Tag Archives: mac

Steps Taken to Tidy my iMac

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I love my iMac as I’m sure I’ve made clear on more than a few occasions. As much as I love it though, I’m still a relative noob having enjoyed the merits of OS X for only a little more than a year now and was unclear on how to keep a lot of my files and applications well organized. After doing some research (and a bit of trial-and-error) I found a lot of great ways to keep things easy to locate so I can spend less time searching for what I need and more time being productive. I’ll list out the changes I’ve implemented below.

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Tabbing Through Forms in OS X

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For all of you switchers out there or if you’re just new to OS X environment entirely.  You may have run into a pesky problem when using tab to navigate through forms as you’ll notice OS X, by default, will only tab to text fields and list boxes.  This is fairly retarded as it forces you to reach for the mouse over and over again if you’re navigating a large number of UI elements.  So, in an effort to keep you informed and hopefully keep you from smashing your skull into the keyboard frustratedly, below are the steps needed to enable tabbing between all controls and not just text fields and list boxes.

1. Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard

2. Make sure that the All Controls radiobox is checked (which, again you can’t tab to until this is turned on) under the ‘Full Keyboard Access: In windows and dialogs, press Tab to move keyboard focus between:‘ section.

Why, you’ll be a tabbing fool with this little tidbit!  So go on, go file your taxes or something and make sure you think of me in gratitude every time you don’t have to reach for the mouse.

Hands On With Pastebot for iPhone

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Copy.  Paste.  How many times would you say you do that in any given day?  If you work at all with a computer (and really, who doesn’t?), then you likely perform those actions constantly.  It’s an old, old computing concept that many of us likely take for granted that really hasn’t changed much since its inception.  However, while I certainly love Apple products, they were a little late to the copy and paste party until iPhone OS 3.0 came out.  But what would happen if your iPhone’s copy and paste functionality were taken a step further, allowing you the functionality of a clipboard manager to save commonly used text and images?  More still, what if you could organize those clippings into a folder structure for quick access on your phone and extend that functionality further by syncing your clippings with your Mac?  Well, as it turns out thanks to the fine people over at Tapbots now you can!

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A Compelling Video for the Apple Tablet

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While Apple’s always been big in the education sector, especially with its iTunes U service, the below video from Coursemart shows a whole slew of new possibilities for students that are Apple-savvy.  Everything showcased in the below ‘concept’ video impressed me, from the iCal integration to on-the-fly textbook purchases which makes sense for people like Nicole who begrudgingly braves the winter cold every morning now with a backpack that is nearly literally bursting at the seams.

What about you other college kids out there?  Would the forthcoming Apple tablet interest you as a one-stop shop for your textbook management, or would you prefer the regular paper approach?

Via TUAW

Need Another Monitor for Your Mac?

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Moar!If so, you might wanna check out NewerTech’s USB 2.0 Display Adapter.  It’s Intel Mac compatible and will allow you to add multiple monitors to your Mac via USB and has selections available for DVI, HDMI, and VGA interfaces supporting up to 2048 x 1152 resolution.  Right now I’m doing dandy with just two, but for those of you that demand an embarrassing amount of screen real estate, this is totally worth checking out.

via TUAW

Snagit Beta Now Available for Mac!

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SnagitIf you’ve ever used the Windows version of Snagit, then you know that it’s a hyper pumped-up screen capture utility with some great features.  Well, for all you Macs out there you too can now enjoy that functionality as their open beta recently launched.  It requries an Intel Mac and so far I really enjoy using it and have found it to be quite helpful.  If you want to see for yourself, head on over to their official site to check out the beta!

Perian – A Must for Quicktime Users

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PerianIf you own a Mac and you’ve got a variety of video formats you need played, you could just go ahead and downlaod the most excellent VLC Media Player. It’s certainly a heavy duty player with ripping and encoding abilities to boot.  However, if you’re just looking for a way to play your mountain of 30 Rock episodes  that are all in AVI format, you can have Quicktime play these by downloading and installing the Perian, the self professed swiss-army knife for Quicktime.  It’s a preferences pane add-on that allows Quicktime to play a variety of different video formats.  It’s a quick download and an even quicker install and after checking it out I can’t believe this wasn’t one of the first things I installed on my Mac.  You can download it here.

I has a Mac!

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IMG_4430Josh has had his iMac for roughly eight months now, which means I’ve been using his iMac for roughly eight months too. There are many times, especially during the summer when our WoW competition was in full swing, where he’ll come home and there I’ll be sitting at his desk stealing his Mac time. Well this dilemma is solved, because Joshua just got me a Mac Mini for Christmas! :)

I’m writing this post on it at this very moment, and man, oh man does it feel good to have my own desktop. I totally poked fun at Josh when he first bought the Mac, calling him a “silly, liberal art student,” and I even drew a picture of him running into Steve Jobs’ hand on Microsoft Paint. But through his powers of persuasion and Apple’s awesomeness I’ve grown very attached to Apple products and honestly, it makes me a little sad inside when I have to use my Windows laptop.

I can officially say: I’m a Mac.

Orb Now Available for Mac

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OrbOrb, the free media streaming software has recently released a Mac client for streaming all of your music, movie, and picture goodness over the internet for free.  As an added bonus, it also has UPnP support so you can locally stream to devices such as the Xbox 360 and Ps3.  Ever since I made the switch decided to give Mac a shot, this has been one area that I haven’t tackled yet.  On Windows it was relatively easy to stream my media to these devices, but on the Mac I hadn’t had the time or motivation to sort that all out.  I haven’t tried it yet, but later tonight I’ll certainly give it a shot and maybe upload a video of my findings.  Head on over to the official site to check it out for yourself.

How To: Build a Dell Mini10v Hackintosh

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HackintoshWhile rumors persist that Apple will be releasing a tablet-based Mac to join the netbook craze, Engadget has a great article on how to turn a Dell Mini10v into a Snow Leopard netbook.  This used to be a far more convoluted process, but Engadget’s guide seems to have made it much, much easier.  I’m not entirely sure of all the legalities involved and if your Mini 10v goes belly-up during the process I doubt that Dell would be very sympathetic to your loading an unauthorized OS onto their hardware, but if you’re feeling brave and want a small, sleak package to haul around your OS X goodness on, this guide would be a great place to start.

Source: Gizmono