New Mac User » How-To’s

Make External Display the Primary Monitor

Matt — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:27:52 +0000

When you connect the external monitor to an Apple Macbook, the external monitor will display as secondary monitor.

In order to make the external monitor the primary one, go to System Preferences -> Displays.

Select Arrangement. You will see two rectangles – each representing a monitor (internal & external).

You will also notice there is a small white bar at the top of the smaller rectangle. Drag the bar to the bigger rectangle (indicating that you want to make the external monitor the primary one).

Create new documents on-the-fly with Document Palette

Matt — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:24:03 +0000

Create new documents directly in open folders.

Document Palette runs in the background and allows you to create new documents in the current folder. With a folder active in Finder, press Control+Option+Command+N to make the palette appear, then select the document type you wish to create.

Or you could use quick Silver to get this running it does take a bit of set up to use quicksilver. Take a look at what I found to make this work in quicksilver.

From Dev.Lipidity.com
Configure your templates.
Create a new folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/ called “Templates.” There, save a bunch of new file templates, like an empty text file, an empty Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, whatever you need. These documents don’t have to be blank; for example, an HTML document template could contain the skeleton tags in it.

Once that’s done, to create new files in Quicksilver, invoke it, choose a directory your new file should live in, and use the “Make New..” Action. From there the object (shown in the third pane) will drop down the list of configured template choices.

Make Stacks in OS X Tiger

Matt — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:45:12 +0000

After watching the keynote last night, I really only saw one feature that i really have to have from the new Mac OS. It is Stacks. I began investigating how i could make this work on my Mac running OS 10.4. I saw a tip on Lifehacker that got me started. (Lifehacker article) They explained how to put a folder on the doc and if you click and hold the folder you will get a list. I know, I know its not a live view of the item but it is a way to open the item in much less time. Mr. Jobs said that he was going to have on of these stacks done for us out of the box in the download folder. I love this idea and an going to describe how to do so step by step…First go to the Finder and make a folder called Downloads, you will want to Place it some where that is easy for you to get to. I have made it in my user folder.

If you want to change the icon to something more than just the Default. Icon Factory is a great place to get free icons. If you are not sure haw to change an icon then here you go, if you do then skip this part. “Get info on the folder”, copy the icon from the download, Click on the icon in the “Get info” window and press command V to past the icon and your done.

Click and Drag the folder to the Doc Bar. I placed mine next to the Trash Can.

Now you will need to make this the default download folder in the browser you use. In Safari go to Preferences and about half way down Change the “Save downloaded files to:” and select the folder you just made. In Firefox its almost in the same place.

And to make it work like the Stacks, that was shown at the keynote, just click and hold on the folder in the doc and it will display the items you have downloaded. Just a not if you don’t have anything downloaded it will just give you a few options.

I also placed my applications folder in the doc to use it in the same way. If you want to put “Applications” there to make sure you use the Applications folder the is in the main drive not the one on the left side of the finder window. If you pick the one on the side it will remove it from the finder window.