minus decreases the zoom level. If an item is selected first, that item becomes centered in the window. InDesign has an additional trick: zoom into a selected item by pressing Command-plus repeatedly,
then press Option- Command-plus one time to zoom back out to your original zoom percentage.



Tip 8
Keyboard Shortcut to Scale Pictures
Both InDesign and Quark- XPress let you change the scale of a picture inside its
box by pressing a keyboard shortcut. First select the picture content, then to change
its scaling by 5% press: Increase: Command-Option-Shift-> Decrease:
Command-Option-Shift-< (Think “greater than” and “less than”.)



Tip 9
Instantly Export to HTML in QuarkXPress
QuarkXPress 5 and above let you convert a Print layout to a Web layout and
then export it as an HTML document. But if all you want to do is export a
print layout to HTML, a shortcut is to hold down the Shift and Control keys while selecting File> Export. Magically, the HTML… option appears. Choose it, select a destination for the HTML files, and click OK.




Tips and Tricks Archive

November 2006

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February 2006

January 2006