#mac basics

[thomasmayfield]

Tutorial, How to screen capture with Quicktime on a Mac.

1. Open up Quicktime.

2. Click on File.

3. Click on "New Screen" Recording.

4. Either click the screen to do a full screen capture or click and drag anywhere on the screen to record a certain part of the screen.

5. Once recording you may record whatever you wish.

6. When you want to stop go to your toolbar, right click on the quicktime emblem and click "Stop Screen Recording"

7. Your done!

[applesource]

Automation

From lifehacker: How Can I Start and Shut Down My Computer Automatically Every Morning?

On a Mac This process is much easier on a Mac than on Windows. To set it up on OS X: Open up System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In the bottom right corner, click the Schedule button. Check the box next to "Start up or wake" to schedule when your computer turns on and the checkbox beneath it to schedule when you computer goes to sleep, restarts, or shuts down. You can set the schedules for specific days, every day, just weekdays, or weekends only. Once you've made all your choices, click the OK button. Note that if you're setting schedules on a Mac laptop, it will need to be connected to power for these schedules to function.

[applesource]

Quicklook

An incredibly useful but often overlooked feature in OSX is actually the Quicklook function, which does exactly as its name suggests. I find it annoying to have to open up the application just to see what exactly the picture/document/movie/mp3 is, so it's a useful utility to keep around. Very little memory hog relative to actually having to locate the application, open it, grab a cup of coffee while it's opening, do a funny dance and then come back to see it's actually a photo of you the day you rolled out of bed with your hair sticking out in an odd place.

it's quite well integrated into the different parts of the mac os, for example Finder windows, and open/save dialog boxes.To see it in action, you can just open a finder window, select the offending document and hit the space bar. hit the space bar again to close the quicklook window that opens up. You're not just limited to finder windows, you can use it in the open/save dialog boxes across most, if not all the applications.I like the fact that it works for a good number of common file types, like images, microsoft office documents even, PDFs, movies (if you're so inclined) and even mp3s.

Here're a couple of screenshots to see quicklook in action.

This is quicklook running in a firefox open/save dialog box -

Here's an advanced quicklook tip - to zoom into the document that you've opened in quicklook, just pinch out with two fingers on the trackpad.

1 step recap -

hit spacebar to preview your document quickly in any window!

[applesource]

The difference between...

The difference between quitting an application and closing an application window.

In order to free up RAM so that applications can run more smoothly on my mac, I prefer to quit applications completely (Cmd + Q) instead of just closing the application window (Cmd + W).

For windows users, closing an application either by using the keys (Alt + F4) or clicking the close button on the window would mean that the application is killed immediately.

For Mac users however, there is an important difference. What's the difference?

Command + Q tells the mac to kill the application. This means the the application is no longer running and hogging up the memory in the mac. Command + W on the other hand, closes the application window, but leaves the application running in the background. As a practical matter, for applications which I will use frequently and which I don't want to have to keep opening it up from ground zero (like Microsoft word), I prefer to use the Cmd + W keys. This closes the document that I am no longer working on, but in the event I need a fresh document I can just call on the application again immediately.

Recap:

Command + Q: Quit applications completely

Command + W: Close specific application window