mac vs windows

ok, so i just installed a free version of vmware fusion as its a beta version…you can get it on the vmware website and they give you a serial number and everything…

its pretty good actually.

I was using it, and I remembered the one thing I liked better about windows when I switched to a mac.

The way it shows photos in thumbnail view…

I always found the way that mac in panther displayed photos was way inferior to windows xp in the thumbnail dept. Windows showed pictures as proper thumbnails, and tiger just did icons (rubbish).

Anyway, I noticed that leopard has proper thumbnails now, and by right clicking on them and tweaking, I think you can actually get a faster way to scroll through your photos than coverflow…

Right click in finder window, >> show view options
Then set the icons to larger and tighter spacing and change the dropdown menu to “snap to grid” so as you dont have to manually sort all all your icons.

Then click on Set as Default.

Now check that out for cool…

Any problems right click and select “clean up” to see things as they should be…

A few bug bears…

With windows when you resize the window, the icons fall into appropriate columns…
with mac, they just give you scroll bars… this is wierd.

Also why to I have to keep hitting clean up, that should be automatic.

Other than that, I think theres no reason to be on windows, esp with vmware virtual machines! (and maybe the cost of a mac)

tiff attachements in apple mail

Grrr. Yet another thing about apple mail

If you paste an image into a message or drag & drop an image from another window (say, a Web browser), Mail converts the raw image data to an attachment in TIFF format.

However… if you drag & drop the icon of an image file (or use the Attach button to locate the file using the file browser), Mail leaves the attached image in its original format. This difference is significant, because although most email clients can display JPEG images just fine, support for TIFF – especially in non-Mac email clients – is less common.

Screen shots in Leopard

OS X has some great screen grab stuff, but they arent very well documented in help I dont think…

So here you go!

To change to pdf – type this into a terminal window

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type pdf
(this works for png, tiff, jpeg too)

If that scares you to death…
maybe download this widget…screenshot plu

or for website this is userful. Its called Paparazzi

also Screen Mimic: Records animations of your desktop to .swf files.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The following are keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots.

Command-Shift-3: Takes a screenshot of the entire screen and saves it as a file on the desktop.

Command-Shift-4: Brings up a crosshair cursor which you can drag to select a specific area. Image is saved as a file on the desktop.

Command-Shift-4:Space:Click on a Window: After

Comand-Shift-4 press the space button the click on a window to take it’s screenshot. The image is then saved as a file on the desktop.

NOTE***: If you add the Ctrl button to any of the above shortcuts, instead of the image being saved to the desktop, the image will be copied to the clipboard.

For the geeks out there like me

Heres the full list of options

usage: screencapture [-icMPmwsWxSCUt] [files]
-c force screen capture to go to the clipboard
-C capture the cursor as well as the screen. only in non-interactive modes
-d display errors to the user graphically
-i capture screen interactively, by selection or window
control key – causes screen shot to go to clipboard
space key – toggle between mouse selection and
window selection modes
escape key – cancels interactive screen shot
-m only capture the main monitor, undefined if -i is set
-M screen capture output will go to a new Mail message
-o in window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window
-P screen capture output will open in Preview
-s only allow mouse selection mode
-S in window capture mode, capture the screen not the window
-t
image format to create, default is png (other options include pdf, jpg, tiff and other formats)
-T Take the picture after a delay of , default is 5
-w only allow window selection mode
-W start interaction in window selection mode
-x do not play sounds
files where to save the screen capture, 1 file per screen

Grab / Preview

Grab is a graphical tool provided in OSX to take screenshots. It can be located in Finder under Applications:Utilities:Grab.

The Grab tool can capture a marquee section, a whole window, the whole screen or a timed screen.

Grab’s default file format is TIFF.

Note**: Preview now has a Grab submenu in the File menu with selection, window and timed screen.

Small fonts in apple mail

I started using apple mail on my new macbook pro, and moved over from entourage, which I’ve used faithfully for 3 years.

I just thought, things are going down the iPhone route, and I want to make life as simple as possible, and I want to use iCal…to sync with my mobile.

Anyway, Apple mail seems to display some email newsletters with really small font size and i was having trouble reading it, so I found a few other people with the same issue, mainly HTML emails from microsoft outlook. Anyway here is the solution:

Close down Mail.app, open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

Now start up Mail.app and Bob’s your uncle — Arial at a size you can read.

Quick Look plugins

I have to say. I LOVE quicklook. Leopards new feature. I recenlty discovered that the best way to use it is to just hit the spacebar, and any file you are highlighting just pops up. Without opening the application.

So I can see word files, pdfs, movies, etc etc. Its great.

I also just found a few plugins, as I get sent EPS files from designers, and I dont have Creative Suite on my new mac, but its great being able to open these so easily. There is also one so you can see inside zip files…

EPS plugin

.zip plugin for quicklook