My Mac Journal » Mac

Mac Keyboard Shortcut For Accessing Help

David Chin — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:01:35 +0000

The keyboard shortcut to access the Help menu on the Mac is shift+command+/.

Mac Keyboard Shortcut For The British Pound Symbol (£)

David Chin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:44:34 +0000

The keyboard shortcut for the British Pound Symbol (£) is Alt+3 (Option+3).

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) Reviews

David Chin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:41:33 +0000

Review by Jackie Dove, Macworld.com – You get better colors compared to the older, March 2009 model: “… viewing them together, the heightened intensity of the red and green spectrums made the difference obvious. Mere eyeball observations were born out by Apple’s Color Sync utility. In comparing the last generation MacBook Pros with the new models, the range of visible color was specifically expanded in the red and green areas. The blues stayed about the same.”

Check out the latest prices and availability on MacBook Pro 15-Inch models.

Mac Applications, Programs and Software

David Chin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:31:42 +0000

This is a compilation of Mac software, paid or otherwise, that I personally use or am intending to try out. I’ve also listed web-based, online services.

Software I use

Firefox: I use this instead of Safari.

Google Gears: I have this Firefox add-on installed so that Wordpress 2.7 administration and management screens load faster in my Firefox web browser. If you blog or edit posts on a regular basis, this speed increase is very welcome indeed. Wordpress 2.7 gives you the option on whether to enable caching via Google Gears on a blog by blog basis.

Perian: Installing this piece of software allows QuickTime Player to be able to play formats such as AVI, DIVX and MKV, among others. It also adds subtitle support.

Document Palette: Allows you to create a blank document in the current folder that you’re in. You can define your own document templates. Read How To Create New Files In Apple’s Finder for more discussion on this topic.

Little Snitch: This software runs in the background and monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic with the purpose of helping you be aware of any packets generated by malware. In the screen capture below, OpenOffice wants to check with a service on their website, openoffice.org, which is a site I trust, so I would select the “Forever” option which tells Little Snitch to always allow traffic to updateext.services.openoffices.org on Port 80 TCP (http).

It costs $29.95 for a single license.

ScreenToaster: A free, web-based software that lets you capture and record your screen, which is great for screencasts, demos, tutorials or simply to show off your game high scores.

Isolator: Isolator is a great (and free) way of hiding your desktop and other screens. Read my brief review on Isolator.

Dropbox: Dropbox offers 2GB of free web-based disk space for your files. It installs a folder on your Mac, and that folder looks just like any other folder. I keep my work files in this Dropbox folder, and any changes to the files or folder structure automatically triggers a synchronization process that updates a set of exact copies on the Dropbox server, which are accessible on your other Mac, Windows or Linux machines. Read about how other people are using Dropbox creatively:

How to Use Dropbox as the Ultimate Password Syncer

Links to related articles and blog posts

John Gruber talks about hardware and software he uses for work.

100+ Free Applications for Mac OS X.

Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

David Chin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 04:26:19 +0000

Here’s a compilation of links to articles and blog posts on keyboard shortcuts.

From UsingMac.com

100 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Creating Symbols. My favorites from this list include alt-g for the copyright symbol and opt-3 for the British Pound currency symbol.
Mac OS X Leopard: 200+ Productivity Booster Keyboard Shortcuts. One of the extremely useful key combination documented here is shift-option-command-delete to immediately empty the Trash without warning.
40 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Finder. I never knew you could do this before: command-option-o opens the file and closes the Finder.