Mac OS X

If you want to record any video content played in your browser you can use Snow Leopard's QuickTime X screen recording feature. If you want to avoid the need for cropping the video, put the video on full screen before starting the recording.

If you also want sound with your video you need reroute the speakers to the microphone with a software like Soundflower and select this new input source within Quicktime X as an input source for sound.

The fastest way to browse your directories in OS X is clearly the column view that you access by pressing Apple-3.

However in this view long file names are usually partially hidden, which can be a problem. Worry not, there is an easy way to resize the width of these columns. Just drag the separator line at the little handle at the bottom. This operation will only change one column at a time.

If you want to change all of them press Alt while resizing. This will not only resize all columns at once, but also makes the new width the default setting for all windows.

Safari and Firefox is the most known browsers for Mac, but there are many more out there. Give them a try and feel free to add more if I missed something?

Safari

Comes with OS X. Currently at version 4 it's one of the fastest browsers out there, which can tackle almost anything you throw at it. It syncs with your iPhone unlike other browsers.

When something goes wrong with your OS X operating system or your Applications you can try several things before getting upset about it:

1. Quit all unused apps - If you have a memory issue this will solve it.
2. Restart - Most of the times this is a quick solution.
3. Repair permissions - Open Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, select your HD and Verify then Repair your Permissions.

If you want to save on typing you can use Snow Leopard's built in Symbol and Text Substitution engine. Open System Preferences / Language & Text. Select the Text tab. Click the plus icon to add a new short code and the full text. This only works in the most common applications for typing, such as Mail, iChat and TextEdit unfortunately. If you need more extensive features check out this post on Textexpander.

You must have noticed an annoying little bug in Snow Leopard. When you try to open multiple files it only opens one at a time. Unfortunately I couldn't find a perfect solution, but there is an intermediate workaround until Apple fixes it.

1. Download and uncompress the attached file to your Desktop
2. Open Terminal and navigate to the folder you want to fix
3. Enter this command: find . -exec ~/Desktop/quarantine.sh '{}' \;

Thanks to Steve Grenier at the Apple support forums. If you have a permanent better solution, please do comment!

Just a quick word of caution. If you need the extensive export features of Quicktime Pro, make sure you backup the application before upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6. Snow Leo overwrites your old QT and will offer less options. After the installation you can simply move back the Quicktime 7 application into a different folder or renamed to differentiate from the new version.

Quicktime 7 export options

Quicktime 10 export options

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) introduced 4-finger trackpad gestures for MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

If you swipe down with four fingers you will activate Exposé to show all your active windows. If you swipe either up or down Exposé gets deactivated.

If you swipe up, your desktop will show. To deactivate you can again swipe up or down.

If you swipe sideways the Application switcher will show up. Once it's active you can select the required app and click to bring it forward.

Check out this video from Matt from www.macosxtutorials.com about what have changed in Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) compared to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).

Have you already made the jump? If so, how is it working out for you? If not, what's stopping you?

There are several reasons to put your display to sleep whenever possible:

• Saves your display
• Saves electricity
• Saves power in a laptop battery
• Saves private info on screen from preying eyes
• Saves the whales

To put the display to sleep at an instant just press:
CTRL-Shift-Eject