I have been using the Macintosh computer off and on since 1989. On Friday, I'll share some tips and tricks using the computer and various accessories. All reviews and tips are my own.
I have been using the Macintosh computer off and on since 1989. On Friday, I'll share some tips and tricks using the computer and various accessories. All reviews and tips are my own.
A list of all the Blog Posts in this category.
PhotoMill helps you convert a bulk of images into the most popular image formats, give your files meaningful names, watermark with text and image, adjust photos (brightness/saturation/exposure/grayscale/etc.), fit geometry (scale/crop/trim/etc.), remove private metadata, add your own copyrights etc.
Also, PhotoMill is a great batch metadata editor, image file renamer and photo browser.
Seems to be a good solution if you manage a lot of photos. For example, if you have a lot of old pictures that you want to convert to JPG from BMP or TIFF scans.
PhotoMill might be a good tool when creating an online photo gallery. (Quickly create thumbnails)
You can do multiple actions, such as add a Watermark Rectangle and then add a text above the rectangle. It is a cool effect that I haven't seen used in other applications.
You can get a side-by-side preview of the change you're about to apply, so you know what impact your changes will have on the image.
The Info Panel is a good way to get detailed information about images without actually having to open it.
There is a preset for "Prepare for Facebook" with the long edge being 2048 and the method is resized to fix long edges. Originally I thought that 2048 was too big for Facebook, as I thought 1200 was the standard size. However, Facebook own documents recommend using the 2048 width to have the best quality.
The search and sorting features was pretty impressive. I can easily drop a folder full of images and work on ones that meet certain criteria. For example, I can drop a large folder of pictures but only work on the pictures that had the wrong orientation.
This application would be very handy when viewing old DVD data. You can pick and choose which images are worth keeping and convert to today's format.
PhotoMill has a free 7-day trial with no limits. After that, the cost to purchase the application is $12. (There is a discount if you purchase the application after your trial)
You can download the trial application from their website.
On April 30th, Autodesk announced that SketchBook is now free for everybody, previously it was $25/yr. This includes both the Macintosh and Android editions.
The only thing that you will need to do is to signup for an Autodesk account - and that is also free.
Autodesk Sketchbook Pro drawing and painting software provide designers, architects, and concept artists the tools to sketch ideas quickly and create beautiful illustrations. Available for most platforms and devices.
Sketchbook 7 Features
Here's a few things that make Sketchbook a great companion to Affinity Designer:
You can download Sketchbook free from the Apple Store.
Even if you don't need a drawing program, it's good to have to use and play around. It does take some time to understand the interface and how to navigate between brushes and colors. However, once you play around with it for a while you'll see that it's a pretty cool application.
If you have a Lynda.com account, you can take Veejay Gahir's Sketchbook Pro 7 Essential Training and learn how to use the software.
After you download Sketchbook, make sure to get the bonus Painting brushes.
There have been reported problems with how Spotlight search is working on the latest version of MacOS (High Sierra). For some people it isn't working or that it's slowing down their computer.
According to Apple, the best way to zero out the Spotlight Database is to put the drive in the Privacy section of Spotlight. When you do this, Spotlight will remove all information relevant to that location.
Once that is done, you remove the entry from Privacy and then Spotlight will reindex the data from scratch - like it didn't know it existed. I would recommend waiting a few minutes for the database to get cleared.
Obviously the index is going to take some time to work. The amount of time that it takes will depend on the size of your data and what you have set to Index in the Spotlight Control panel. Your better off letting this run overnight so that indexing process isn't flighting resources with other computer activity.
If Apple's official way doesn't work then try the mdutil way...
The mdutil command is at your service. The command manages the database used by Spotlight. If you're doing anything with Spotlight, you have to go through the mdutil command.
Some of these commands you need to be the computer root user. Which for most instances, the primary user that logs into the computer.
The mdutil -s command checks to see if Spotlight Index is on. That is will search inquiries return a search results.
mdutil -s /
Two Responses you can get:
Using the 'E' flag with running mdutil will Erase and Rebuild the Index. The same caveat as before, it will take some time for the index to get rebuild.
mdutil -E /
This is useful Spotlight indexing is taking too much of your computer resources.
mdutil -i off /
This is what you should see if the process was successful.
mdutil[96409:6557235] mdutil disabling Spotlight: / -> kMDConfigSearchLevelFSSearchOnly
Indexing disabled.
If you're not going to use the computer for a while, why not turn on indexing. Remember you can always exclude documents and folders by using the Spotlight Control panel.
sudo mdutil -i on /
This is what you should see if the process was successful.
/:
Indexing enabled.
XMenu is a neat utility that put allows you to put up to six addition menu items in the menu bar.
There is the type of menus that you can add, each category has their own unique menu icon.
This menu item displays all the applications that you have in your Application Folder. This is an alternative approach to using the LaunchPad.
The downside is that if you have a lot of applications, it can take a while to find it. There's no searching and the applications are displayed by there name.
This menu item displays all the applications that you have in the Xcode Applications folder.
If your not a hardcore developer, you get Accessibility Inspector, Application Loader, FileMerger, and Instruments.
Tip: Probably not very useful menu item if your not a Developer.
All your Home Folders at your fingertips!
This is a great way to access common folders you use every day. Files in your Dropbox, Photos, Music, and Desktop can be accessed very easily.
This is just you user Document folder, which is located at ~/Documents
Most files that you save are kept in the Documents folder.
Create your own set of application/files that you want in the menu bar. This a very cool feature since you can put anything you want and it will be displayed in the drop-down menu.
Personally I think this is the best feature of xMenu.
This is a great way to declutter your System Dock, simply put "rarely" used applications in here. You'll still have quick access via the menu bar instead of the System Dock. You can create folders of like items so they might be easier to find.
Access common text snippets from the menu bar. However, with tools like LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro, this doesn't really seem very useful. There's no scripting capability - you only display raw text.
This is neat to have feature, but for better productivity use Keyboard Maestro or TextExpander.
XMenu adds one or more global menus to the right side of the menu bar. They give you access to your preferred applications, folders, documents, files, and text snippets. Launch any application with a single menu choice or insert text snippets into your documents. XMenu is a real app, no hack, no extension. And it's free.
You can download XMenu from the Mac Apple Store. Devon Technologies has provided the software free of charge.
Resize-image is an application that most people might have seen in a Bundle Hunt bundle. On the service it looks to be a good practical application that will help batch process a bunch of images.
Macsoft's Image Resizer for Mac is specially designed Mac image editor software for Mac users to combine, resize and revolve photos, add watermarks to them freely. And it allows you to change the image format from one to another without any difficulty.
The application allows you to do multiple image actions at once, you can resize, add text and add text and image watermarks.
It's a good basic application for the functionality. However, there are a few drawbacks:
If there's a current Bundle Hunt bundle going on, you can pick it up for a good deal. At least if you ocassionaly need an image batch program.
It does what it says - I think you're limiting yourself to features and functionality. It certainly not worth the $19.99 price.
Otherwise it's $19.99 on their website - not sure if it's really worth the price.
The Batch functionality in Photoscape X goes well beyond the capabilities of Resize-image. You can add a lot more effects and have more flexibility with existing tools in Resize-image.
While Photoscape X cost a bit more, it's certainly worth the extra cost because you get more than an app that does batch processing. You get a nice image toolbox.
Which means that you'll be using the application more often and at the end of the day get more value for your money.
Five things that make Photoscape X a much better application:
LaunchBar is a very powerful tool that puts instant access to all sorts of actions at your fingertips. You can open applications faster, get to documents, set reminders and so much more.
There are a lot of very useful LaunchBar built-in actions - 152 of them to be exact. They expand the capabilities of LaunchBar to be way more useful than the standard Spotlight search.
Here are three example actions that are very useful. Granted it takes some time to get used to the new process, but you will see how it can improve your computer productivity time.
The typical method to search using Google requires opening up a browser, typing a search term and hitting return. That's great if you're already working with the browser open, but if you're doing a paper it's a lot of extra steps.
Using LaunchBar, you can quickly get things moving by passing the search parameters to the browser. After doing this a few times, you'll see how using LaunchBar method is so much easier than a typical method.
Whenever I have a list that I need to join, I usually end up opening up BBEdit and then pasting the text and then do a simple search and replace. After the search, I have to remove the last comma in the list. No so fun, and very time-consuming.
Using this trick in LaunchBar, I am able to work much quicker. Now I can quickly sort the list. There are other list tools in LaunchBar, but this is one that I use the most.
Tiny URL is a great service to make URLs really shore, especially when the URL has a lot of parameters. This is useful when you want to post something in Slack or in a Jira. There's no need to have a huge paper trail link
The nice thing about Tiny URL is that it never expires, so you can keep using it for a long time.
You can make the process go even quicker by using custom abbreviations. The actions will appear quicker with abbreviations that you are more familiar with.
To make Searching Google faster, change the Google Abbreviation to search:
File Juicer is a cool program that extracts images from Powerpoint and PDF documents.
Description from the site:
With File Juicer you can
and more...
I find this useful when I want to extract images from an old Powerpoint slide and use it in other presentations. I have a lot of old PDF documents that have images in them.
It was fun playing around with File Juicer but right now I can't seem to justify paying $17 for it.
I found the ability to extract Browser Cache and Images from Messages is way cool. The extracting messages are nice, was wondering how I could get a copy of images.
File Juicer will be placed on the short list of applications to buy - maybe this summer.
PhotoScape is a great all around graphic tool. It's very useful to touch up images and add a bit of touch that sometimes is needed.
There are times when I have a graphic image and I need to point several things out, such as steps to perform a bug. This is where having a numerical annotation graphic can be handy.
There isn't a built-in numerical functionality in PhotoScape X. There are a couple of ways to get it done:
I like using the symbol way versus the first way because I can duplicate the graphics and have all the numerical annotations be the same size, color, and effect.
While playing around with Photoscape, I found a real hidden Mickey!
When you insert an image to another image, you have the ability to define the inserted image shape. If you scroll about 2 thirds a way down, you'll see two Mickey Mouse images.
There's also a Macintosh logo there with Steve Jobs as the outline.
Very Cool.
When was the last time you looked at the System Services you have installed?
Some applications provide helper services so that you can interact with applications. You can access the services from any application menu.
Some of the service's functionality will only show up when you have something selected - text, image, file or folder.
There are four main categories for Services:
Services is a good way to be more productive with applications you use every day.
It's worth checking out what services are available on your computer.
You can check out all the computer services available by looking in the System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Services
If there are some Services that look interesting, you can always assign a keyboard shortcut to make it easy to access the shortcut. Items that don't have a checkmark are not enabled. If there are applications that you don't use, you can always disable the Services by unchecking the services. (In my case, I don't use the Bear App, so I'll disable that.)
Did you know that you can easily convert a webpage text to spoken text to play on your iPhone? Yes, there's a built-in service called, "Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track."
There are four good speeches to select from Samantha, Victoria, Alex, Fred. These voices offers you the best realistic speech quality. (Whisper is also a good quality sound.)
For some reason, Chrome doesn't have the reading mode enabled by default, see How To Turn On Secret Reading Mode In Chrome Desktop Browser to get it working.
Now you can make your own "Books on Tapes" and listen to articles on your commute.
It's also a good way to proofread your blog or important emails.
There is a popular online utility called GeSHi - Generic Syntax Highlighter which makes it easy to display Code in the same Syntax format in popular editors. You use this when you want to display code on a website.
If you have BBEdit, you don't need it because there's a built in tool called "Copy as Styled" which will copy the selected text using the BBedit color scheme that you have selected.
''-public-void-setHints(int-hints)-{
''-super.setHints(hints-&-(~ImageConsumer.COMPLETESCANLINES));
''-}
The other "Copy as" functionality is the "Copy as Styled Text" which copies the selected text as rich text. This is handy when you may want to paste the syntax code in a Microsoft Word document or Evernote note.
If you have OmniGraffle you can create a cool info-box using your code:
A few simple steps in OmniGraffle and you could make this:
It appears that this is easily done in OmniGraffle. I tried in Apple Page, Microsoft Word, and Affinity Designer and they all require some additional touch ups. For example, you may want to create a box object first and then paste the content from BBEdit.