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

Try a new scene on your Mac’s desktop image with over 600 free wallpaper images to choose from at InterfaceLIFT . The site also features user submitted custom icons to keep your Mac in high style.

You can change your Mac’s desktop image by clicking on the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen (in Mac OS X) and selecting ‘System Preferences’. Choosing ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ will allow you to change your desktop image.

The application iPhoto is used to manage digital photographs and quicktime videos taken on your digital camera.

I use iPhoto for offloading digital pictures and video clips from my camera and modifying the pictures and cataloging the videos on it. The Quicktime videos can be moved to iTunes for cataloging and playback. You can also use iMovie for digital movie clips and stills.

The secret editing mode gives you much better control over the Red Eye and Retouching tools. You can adjust the size of the Redeye and Retouch tools and the intensity of the Retouch tools. The Redeye tool now shows up as a round center in a oval cross hair. The Retouch tool now allows you to control the size and of the tool and the intensity.

A caller had a question about how to “see” his printer, and print to it, from his Mac, given it’s connected to his Windows machine by USB.

I thought that we had answered this question before, however, I see that while we did answer a Mac-Windows printing question earlier this month, we did not answer this specific question! [see this May 3 MacWork.com article about cross-platform printing ]

The straight-forward answer is probably:

Say that you work in an application like Microsoft Word every day, all day. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the application open every time you start or log in to your Mac?

No problemo. Find the application alias in your dock, then either Control-click (or right-click if you happen to have a two-button mouse like I do) and choose Open at Login from the contextual menu.

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).

Lose those space-hogging labels in your Sidebar.

To get to the space-saving icon view, click on the gray divider bar that separates the Sidebar from the folder’s contents and s-l-o-w-l-y drag it to the left until it sort of snaps to the icons. The trick is dragging slowly. Drag too fast and you’ll collapse the entire column. If you miss labels, just roll your mouse over an icon and the label appears.