TekkieBob - All Things Tech!

Here's a tip that can help you in many ways. Screenshots. This means that you can take 'pictures' of your computer screen or any part of it. Taking shots of your screen can be very useful. For example, suppose you are trying to help a friend with his Mac. You could take a picture and send it in an email to help him visualize how he can accomplish his task. How to do it. You could use Grab in the Utilities folder, or you could use keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are quick and easy. Say you want a shot of your entire screen, simply press (all together) Shift-Command(⌘)-3 and Leopard will make a picture file on your desktop that you can modify or send in an email. Like this: The screen shot will be a small file on your desktop like this: You can rename and move the file as you wish, of course too. Another shortcut is ⌘-Shift-4 which will allow you to take a picture of only a portion of your screen. (That is how I captured the picture of the file on the right.) ⌘-Shift-...

Time Machine for Mac OS X Leopard is a feature of the operating system that can save a user so much heartache! Recently, I had the unthinkable happen - a physical hard-drive crash! Ordinarily this would have been the most devastating thing to happen. However, thanks to a recent Time Machine backup on my Time Capsule , I was able to restore my Documents, Applications and settings on my new drive. It was as though nothing happened at all. For those unfamiliar, Time Machine is a feature built into OS X 10.5 that automatically backs up your Mac to an external hard drive every hour. It keeps hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for 30 days, and weekly backups until the disk is full and then deletes the oldest. Has Time Machine for Leopard saved you? Tell me about it!

Quicklook - look at file content without opening a program. New with Mac OS X Leopard is a program called Quicklook. This time saving utility enables a user to view the contents of a file without having to open the program used to edit it. For example, say you have a PDF document and want to quickly review its contents. Normally one would have to open Preview in order to see it. Now with Quicklook, one can simply touch the spacebar and the file 'opens' on screen instantly. You can scroll, view in full screen and even move on to the next file without having to open any other program. Accessing Quicklook is easy. In any finder window simply higlight the file and touch the spacebar. Alternatively, just click on the Quicklook icon. (It looks like an eye) Quicklook will open image files, text, PDF, spreadsheets, documents and even movies! Below is a quick video showing Quicklook in action. There are plugins available that allow Quicklook to work with folders and other suppor...