Under the hood of Mac OS X lies a haven of nerdy FreeBSD Unix goodness; If you know what you’re doing, you can pretty much make the OS do all sorts of things you couldn’t do in a mouse-driven graphical interface just by opening the Terminal utility and typing in a few commands.

However, as powerful as Unix is, unless you’re a hardcore computer geek or a programmer, it’s still somewhat difficult to grasp for the rest of us mere mortals (yours truly included!) who have been brought up on a steady diet of mouse pointers, icons and windows. This has provided a golden opportunity for independent Mac developers - you’ll find a lot of shareware/freeware programs that exist now for the Mac are essentially a friendly graphical front-end to a set of complex Unix commands.

Which brings me to Tinkertool, one of those items of software I personally can’t imagine doing without. TinkerTool lets you tweak Mac OS X’s default settings in ways that you wouldn’t normally have been able to do unless you knew Unix - as such, it doesn’t provide any new features, it just brings already-existing features out of hiding.

Among the tweaks which are now possible:

• Change the default file format for screenshots (PNG is the Mac default, but you can set it to JPG, TIF, BMP & more).
• Change the default system fonts.
• Show hidden system files (Be careful with this one - those files are hidden for a reason!)
• If you don’t like Apple’s Dashboard, you can now disable it completely.
• Disable those hidden files that tend to show up on a PC when you’re sharing files across a Mac-PC network.
• Make dock icons turn semi-transparent to show that a program is hidden (a personal favourite of mine)
• Group scrollbar arrows together at either ends of a window, to save mouse mileage (very useful if you’re dealing with extra-large
  windows)

…Plus heaps more. Download Tinkertool from Bresink.com and give it a spin - you’ll find all sorts of subtle ways to make your Mac OS work the way you want it. And just like any other software we endorse here at Inspect My Gadget, it’s completely free!

The PDF format is great for sharing documents with family/friends and printers because they retain all the fonts, formatting and layout of the original, but can’t be easily edited - they can be as secure as you want them to be. In fact, if you want any document professionally printed these days, many printers will actually insist on PDFs (some free advice: NEVER give them documents in Microsoft Publisher format - trust me, they will get shirty with you).

A recent IMG Quickie article “Windows Software: PDF Creator” told about a free utility for creating PDFs in Windows, but what about Mac OS X? Fortunately and conveniently, Mac OS X comes with the ability to create PDFs built-in. In fact, you can create a PDF from just about any Mac program around, even if that program doesn’t offer the feature itself.

You access this ability from the Print dialog box - basically, if you can print it, you can PDF it. Click the “PDF” button at the bottom left of the Print dialog box, and you are given a list of options. 
Select “Save as PDF”, it’ll ask for a name & location to save your new PDF to, and voila - instant PDF!

You may want to take the time to check out some of the other options; for instance, if you think the PDF is going to be too big, select “Compress PDF”. If you’re security-conscious, you can select “Encrypt PDF”. Or if you want a quick way to create a PDF and then attach it to an email in one fell swoop, you can select “Mail PDF”.

If you’ve just bought yourself a shiny new Apple Mac computer, you’re probably wondering “How do I use it? Is it anything like Windows?” By and large, you’ll find that the Mac OS X operating system shares a lot of similarities with Windows - all the basic conventions like icons, desktop, shortcuts (Apple calls them “aliases”), windows, menus, Trash, etc. all work pretty much the same.

However, Mac OS X also has its own distinct personality quirks & features. The current version of the operating system - 10.4, also known as “Tiger” - was released in April 2005. Its stand out features are listed here:

• Spotlight
• Dock
• Sidebar
• Smart Folders
• Expose
• Dashboard

This article, which I’ll be presenting in two parts, aims to cover most of Mac OS X’s unique features & methodology, and in particular how to use them to your advantage.

Part 1 which follows will cover Spotlight, the system-wide search feature, as well as the Dock & Sidebar. Part 2 will cover Smart Folders, Exposé and Dashboard.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve just bought yourself a shiny new Apple Mac computer, you’re probably wondering “How do I use it? Is it anything like Windows?” By and large, you’ll find that the Mac OS X operating system shares a lot of similarities with Windows - all the basic conventions like icons, desktop, shortcuts (Apple calls them “aliases”), windows, menus, Trash, etc. all work pretty much the same.

However, Mac OS X also has its own distinct personality quirks & features. The current version of the operating system - 10.4, also known as “Tiger” - was released in April 2005. Its standout features are listed here:

• Spotlight
• Dock
• Sidebar
• Smart Folders
• Expose
• Dashboard

Welcome to Part 2 of our Beginners’ guide to the Mac OS X “Tiger” operating system! In Part 1, we looked at Spotlight, the system-wide search feature, and the handy Dock and sidebar. Now we look at Smart Folders, and two pretty nifty screen features.

Read the rest of this entry »