As many of you know, the beeping sound while raising or lowering the volume can be turned off/on. (System Preferences > Sound > Play feedback when volume is changed)
As I posted earlier, holding down ALT and SHIFT will change the volume in very small intervals.
What I just discovered is that by only holding the SHIFT, you can make the volume beeping sound turn on or go away.
Command + Expose = Show Desktop
For me command + F3 does the same thing that a “Show Desktop” shortcut would do.
My Posts are so short-winded nowadays. Sorry about that.
Anyway, if you’re on a Mac (duh?) go to System Preferences then Sharing. There are some interesting things there.
If you enable file sharing, you can share files (duh?) with other Macs on the network just by looking for the host computer (with all the cool files) in Finder, under the “Sharing” category on the left sidebar. I hope that was clear….if not, figure it out yourself, drop me a comment, or email me (check About page)
If you enable screen sharing, you are basically setting up a VNC server (I think) so that devices such as other computers (cool) and iPhones (eveeeen cooler) can connect to your computer, see your screen, do all kinds of crazy stuff.
GG
Mac = spotlight
Windows = search function in start menu
Anyway, spotlight is really useful! Especially if you don’t have Quicksilver installed. If you want to search for a file, spotlight is actually better than Quicksilver because Quicksilver (by default) doesn’t index everything. Spotlight does and can find pretty much anything.
However, if you are searching in spotlight, you absolutely need to know how to view an item in Finder. That wasn’t very clear, was it. OK, so you are searching for Firefox because you want to put that on your dock. You search for it in Spotlight and find it. Now what? You want to view it in a Finder window so that you can drag it onto the dock but you can’t right-click or anything in the Spotlight search. You can go to “Show All”…Annoying!
So I took the time some weekends back to upgrade to Vista (yes, not “upgrade to Windows XP” ><”) and was really surprised by how nice the graphics are. I try not to compare graphics between Windows and Mac (because they are two very different styles) but I really like how much more “depth” seems to be in Windows Vista graphics with the reflection, blur, color hue effect.
Overall I really like Vista, but then again I have used the Ultimate version with Aero.
Oh yeah, and turn off the annoying prompt asking you to allow Windows to do any administrative action.
I don’t use a PC so I don’t know if this applies to PC’s (but then again, I don’t think a PC user would be on this blog), but there is a very quick shortcut for “Page Down”.
Tap the space bar to move one page down, equivalent to hitting the “Page Down” button. And like many other shortcuts, Shift + Spacebar is the opposite of pressing the space bar, and is the equivalent of the “Page Up” button.
Taking a full screenshot is very easy on the new iPhone software. Just press both the Sleep/Wake button and Home button at the same time. You will see a “flash” and the screenshot will be saved on your Camera Roll.
If you are writing blog posts (like me) or tutorials, you can then annotate those screenshots in Photoshop or Skitch. I especially like Skitch – I also liked Jing’s annotation tools and simplicity of use but Skitch allows annotations of photos other than screenshots. Jing does not.
I already blogged about how to change your background but today I am going to show you how to customize your Finder (the number of customizable options is limited) and use several important functions in Finder.
1.) Option to turn on a path bar at the bottom of the Finder.
While you have the Finder selected (so that the menu is Finder), go to View > Show Path Bar.
Now here is a straight-up useful Mac tip I use everyday: increasing the volume by smaller increments. Normally if you press the Volume Up or Volume Down buttons, the volume will increase by one whole bar. This had annoyed me forever until I learned how to. Leopard only.
.
+ 
+ Volume Up / Volume Down
Alt/Option + SHIFT + Volume Up/Volume Down
.
Ed
EDIT: This post have been getting very many views lately so ‘fess up in the comments if you want a part 2 with more advanced and new ways to use Mac OS X commands and wildcard characters.
This tip/post is going to be about several common Mac OS X commands and wildcard characters I have discovered, at work, that is useful to understand and know how to use. First off, wildcard characters are special characters such as * and ? that help you to find groups of filenames that have something in common.
For example, say I have a couple of files that I want to find in my home directory. My home directory is cluttered with junk files that I never take the time to organize. But somewhere within that junk pile of files there lay 8 files I would like. Their filenames are ssw_idl.a285, ssw_idl.r391, ssw_idl.z988, ssw_idl.c293, and the other 4 files are named similarly (“ssw_idl.” followed by a letter, then 3 numbers). Read the rest of this entry »
