Walt Mossberg has some advice for PC users considering the switch to Apple. He covers all the bases, including the Mac’s usefulness as a gaming machine.
Are you among the PC majority considering a switch to the Mac? Then you probably have some important questions.
Funny thing about shortcuts: If you try to manage too many of them they lose their primary purpose; that is to be shortcuts…
Anyway, I was reminded of three very useful text and text selection shortcuts recently.
The first is to do with deleting individual works. When you’re most of the way through typing a word and you realize that you’re spelling it wrong—press Opt-Delete and the whole word deletes in one stroke.
The second is to do with clicking to select words. If you double click a word the whole word is selected. If you triple click a word then the whole paragraph is selected; if you select a word and delete it—the word and one of the spaces on either side is deleted—you don’t need to carefully wipe over the word and a space.
Finally, if you double-click a word and hold the mouse button down on the second click, you can then wipe to select that word along with other whole words.
One last thing I rediscovered while typing this: If you’re typing in a text field that doesn’t normally support spell checking while you type—press Cmd-Shift-; to bring up a traditional spell checking box.
Imagine the situation: You visit a site that contains several links to pages and you want to open those pages in new windows. You could use modifier keys when clicking on the links (on my version of Safari I press Opt-Cmd while clicking), or you can use this bookmarklet.
Don’t click it yet!
Instead, show your Bookmarks Bar, click and hold for a moment on the link, and drag it to the bar. Rename it if you like. Now you can click the new button when viewing any page and that page will now produce new pages for any link that you click.
I found this gadget at Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site
An interesting review of the new 15 inch Powerbook. I particularly like his observation on design:
The difference is that PC hardware appears not to be designed so much as decorated.
Couldn’t agree more!
Hallon is a little red rasberry icon that sits in the menu bar. You use it to bookmark websites, files, iTunes tracks etc…
DownloadComment is a tiny Safari hack. Once it is installed, files downloaded using Safari have their URLs added to the comments field of their info boxes. Apparently, this was a feature of the OS9 operating system (but that’s before my time)…
The Services menu is a great feature of OSX; mine was getting a little cluttered though. It had entries for apps that I have in the Applications folder, but rarely use.
I Googled and found this great primer for cleaning things up. Careful though: be sure to backup any files before modifying them!
Hot sides (mouse triggers) are available as a beta plugin. This is radically cool. I’ll post more to the main site as soon as I’ve fully scoped it out…
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FolderGlance has been updated to version 1.7.0
What’s new in this version:
Sort order can be further customized. For instance, applications can now sort before folders, or files can appear before both folders and applications.
The target folder for a move/copy/make alias operation can now optionally be opened after starting the operation.
Invisible files’ icons now appear slightly dimmer than regular file icons.
A memory leak has been fixed.
Custom folders and custom “open with” folder now work with all paths, including paths containing accented letters or other “funky” (including Norwegian…) letters.
Trailing slashes no longer appear after custom folder items, and the main hard disk is now shown using its name, rather than just a “/”.
The preference panel now has a tab with some brief tips on FolderGlance usage.
