Last updated 10/20/2004

Mac OS X Power Hound: Panther Edition

Mac OS X Power Hound: Panther Edition
Author: Rob Griffiths, Creator of Macosxhints.com
Edited by David Pogue & Adam Goldstein
Publisher: O'Reilly
545 pages ... $24.95
ISBN 0-596-00818-X
Teach Yourself New Tricks

This is a book of Mac OS X hints and tips organized into sixteen chapters: 1. Designing Your World, 2. The Finder and Desktop, 3. The Dock, 4. Programs, 5. System Preferences, 6. Networking, 7. Mail, 8. iTunes, 9. iPhoto 4, 10. The Other iApps, 11. Other Apple Goodies, 12. Web Browsers, 13, Other Applications, 14. Add -Ons Worth Adding, 15. Useful Unix Hints, 16. Intermediate Unix Hints.

Mac OS X Power Hound: Panther Edition is not meant to be read cover-to-cover. It is meant to be sampled, to be enjoyed in small bites, or to look for specific hints. Here are two samples As I was writing this I opened the Contents to two different pages, and picked an item from each that looked interesting:

12-32 Quick Bookmarks

Imagine you are working on a huge research project, bookmarking tons of web sites as you go. You're probably tiring of the Safari new bookmark dance: hit Command-D (or click the plus sign button in the toolbar), name the bookmark, and pick a spot o save it form the pop-up menu. After about seventeenth site, this routing becomes rather tedious.

So, here's a faster, more efficient way to bookmark a bunch of sites: use Shift-Command-d instead of just Command-D. When you add the Shift key, Safari immediately saves your bookmark directly into the Bookmarks menu-no dialog box, no pop-up menu, no nothing to slow you down. Later, after you've added all of the sites, you can choose Bookmarks -> Bookmarks Menu to organize and rename them.

13-22 Speeding Up Batch Conversions

Photoshop's File -> Automate -> Batch command lets you apply resizing and formatting changes to a large number of files at once, while you sit back and leaf through a magazine.

To accelerate your batch conversions, send Photoshop to the background. That's because when it's not the foremost program, Photoshop doesn't bother to redraw the screen as it opens and modifies every fine in the batch. The result is much faster processing.

Not every hint in Mac OS X Power Hound: Panther Edition will interest any given reader, but this time I connected on two out of two.

There are over 650 of these hints. This would be a fun book to have, to sample one or two interesting hints when the mood fits, and to try them to see how useful they are for you.

For more information or to buy Mac OS X Power Hound: Panther Edition , go to
http://www.oreilly.com