Recover from a missing Photoshop scratch disk
Against Photoshop's advice, I've set an external hard drive as my primary Photoshop scratch disk. But when I recently left my external drive at home, Photoshop refused to start -- it displayed an error message that read "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available," without an option to change scratch disk. Clicking OK closed Photoshop.Thankfully, as it is with many things Mac, keyboard shortcuts work wonders. Holding down Command and Option while opening Photoshop allowed me to change the scratch disk's storage location.
published on Tuesday, the 4. November 2008, macosxhints
Toggle AirPort on and off using keyboard shortcuts
This is the simplest way I've found to toggle the AirPort card on and off without using third party applications or too many buttons. Hopefully others will appreciate this function as I do. Note: This function is tailored to a MacBook, as the F5 and F6 keys have no predetermined function on these machines. Other machines may need the shortcut keys to be edited. Create two keyboard shortcuts. Go to the Apple menu » System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Click the plus sign at the bottom of the window, and select All Applications from the pop-up menu in the next dialog. In the Menu Title box, type Turn AirPort On with that exact case and spelling. Set the Keyboard Shortcut to F5, then click Add. Click the plus sign again, leave the pop-up menu set to All Applications, and in the Menu Title box, type Turn AirPort Off with the shortcut key also set to F5 -- only one of these functions will be displayed at a time. In t...
published on Friday, the 17. October 2008, macosxhints
Chronos releases F10 Launch Studio 2 launch manager
Chronos has released F10 Launch Studio 2, an application and document launch manager for Mac. When the program is started, 'Zero Setup' automatically finds new applications, with relevant documents displayed on a side bar. Users can configure multiple docks with different favorites, or edit the shortcuts. The user interface is now animated and has been redesigned to be streamlined....
published on Thursday, the 25. September 2008, macintosh-news-network
10.5: View PDFs inline in Firefox 3
This hint is really just a link, but there have been several other hints dealing with PDF plug-ins for Mac browsers -- the Adobe plug-in only supports Safari) -- and this represents the first real solution for Firefox 3 I have seen. There is now a Firefox extension named firefox-mac-pdf, available for Firefox 3 under OS 10.5 that utilizes the built-in PDF support in OS X to display PDFs in-browser. In my testing, it appears to work very well. It doesn't have the nifty fading bezel that the Safari PDF viewer does, but it supports all the same keyboard shortcuts and you get the standard Mac OS PDF contextual menu when you control-click on a displayed PDF. [robg adds: This plug-in takes care of the only major complaint I had about Firefox; being able to view a PDF inline ins...
published on Wednesday, the 18. June 2008, macosxhints
Use Teleport with VNC for total remote keyboard control
One thing I dislike about using most VNC viewers is the inability to use commands like Command-Tab for switching applications, or Command-Space (my Quicksilver shortcut). A previous comment (and this hint) described using Teleport. And others have pointed out a VNC viewer that is built into OS X. This hint simply points out the beauty of combining those two bits of info.If you use Apple's VNC and Teleport, you can simply drag the mouse off-screen while still viewing your VNC display, and have full keyboard access to the remote machine. Command-tab program switching and launching is a lot easier, as is activation of the Dock if you have it set up to appear when the mouse is ...
published on Monday, the 2. June 2008, macosxhints
Display system uptime in a Finder dialog
I was thinking that there must be an easier way than going to Terminal and typing uptime in order to find out how long my machine had been up. So I wrote a wee AppleScript that gives the answer in the form of a Finder dialog window. Stick this into Script Editor, and save it as Application (or Application Bundle). set output to do shell script "uptime" tell application "Finder" display dialog output buttons {"OK"} default button 1 end tell If you wish, you can then add a shortcut to it from your launcher. Voila, uptime and load averages at your findertips (literally). [robg adds: This is a very simple hint, but one that demonstrates to new AppleScript users how to display the output from any Terminal command in a dialog. For uptime, and many other Terminal commands whose output I'd like to see on occasion (such as the results of the last Time Machine backu...
published on Tuesday, the 18. March 2008, macosxhints
Toggle external screen mode on iBooks
By chance, I just discovered that although there's no special marker on the iBook's keyboard, it is possible to toggle between the mirror- and the screen-spanning mode with one keystroke: Install the Extended Desktop patch to use screen spanning on your external display. Press Shift-Command-F7 to toggle between screen-spanning and mirror modes. By pressing the shortcut twice, it's also a nice way to put all your windows back on the notebook screen, in case you won't power on your connected external display. Maybe this is some new feature introduced with the MacBook that back-propagated to the older consumer notebooks. I use Mac OS X 10.4.8 on a "late G4 iBook" (Sep 2005 edition). [robg adds: I can't test this one...]
published on Monday, the 6. November 2006, macosxhints