by on November 7, 2009 5 Comments

Print Envelopes and Mailing Labels from Address Book

I’ve been using OSX for a few years now but every once in a while I run into one of those obvious features of the OS that I never knew about. This happened just the other day with the Address Book.

The Mac Address Book has a very full featured print facility which lets you print envelopes, mailing labels, even a pocket address book. You just need to select a card or range of cards and select Print from the menu. Check out the video below to see the entire process.

Have you come across anything about OSX that you never knew existed, tell us about it here.

by on November 5, 2009 1 Comment

Create PDFs from any Mac application

PDFs are the de facto standard for portable read-only document exchange. You can shell out money for Adobe or some other third party utility or, you can follow these steps to easily create a PDF from any OSX application that allows you to print a hard copy.

  1. Open a program that supports print
  2. Select Print
  3. In the bottom left hand corner of the Print dialog there is a PDF button, click it

PDF Dialog

It presents numerous options for manipulating a PDF file. You can save the PDF to disk, email it or any other number of things.

I use this feature all the time for printing receipts from the web, emailing a receipt to someone, making a PDF version of a Word document, etc. If you have any creative ways to use PDF, please let us know.

by on October 26, 2009 Leave a Comment

How to remove the Dashboard from the Dock

Your Dock is premium real estate on your Mac OSX Desktop. You should generally keep applications that you use everyday in your Dock for quick access.

The Dock comes configured with a few applications including the Dashboard. The Dashboard is already accessible via a shortcut key so placing it in the Dock might seem wasteful to some people. You can remove the Dashboad from the Dock by either control clicking the icon or by right clicking the icon and selecting remove from dock. This doesn’t disable the Dashboard, it just removes it from the Dock, to free up more space. Check out the demonstration video.

by on October 12, 2009 5 Comments

Quickly Switch Applications with this Shortcut Key

Apple Command Key

Apple Command Key

If you are coming from an Windows based operating system. You may know that Microsoft has an application switcher. The application switcher is activated using the ALT + TAB combination. This makes it easy to switch between all the open applications in the system.

Well, Apple has that functionality built into OSX as well. It’s activated using the Command + Tab keys. Press them together once and it activates the Application Switcher.

If you hold down the key and continue to press it, a block highlights the application that becomes active when you release the key combination.

Apple adds another cool feature to the Application Switcher. If you highlight an application and press the Q key, it will quit that application. Also, if you highlight an application and press the H key it will hide that application.

The Application Switcher is a great way to quickly move between your running programs. If you have any other interesting shortcuts, discuss them here.

by on October 2, 2009 Leave a Comment

Organize Your Photos with iPhoto and Faces

If you take a lot of digital photos, you know how challenging it can be to keep them organized. iPhoto, a free photo library application is included with Mac OSX. It does a great job helping you keep your library organized.

In iPhoto 9, Apple introduced a new featured called Faces which tries to identify and tag people in your pictures. With a little bit of training, it does this very well.

In this short video, Apple introduces Faces and shows you how you can start using it to track the people you love in your photos.

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