The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

If you need to take a screen shot — and in my 10 years as a trainer I’ve had to take LOTS of them — here’s a nifty keyboard shortcut.

Press Shift-Command-Spacebar-4, which is a bit ackward (I had to use both hands) and your cursor changes into a crosshair (sometimes it changes into a camera icon). Just click and drag a bounding box around what you want to capture and release the mouse button to take the picture, which shows up on your dekstop as Picture 1 (or 2 or 3 depending on how many pictures you take).

Head over to Safari!

As discussed on the show tonight, unlike Windows where you go to the Tools to set the default web browser, in OS X, no matter which browser you’d like to use, set the default within the General preferences of Safari, Apple’s own, free web browser.

You’ll see the first pop-up menu is called “Default Web Browser:” and it should show any and all browsers you have installed on your system.

I’ve always thought that the way things “poofed” when you dragged them out of the sidebar was cute. But the first time I accidentally dragged a CD from the Sidebar, poofing wasn’t cute at all. It was really annoying.

I don’t like extra icons cluttering up my desktop. So I have my Finder preferences set to display hard drives, connected servers, CDs, DVDs and iPods in the Finder window’s Sidebar.

The first time I wanted to eject a disk in OS X, I tried dragging into the Trash, just like I had always done in OS 9. The icon poofed and the disk didn’t eject. I did manage to eject the disk, but the next time I inserted a CD, it didn’t show up in Sidebar.

Is your bloated iCal slowing down your computer? Use a simple preference to remove tons of information in one easy step.

Here’s how:

1. Open iCal.
2. In the Finder menu, click on iCal and choose Preferences from the menu.
3. In the dialog box, click on the Advanced button.
4. Select the delete events option and choose the age of the items that you want to remove.
5. You’ll get a dialog box warning you that iCal’s about to do what you asked. Tell it yes.

That’s it. You’ve cleaned up your calendar and should have a faster-running computer.

The next time you need to add bold or italic text to a Microsoft Word document, don’t click the B or I button in the Formatting toolbar. Use keyboard shortcuts to apply basic character formatting.

To add bold, press Command B then release the keys and start typing. To end the bold styling, press Command B again. For italic text, press Command I and release the keys. To end italic text, press Command I again.

Use some keyboard shortcuts to open and close new Finder windows automatically.

Double-click on a folder in Icon or List view and it opens in the current window. Hold down the Command key when you double-click and the folder contents open in a new window. Hold down Command and Option when you double-click to open a new window and have the old window close automatically.

Use Safari’s Mail Llink command to email a webpage to friends and family.

Let’s say you that you find a webpage that you want to share with a friend. Just choose File > Mail Link to this Page or press Command Shift I. The command automatcially opens a new Mail document with the link neatly in place.

If you want to send them the entire webpage choose File > Mail Link to this Page or Command I instead.

You can use the iPod for more than just listening to music. It can be used for audio books and news reading as well. Another use is as a learning or training tool.

Any file that can be converted to text can be converted to an AIFF file and dropped onto iTunes. Most websites or manuals are in PDF format. One of the features of a PDF file is that it can be saved as text. This resulting text file can be edited and then converted to an AIFF file.

You have a digital image that measures 2202 pixels x 1704 pixels. You want your final print to have a resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi). What’s the largest print you can make? Use Photoshop’s Image Size controls to find out.

Open your image in Photoshop. Choose Image > Image Size and deselect the Resample Image option. Now type 300 in the Resolution field and Photoshop shows you the size of your image in inches.

Now if a train going 60 miles an hour leaves Chicago at 11:30…

As my in-laws in Minnesota told me, “If you can’t talk about the weather, you may as well get a t-shirt that says ‘I’m not from around here.’” Here’s how to get more out of your Weather widget.(You ARE running Tiger, aren’t you?)

If you’ve got the Weather widget open and you want more information about the weather in your pick city, click on the city’s name. That launches Safari and takes you to Accuweather.com, where you’ll find more detailed weather information. If you have cookies disabled in Safari, AccuWeather.com may not save your default location.