Apple has released Safari 5.1 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, bringing the improvement of Safari on Lion over to Snow Leopard such as Reading List, new privacy pane preference and new process architecture. Several notable new features in Safari 5.1 are however Lion specific and are not available when running under Snow Leopard: Multi-touch Gestures, Resume, Full Screen Browsing, Sandboxing, Downloads Popover, better HTML Canvas graphics etc.
When you click on the sound icon that is docked at right corner of the menu bar, it displays a slider for you to adjust the volume. To access the advanced sound preference, you can Option-click on the same icon to reveal a menu that allows you quick adjustment of the input and output devices, and also access the Sound Preferences.
The Sound Preferences can off course be accessed via the normal System Preferences->Sound. A keyboard shortcut to get to the same Sound Preferences is to hold the Option key while pressing the Volume Up, Volume Down or Mute button on the keyboard.
Mac OS X comes with a number of command line programs that can handle compress files. But for a program with a graphical user interface that can handle numerous compress file formats, we can recommend The Unarchiver. The best part is it is a free program.
Mac OS X has some nifty shortcuts for hiding apps, useful when your boss or your partner is coming over while you’re doing ‘something’ on your Mac.
Use Command-H to instantly hide the app you’re currently using. The companion shortcut is Command-Option-H which hides all apps except for the one you’re currently using.
You can also use Command-M to minimize current window of the app you’re using. This is not as effective as Command-H as it is not instant. The companion shortcut key is Command-Option-M which minimize all windows of the app you’re currently using.
As a last resort, you can always press Command-Option-Shift-Q to logout immediately.
We manage our printers and print jobs using Mac’s System Preferences->Print & Fax. Beneath the hood, Mac OS X is using a powerful printing system called CUPS. Turns out that CUPS has a web interface for you to manage and administer printers and jobs on your Mac.
To view the web interface, just point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:631/.
CUPS (some say stands for Common Unix Printing System) is by Michael Sweet and debuted in 1999. It is a free software under GNU General Public License and is also the default print engine for several Linux distributions such as Red Hat. Apple adopted CUPS since Mac OS X 10.2 in March 2002. In February 2007, Apple hired Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.
Mac OS X comes with a capable screen capture tool built-in. You probably already know that using Command-Shift-3 is for capturing the whole screen, and Command-Shift-4 will give you a crosshair cursor to choose the area of the screen you want to capture. Both Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 will output the screen capture as PNG file to you Desktop with a name “Screen shot xxxx” where xxxx will be the timestamp.
Instead of capturing to file, you can capture the image to Mac OS X system clipboard memory. This will allow you to paste the screen image into another application such as Photoshop or Pages. To capture screen into clipboard memory, use Control-Command-Shift-3 for whole screen or Control-Command-Shift-4 for portion of screen.
You can also capture specific window or object on the screen using the Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4 screen capture shortcuts:
Press Command-Shift-4 or Control-Command-Shift-4. The cursor changes to crosshair.
Press the spacebar to toggle the cursor into a camera icon.
Move the camera cursor to the window or object that you want to capture. The window or object will be highlighted when the cursor is over them.
Click the mouse anywhere on the highlighted window or object to take the screenshot.
Preview app on Mac OS X Leopard is more than just for preview. You can use the Preview app for basic image editing such as cropping and sizing. These basic editing functions are often all you need for publishing images and photos to the web, there is no need to spend money for third party app.
Enter Command-S to save the changes. This will overwrite the image file. Select to save to different file if you want to keep the original.
