A Few Handpicked Tips For Mac Beginners

Enhance Your QuickLook With Plugins
This oft-forgotten feature allows you to preview files without ever having to open up an application, and it’s only a space bar click away. A team in Japan has released what appears to be the first external plug-ins for QuickLook, and they really add some awesome functionality to this already useful new tool.

Download Folder.qlgenerator and uncompress it. With the folder uncompressed, you should see a couple of files inside, including a Readme, and the actual Folder.qlgenerator file.
Head over to your root ~/Library and then find the folder entitled QuickLook. Now, simply drop the Folder.qlgenerator and Zip.qlgenerator into that folder.

Try and QuickLook a folder and you should see a new screen that shows the contents of that folder and not just the one large icon that QuickLook displays by default. If it doesn’t happen right away, either give it a minute, or try opening a Terminal window (located in /Applications/Utilities) and typing killall Finder.

You can just invoke QuickLook with a .zip file selected and it will show you a list of the files that are within it too.

Play Any Video Format File On Your Mac
There are 3 very important applications that every Mac user should download. These applications will allow you to play almost every video file on your mac, and make you a happier, more entertained person.
To play any video format on QuickTime you need the following applications.

1) Download Perian-it adds the following codecs:
AVI, FLV (Flash Video), MKV, “MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio [...] AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3

2) Download Flip4Mac WMV -After the download, it will install the components on your computer. It plays all your WMV format files on mac.

3) Download VLC -This is the “swiss army” knife of video players, and can handle most video formats out there. This is my go-to if my Perian-Flip4Mac-Quicktime system doesn’t work . VLC is free, and can be downloaded from videolan.org

Hopefully these 3 items will get your video files playing.

Clear Finder's "Open With" Menu
Have you ever right-clicked and selected “Open With” on an MP3 to open it with your favorite player only to be bombarded with a list of applications you thought you removed ages ago? Maybe even some you never knew existed? There is also the problem of duplicates.

Everything is stored in a single file located in your preferences folder. Take the following steps to delete this file so the list can get a fresh rebuild

• Go to your ~/Users/Library/Preferences folder
• Find “com.apple.LaunchServices.plist” file and trash it (you can back it up if you want)

There you have it. The next time you right-click on an item and select “Open With” in the Finder, only current applications will be listed. Some items may return if the application that controls them adds itself back to the list. You can delete the file again if you are having problems.

Courtesy MacApper

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Snow Leopard! An Intel-Optimized Built of Mac OS X

The next version of Mac OS X is code-named "Snow Leopard," as all of you know, and will indeed be Intel-only.Mac OS X Snow Leopard will focus on performance enhancements rather than featuring new apps like in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5).It will be optimized for multi-core processors and enable “breakthrough amounts of RAM.”

"So what new does Snow Leopard has to offer"?

Enhanced Multi-core Processing. No New Eye Candy Features.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard delivers a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality.It makes the Mac OS X more efficient for users.It's called "Grand Cental" , built into Snow Leopad.
Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore Macs.
Apple is laying the foundation for future with Intel processors.They're likely just to tighten-up the OS, make it faster and more secure for users with this os.


64-bit Technology In Mac OS X.

More RAM makes applications run faster, because more of their data can be kept in the very fast physical RAM instead of on the much slower hard disk.
Therefore,Snow Leopard provides the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amount of RAM(theoretically estimated 16TB or 500 times more). Apple has a lot of hope with this in the future.


Improved QuickTime X and Safari.

The release will come with a new version of Quicktime that improves media playback QuickTime X, a new version of the multimedia framework optimized for extremely efficient playback and support for modern codecs.

Snow Leopard delivers the fastest implementation of JavaScript to date SquirrelFish, web applications are more responsive. Safari runs JavaScript up to 53 percent faster with Snow Leopard.


The Newcomers!, OpenCL and Microsoft Exchange Support.
OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second With GPUs.OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.


Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal.
Mac OS X uses the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange Server 2007.

Because Exchange is supported on your Mac and iPhone, you’ll be able to use them anywhere with full access to your email, contacts, and calendar.


Price? Wait Untill...?

Apple has announced that the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard is expected to ship in about a year.By then the Intel Macs will be at least 3 year old. Well there are new updates for the present Leopard Mac OS X 10.5.4.

It will surely not be sold free, but i'd be surprised if they sold it on full price of $129.I think it will be less something like $49-$79. Or even as less as $30.

Should You Transform Form 'Leopard ----> Snow Leopard '?

Well for all the new Mac OS X 10.6 looks like a Windows Service Pack upgrade in PC is here for the Mac OS X 10.5.

But, in my opinion the Snow Leopard has a lot more to offer than it appears. Well it all depends on the marketing strategy of Apple .I hope they make it a little cheap.

written by Avipar\\

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Add text to images with Preview

Open Textedit, type a suitable label or string of text. Set the font as you desire (cmd+t), go to “File -> Print” and choose “Open PDF in Preview”.

Now using the “Select Tool” select the text (draw a box around it) and press (cmd+k) to crop. Save the cropped PDF as a PNG image (File -> Save As)

Now with the saved PNG image, hold the mouse button on the select tool until the drop down menu appears, and choose “Instant Alpha”. The image will now let you select the background portions to remove. Click on each white area until they are all grey and then press “Enter”. Now, “File -> Save As” a PNG again, this time you will notice the “Alpha” tickbox is checked. Overwrite the existing PNG file.

Now, with the saved image, press “cmd+a” to select all, then “cmd+c” to copy the item. Go across to your target image and press “cmd+v” to paste the text in. You can drag the text anywhere you like on the image!

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