MacTricksAndTips.com

When ever your right click on a Dock item you will notice there is a list of items. Have you ever wondered how these items are created and if you can change them? Well you are in luck. This post will hopefully show you how you can change them to something a bit different. Its quite simple to do however you do need to err on the side of caution as you are altering system files. You only need TextEdit so it shouldn’t be too complicated.

Today’s entry builds upon the previous post, Screen Cap/Grab/Thumbnails Of Movies, in short I am going to show you a quick way to combine the preview image that is created in ScreenGrabber and attach this as the image icon, alternatively you can use this trick if you have an alternate frame/image you want to use as a replacement. This trick is useful if you browse your video in thumbnail mode. If the thumbnails are quite large you can have an entire overview of the movie. Pretty useful and easy to implement.

This is just a simple but rather interesting trick I would like to share with you today. If you have an iOS device, such as an iPhone or iTouch and want to read a file on the move such as a PDF or any other text file it can be very simple. The new iBooks app on the iOS device allows you to upload PDF’s. This post is going to show you how you can do this with any file, such as doc file for example.

Have you ever wondered which application or system process is using a file. The annoying message usually pops up when you are trying to delete a file or folder within Finder. This little trick, using a Terminal command called ‘lsof’, allows you to find which application is using a file, its very useful if you don’t know what application is using the file.

The title of this post doesn’t described everything I plan on doing within this post. I am going to show you how you can backup your disk images a disk image from Disk Utilities, then with this disk image migrate it over to a new computer. I effect your are transferring user accounts to a new computer and creating a back up. I have used to to back up disk images of people’s old Mac’s and then used this disk image to transfer there accounts onto a new computer. It has the added bonus of allowing you to use it on many new computers. So if you have a fleet of new Mac’s you can transfer the same user account and files onto the new Mac’s.

This is a quick Terminal trick that I think is quite useful, especially if you are into stocks and shares and want to know the latest price of your portfolio. This tip is going to show you how you can pull a stock/share quote into Terminal. I’ll then go a bit further and show you how you can put the price in a form that is easily read for use in GeekTool or something similar.

A couple of days ago I wrote a post on how to make a PDF file from anything, some one asked the question how do you save multiple images as one PDF. There may be many reasons for adding images into a simple PDF, it is generally useful for email purposes. This post has actually taken me a while to find the best solution. My original solution involved me making an original PDF file and then adding pages into the PDF file and then adding the images. However with a bit (of rather obvious) looking i’ve found a simple way to do it.

I was having a play around with Time Machine and Mail and I was wondering if there was any specific way to archive specific months of email. I know Time Machine backs up every single email address, however Time Machine isn’t that useful if you want to transfer or store these email addresses in another location. So I came up with this rather simple method, it takes a little bit of work, but by using smart folders you can actively back up and archive specific months of email.