Mac OS X « conradchavez.com

Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category

Mac OS X: Keyboard shortcuts to launch any application

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on June 28, 2007 | 22 Comments »

Some of the search queries that land people on this blog seem to be looking for shortcuts for applications. (Especially Activity Monitor…see the third and last paragraphs for more on that one.) With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you don’t need to create or even learn shortcuts for applications. They’re already there, but not [...]

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Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac: Free a stuck Help window

Posted in Mac OS X, Microsoft Office on June 5, 2007 | 11 Comments »

The Microsoft Office Help window’s title bar can sometimes get stuck under the menu bar. When that happens, you can’t move the Help window, and you can’t close it because the close button is part of the title bar. Because the Help window is more like a palette than a window, it doesn’t respond to [...]

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Stuttering video playback on PowerBooks and iBooks

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X, tagged iBook, laptop, notebook, PowerBook, streaming, Video on February 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple PowerBook or iBook, here are some ideas. Check Energy Saver settings. Open your System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In Energy Saver, click the Options tab. Now check the setting for Processor Performance. If it’s set to Reduced, change it to Highest or Automatic. Video [...]

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Mysterious application failures caused by delocalization

Posted in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, Apple, Mac OS X on January 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Is an application failing to start after you run a delocalizing utility? Some apps don’t like to have their localized resources deleted, and they refuse to run without them…

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Back up important preferences files

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Mac OS X on November 19, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

When an application isn’t quite working right, sometimes the cause is a preferences file that’s gotten corrupted, so a common troubleshooting step is to delete an application’s preferences file. That’s easy to do, but with many of today’s more complex software programs, preferences are key to your workflow, and when you lose your preferences, the [...]

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Spotlight: Speed search term entry by abbreviating

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on September 25, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

If you’ve used both Spotlight and one of the third-party file indexers/launchers that came before it, like LaunchBar or QuickSilver, you know that entering a search takes a little more effort in Spotlight. LaunchBar and QuickSilver can find a file using very short abbreviations, they learn which abbreviations you prefer, and they interpret abbreviations very [...]

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Select a menu command by typing

Posted in Mac OS X on August 15, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

In Mac OS X, when a menu is open you can select a menu command by typing its name. You can actually go well beyond that, but most Mac users are not aware of how to do it. Running menus from the keyboard sounds like a minor feature, but in fact, selecting a command by [...]

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Apple Mail 2.0: Organize smart mailboxes

Posted in Mac OS X on August 4, 2006 | 3 Comments »

Just as you can organize mailboxes into mail folders, you can organize smart mailboxes into smart mailbox folders. In a mail window, I had been frustrated by the inability to sort Smart Mailboxes in folders like you can with normal mailboxes, so I had left all my smart mailboxes at the top level of my [...]

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Fix problems with menu bar utilities

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on July 26, 2006 | 4 Comments »

When an item on the right side of the menu bar isn’t working right (Spotlight, the Airport icon, or something you added to the menu bar), you can often fix it without having to restart the computer. Menu bar utilities are handled by a process called SystemUIServer. If you restart that process, everything on the [...]

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