MacTricksAndTips.com

A couple of days ago I wrote a noob’s guide to installing applications. Its was well received by many and one question which seemed to appear a lot was how to uninstall applications. Clearly people are having trouble with this. This post will hopefully clear up your worries.

There are two methods in which to uninstall applications. The normal way, and the not so normal application way. They both are very easy to complete and it really doesn’t take much to do.

The sleep feature of a Mac is one of the best features for quickly putting your Mac into a state where you can lift it off your desk and be back in the same spot when you start up again. The sleep functions do work better on laptops rather than desktops. This is just a quick tip to wrap up a Saturday of working.

The login screen on Leopard is cool the first 2000 times you see it, but after a while it does get a bit boring and it can do with a change. This method is really simple and doesn’t involve using Terminal or any sudo commands. Coincidentally I don’t really like using sudo commands or mentioning them, since they are so powerful, if you get it wrong you can delete your whole partition.

Many people who by laptops (especially Windows laptops), use the trackpad/touch pad as a means of clicking. By default this is switched off to Mac users, on the flip side it is normally on for Windows users. It is always funny to see a new Mac user trying to click with the touch pad and jabbing there finger ever harder on the touch pad. Thats not the purpose of this story, switching it on is.

Some times you need to quickly access system profile for various reasons. Usually you have two options. Either click on Apple in the menu bar > About This Mac > More Info of go to Applications > Utilities. But there is a third way.

If you click on the Apple in the menu bar, then press option, About This Mac will change to System Profiler. Its a simple little shortcut that could save you a little bit of time. Most menu options will give you a small hidden shortcuts if you press the option button. Try it out.

This is the sort of tip that you think you will never need until you want to change the default association of a file, and you can’t for the life of you think what you need to do. It is very simple to do. It is aimed at beginners to the OS but many people still may not know how to do it. Its slightly hidden away.

If you are not using Time Machine you should. It so easy to use and simple to set up. Anyway I have found that my Time Machine could backup more frequently. The default time is one hour. In an hour I can create change and delete a lot of file that wouldn’t be backed up. You can change the backup time value and it is easy to do. There are two ways to do this, through Terminal or the good old manual way. They do the same thing.

Here is a power trick that I love. In a nutshell it enables the path of the current finder window to be shown where the name of the folder is kept. For example on a default Leopard installation the name of the folder is shown in the top of the window, for example “Applications”. This is Ok, but there is a quick trick and can enable the full path of the current finder window to be shown. An example of this is shown below.