If you had to decide between 5 new features in Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) or let's say a 20% speed increase in all of your application compared to Leopard (OS X 10.5), which one would you choose?

In Finder you can zoom in and out with your trackpad using the pinching gesture.

This feature in Finder only works with the icon and coverflow views. It's very useful when applied to the Desktop, for example if you need to quickly make space for more icons or you want to see the icons of some documents in larger size.

To switch on this feature go to Finder / Preferences / Advanced and switch on Zoom using trackpad.

Google now allows logged in users to vote for, delete and add new search results for any keyword. What does this mean to you and web site search engine optimization (SEO)? First see the video below about SearchWiki and what it does.

One might think that eating has nothing to do with your creative capacity, but he would be so wrong. What you put in your system greatly influences how many good ideas you will have and how fast they will come.

Most importantly you need to think long term. If you're in the creative business you have to come up with ideas daily or at least several times a week. You should not abuse your body for short term gains. On long term such practices will make you suffer.

Numerous studies have shown that eating the right kind of stuff can increase your brain powers besides making you healthy.

For fuel your brain uses carbohydrates. Omega 3 fatty acids are used as building blocks for the neurotransmitters. Antioxidants help preserve your brain powers on long term. Now, let's look at these in detail.

Let's suppose you receive a pdf document that you need to further work on in Illustrator, but when you open it all fonts get replaced by the default font, because you don't have those fonts used in the pdf. The font information is there in the pdf, so theoretically if you could convert all the text to outlines you would be able to work with the document.

To do that you have to open a new Illustrator document. Place the the pdf. Select the menu Object / Flatten transparency. Make sure to check the Convert all text to outlines option and go. You got the whole pdf in curves.

Have you ever had a problem like the the picture above in InDesign?

All those red zones are above 300% inkt percentage.

So you need to change those percentages, there are a lot of ways of doing it, with profiles and so on...

I found an interesting way in Photoshop. Here it is...

I was looking for a good way to implement a simple theme switcher for creativebits' light theme and found this competition on smashing magazine. The winner has a very sexy OS X style box that moves around and allows switching between several themes. I think it's an overkill for our purposes, but it is certainly inspiring.

Looks very exciting. More info here.

Finally Google released Analytics' most requested feature. It's still in beta, but works pretty well already. Now, you can view your long term data in weekly and monthly breakdown besides the default daily view. This was a very important step to be able to judge your site's growth over a longer period of time.

Daily breakdown. Hard to see the trends.

Weekly view. Easier to judge.

Monthly view. You can clearly see the trend here.

Also, you have the option to view many other aspects of your site besides number of visitors such as page views and Pages/Visit. Now, Google Analytics is truly the best free solution out there to measure and analyze your site's traffic.

There are millions of ways to generate ideas to come up with new concepts for your projects. You can use your subconscious to come up with an idea or you can consult the Idea Generator for random associations. This tool is great because it gives you combinations of terms that are usually unrelated, but your mind will still try and connect them. This exercise will create lines of thoughts that can be completely novel.

Add to the three generated words some keywords from your own project and you get an endless list of inspirational sentences. Most of them will be non-sense, but they may still give you a seed for an idea. Of course you can simply use a dictionary for this purpose, but this tool is more convenient.