News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
In iPhoto ’08’s thumbnail view, there are a couple of undocumented keyboard shortcuts that make working with thumbnails somewhat easier. If you want to resize the thumbnails, for instance, you don’t have to grab the mouse and drag the slider. Instead, you can cycle between various pre-set thumbnail sizes by pressing 0 (tiny), 3 (small), 2 (medium), and 1 (show one image only). (Previous versions of iPhoto support these same keystrokes, though they offered only three sizes—0, 1, and 2.) When you press 1, you’ll see only one thumbnail at a time, and it will expand to fill the entire viewing area in iPhoto.
Rob Griffiths | Nov 19, 2008
While Stickies has improved over the years, there’s still one fairly major problem with the program: It’s not easy to get your text out of Stickies. There’s a File -> Export Text menu item, but that will only export the text from one Sticky at a time. What if you’ve got 30 or 40 notes, and you’d like to get the text out of all of them?
Rob Griffiths | Nov 17, 2008
Data detectors are one of the new features in the OS X 10.5 version of Mail. Data detectors watch for addresses, dates, and times in e-mail messages, and when found, highlight those regions of text when the mouse enters them, displaying a button to show a contextual menu. Activate the contextual menu, and you can create new iCal events or Address Book contacts based on the highlighted information.
Rob Griffiths | Nov 14, 2008
It seems there’s a bug of sorts in the 10.5 Finder that makes drag-selecting items with large icons quite slow, especially if the window contains a large number of icons. If you try drag-selecting a bunch of 128-by-128 pixel icons in such a window, you’ll notice some visual freezes and jumps as you drag the mouse around. These lags can be distracting and annoying, as they make it tougher to drag-select just the group of icons you want to select.
Rob Griffiths | Nov 12, 2008
If you use the Universal Access screen zoom feature—Command-Option-equals and minus, or Control plus your mouse’s scroll wheel—you’ve probably noticed that OS X attempts to “smooth” the zoomed-in image by applying various colour shades to fill in areas of sharp colour change. Depending on what you’re looking at, and how much you’re zooming in, the end result can either be very nice or very ugly.
Rob Griffiths | Nov 10, 2008
One of iTunes’ oft-overlooked features is the Radio entry in the Library section of the sidebar. Here you’ll find streaming radio from around the world, covering everything from music (alternative, classical, hard rock, etc.) to comedy to sports to talk. Although I don’t use the feature as much as I should, one of my favorite local FM stations has a presence there, so it’s a good way to listen to that station while I work—ironically, in my office full of high technology gear, there’s not a TV or radio to be found.
Rob Griffiths | Nov 7, 2008
Myvu has announced that its Crystal video goggles now work with the iPhone. The Crystal glasses require a new cable which costs $US24.95.
