Column selections

I am sure you are using the copy and paste technique every day you are using your Mac. Of course this a very impotant feature who nobody would ever like to miss again.

Normally you select the text either by keyboard or using the mouse to drag from the start to the end of the text you want to place into the clipboard. This way marks the text floating including it’s contents line breaks.

On a Mac you even can mark a text by drawing a rectangle! That makes sense if you need a exact text block to be marked. If you are working with text editors quite often, I am sure there was the one or other situation you needed that.

Just hold down the <OPTION> key before starting. The mouse pointer changes to a cross fade and then you know, that column selecting is activated. Now hightlight your wanted area, and that’s it.

Note: This is only working on Cocoa Text objects, like as in text/word processing fields.

Clipboard viewer

There are several ways to copy and paste data from source to another target, mostly applications or different windows.

You can use the classic Command+C and Command+V method or the mousy drag and drop.

When you are working with the computer, I am sure you are using this clipboard functionality quite often, because is saves so much typing.

If you want to know what you have just copied and pasted, then take a look at the Clipboard viewer out of the Apple’s developer tools box.

It does not replace a clipboard manager, but may help if you lost some pasting.

figure 1

Sometimes it may happen when you have a brandnew application and you drop it into the application folder, that the icon is looking like figure 1. The OS X uses a cache to display the icons quickly and it will not be rebuilt on folder change!

You can avoid this by using just a little trick.

Instead of throwing the application icon directly into the application folder, let it fall on the Desktop first. It will be extracted out of the dmg image and will have the correct icon picture instantly. Now drop it into the application folder and it looks correctly.

I am experiencing this with 10.5.6 and I filed it to Apple’s feedback form.

Skitch

Skitch is a wonderful freeware tool from Plasq helping you creating screenshots with annotations or simple image manipulations like rotation or scaling.

As you can see in the picture, I made a snapshot of my DJ homepage and did some simple things like text and shapes.

You can resize just by dragging or make snapshots even from your connected webcam. You have plenty of customizable settings and a history to see what images you have created.

Another cool thing is a time delayed screenshot as you can do with the Grab tool from the Application Utilities.

Skitch enables you to upload the visible picture to your own FTP server or many other preconfigured image hosters like Flickr or Plasq itself, where you can share it with the world or your friends.

On the bottom of the window is a puller where you can just drag and drop it on to the desktop, a folder or any other dragable application. The file is then named as specified in the textfield and created on your destination with the selected image file format.

There are many other features which would explode this article. Just have look at Plasq‘s valueable demo video. I am sure, after watching you will download, install and love it. Maybe that is the reason why they took a heart as logo.

PGP encryption

PGP stands for pretty good privacy and is used for encryption. It helps you to encypt your emails and files, so that only people you want to see the content can view it.

Of course, you can create a ZIP file and use a password, but that is not that secure as PGP supports.

To make that better, PGP works with two keys. One public key, you can give away and one private key which is secret and should only stay with you! The private key is additionaly secured by a passphrase, only you know.

To have it easy in all ways, you can use the free and Mac OS X ready compiled applications at the Mac GPG site.

To manage the keys use Keychain Access. This tool is also used to create your public and private key, if you do not have one, already.

If you want to send me a text or a file, that can be read only by me, you need to have my public key added to your keychains. For files use the FileTool, for messages use the DropThing.

For emails, you may use the GPGMail plugin in the OS X Mail application. Under the subject field you will find the PGP options for signing, encryption and decryption. Here please take a short look for the installation. You need to copy the file GPGMail.mailbundle to “~/Library/Mail/Bundles/” (Macintosh HD) manually.

Rearrange sites in PDF

PDF (Portable document format) by Adobe is a very great invention. If you create a PDF file, it can be read on every common computer and operating system – even on most mobile devices. They look and feel all the same.

But creating them with a Mac is no problem, because with OS X you have native support. You can do your very own PDF documents with almost every application by selecting File, Print, Save as PDF from the menu.

But what if you have a PDF and want to rearrange the pages? Just double click the appropriate PDF file and use drag and drop to resort the pages from the right quicklook pane.

Preview is that good, that you even can drag and drop pages between different PDF files!

You also can mark multiple pages to drag.

Because I am as lazy as most people, I do not want to type much. The console helps you out a lot with that. Just type the first letters and hit tab to autocomplete the name.

But what, if you did a download and want to run a included script from the extracted directory? Then you have to use the cd command (change directory) for every directory as long as you reached the target path. Use the magic and just type “cd ” (with a blank after cd). Next, drop the little folder icon from the finder’s window title bar to the console window to have the full path in the terminal session.

Terminal with drag and drop

The solution is really simple with the Quicktime player. Just pause at the wanted position, size the window as you like and then drag the picture to a document or the desktop.

Grab a picture from video

Voila! When dragging to the desktop the file is named “Movie Clipping 1″ and stored with loseless compression as a png image. If you do some more, they will be numbered.

Credits: Picture taken from Pumping iron.