Here’s a fun little trick! This screencast I made will show you how to pause a window in mid-minimization. This trick really has no value, but it’s always cool to show off to your friends.

When I first got my hands on a copy of Leopard (if I remember correctly I snagged a copy of the beta just before the Golden Master, which was still very buggy) Spaces became my favorite feature (along with Quick Look).

With the recent release of Leopard 10.5.3 Spaces has seen some great enhancements. The most notable one has an excellent write-up by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. I’m not going to discuss this new feature because I feel that John has done an excellent job at that task.

One feature I would like to discuss is one I discovered today. This feature is much less prominent than the former, however it is still very useful. In 10.5 through 10.5.2 in order to add an application assignment for Spaces, you had to click the plus button and search through your Applications folder to find the application you wanted to add. In 10.5.3 you are now presented with a pop-up list of all of your currently running applications and can quickly add an application assignment. This small enhancement is welcomed with open arms and will save precious seconds while using my Mac.

A cool new feature of Firefox 3 is the ability to add a keyword (or “keyletter”) to a search engine.

To add a keyword to a search engine, click the search engine icon to pull the up the drop-down menu and then click Manage Search Engines... . Select the search engine that you want to add a keyword to and click Edit Keyword and then assign a keyword. I personally like to use a ‘keyletter.’

For example, I have the letter G assigned to Google.

What this assigning of ‘keyletters’ allows you to do is to type the letter g into the address bar and then type what you want to search for.

For example, typing in: g justin allard will be like going to Google.com and searching for justin allard.

This trick can be particularly handy for when you don’t want to change the search engine in the drop-down menu just for one search.

Keyboard short cuts always come in handy and usually improve the speed one can use a computer. Here's two short cuts that aren't too well know for the Finder: Command + up arrow will send the navigation up one level. Command + down arrow is essentially an alternative to Command + O, in that will send the navigation down into the selected folder or open the selected file.

Command + up arrow can greatly improve navigation within the Finder.

Need a quick way close a Widget and are tired of clicking the + icon in the bottom left corner to get the X's on all of the widgets? All you have to do is hold down the Option key and move your mouse over a widget you want to close and the X will appear. Just click it, and it's gone. Simple as that.

Sometimes when you view an image in Quick Look, it's just too small to see an important detail. So what do you do? Open it in Preview? Probably, but not anymore. When you Quick Look an image, hold down the Option key and click to zoom in on the image, and when you're zoomed in, move around the image by clicking and dragging.

You may not know this, but in OS X (especially Leopard), the spacebar is a very powerful key. Not only is it the key of choice in the Finder to view a file in Quicklook, it may also be your key of choice in dialog boxes. When a button is surrounded either graphite (as pictured below) or blue, just hit the spacebar and you activate that button, whereas if a button is graphite (as pictured below) or blue just hit the return (enter) key to activate that button.

Hopefully this little tip will help you improve your productivity.

Having my Mac lock when ever my screen saver starts can be a pain when I'm at home and I don't need it to be locked. That is why I enabled an icon in my menu bar that lets me lock my Mac with two clicks. However, the process of getting this in your menu bar is probably not what you would think. First open Keychain Access and then go to the Preferences and check the box that says Show Status in Menu Bar. That will put a little lock icon in your menu bar. To lock your screen just click the lock and select lock screen.

The only reason I've ever wanted to convert a DMG to an ISO is so I can burn that DMG on a dual layer DVD on a Windows machine. Unfortunately, there is no way to convert a DMG to an ISO in Disk Utility. That's where a handy little Terminal command comes into play.

hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso

Just replace /path/to/filename.dmg with the path to the DMG that you want to convert. An easy way to do that is to just drag the DMG into Terminal.

Then replace /path/to/savefile.iso with the path to where you want to save the file. You may get the .cdr extension at the end of the new ISO, but you can just delete that extension and change it to .iso.

The way Stack in Leopard assume the first icon of whatever is in the folder of the Stack pretty much sucks and looks horrible. However, this is a way to make them a little less ugly. Optica Optima has a beautiful solution with their beautiful semi-transparent icons.
Download the icons.
Mirror on Justin Allard dot com.


Getting the icons to stay at the top of the Stack is the real trick, and involves a little a little Terminal hackery. The following Terminal command is an example of what you may have to type.

cd /Applications
touch -mt 202001010101.01 ApplicationsIcon

What the first command does is change the directory of where you are working, so change it to the place you put the icon. If you don't know the path, just drag the folder to the Terminal after typing cd.
The second command uses touch which changes the date modified of the icon to January 1st 2020. Because of the date change, you can sort the folder by date modified and the icon will remain at the top.
Alternatively, you could just name the icon with a 0 as the first character, and sort by name. Use whatever works best for you.

Credit to Optica Optima and XD.

This little how-to can always be found in the Leopard Tricks section, along with some other tricks.

Are you not a big fan of the new login wallpaper in Leopard? I wasn't a huge fan either and luckily, there is a pretty easy way to change it, and I'll tell you, and show you, how. Just a disclaimer, I am NOT responsible if you screw up your Mac in any way, shape or form. This process worked for me and it should work for you. Also, CoreServices contains some important system stuff, so if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.

Read the how-to

or

Watch the screencast

After running a developer build of Leopard for the past week and a half, there is one feature that I have come to hate. Stacks. They can be nice if you just have a folder that you throw a few documents or pictures in here and there, but there really is no use for them, at least the way I used folders in the Dock in Tiger. To me, Stacks have become a nuisance, sure they look pretty, but they don't seem to serve much of a purpose besides looking cool.

Luckily for me, and anyone that reads this that likes how folders in the Dock worked in Tiger, I have found a way to circumvent stacks in Leopard's Dock. What you have to do is create and Alias of the folder you want in the Dock and put that Alias in the Dock. Doing that makes the folder in the dock open up in a Finder window.