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If you don't the default blue outer-glow in Exposé you can easily hack to make it look more appealing.

Go to the folder System/Libary/CoreServices. Locate the Dock application. Ctrl-Click it and select Show Package Contents. Within that navigate to the Contents/Resources folder. Here you will find two png files: expose-window-selection-small.png and expose-window-selection-big.png You can overwrite these to create a new look.

See attached files for a neat white outline.

Thanks for the tip propono!

There are situations when you have too many results in your Spotlight search. You can filter them to exactly what you need by using one of these search expressions:

1. name:searchterm - search filenames only, useful if you know you're not interested in email or text file content, etc, just file names.
2. date:today - useful if you know the file you're looking for was edited on a certain date. You can of course use the terms yesterday, 12/24/09 and even tomorrow which will search only calendar entries and to-do items.
3. kind:pdf - handy if you know the content type you're looking for or want to list all files of a certain kind. More details here.
4. author:ivan - use this if you know who the author of a certain document, email or chat is.

More posts on Spotlight:
Quick calculations with Spotlight
Tagging files for Spotlight
Changing the Spotlight shorcut
Show file location found by Spotlight

Sorry to pitch another Google service, but this is a really useful tool. :) Google Browser Size shows you how much of your website people see without scrolling. This can be important to make sure important elements of your site, like navigation are visible to as many people as possible. Also it gives you a good idea about the number of people who will see your extra wide website layout in its entirety.

By default most of us use our ISP's DNS to resolve web addresses into IP numbers. Google came up with a Public DNS system, which is is supposedly faster (and perhaps safer) than using the ISP's DNS. If you want to test it on your Mac it's really easy to set it up.

1. From the Apple menu, click System Preferences, then click Network. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
2. Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example: To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select Built-In Ethernet, and click Advanced. To change the settings for a wireless connection, select Airport, and click Advanced.
3. Select the DNS tab.
4. Click + to replace any listed addresses with, or add, the Google IP addresses at the top of the list: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
5. Click Apply and OK.

Google isn't first with the idea for a faster public DNS. I've been using OpenDNS for years, which is a really nifty service offering many features.

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 After the Shoot (Wiley Publishing)
By Mark Fitzgerald
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

I work with lots of photographers, most of them professionals. When I first begin to work with a new photographer, one of the first questions I ask is how she handles sharpening in her workflow. That’s because sharpening is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the postproduction workflow. When it’s done incorrectly, it can have a detrimental effect on the final image. If someone is making this mistake, I want her to know before moving on to other things.

Understanding Sharpening

Digital photo sharpening is nothing more than enhanced edge contrast. Photoshop tricks you into thinking a photo looks sharper by isolating edge detail and enhancing contrast along those edges. One side of the edge is lightened while the other side is darkened. The enhanced edge contrast is referred to as haloing because of the effect it causes along these edges.

There is no magic formula for sharpening because the amount of sharpening for a particular image depends on two very different things — the content of the image and its overall dimensions. Images with lots of edge detail, like the bowl of silver rings shown below, can handle more sharpening than images with fewer hard edges, such as photos of people or a photo of a landscape on a foggy morning. This is because lots of sharpening adds to the feel of the ring photo, while it would detract from the softer feeling of the portrait or foggy landscape. Additionally, a smaller print of this shot doesn’t need as much sharpening as a larger version would require.

Read further on Graphics.com

Context Free is an application that creates geometric shapes using a programming language.

All the images created are vector images that can be exported as SVG. You can open the files in Illustrator or Photoshop and further modify them to include in your designs.

Typical uses would be patterns for backgrounds and geometric shapes for logos.

Here are few examples created with this application:

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 for Nature Photographers: A Workshop in a Book (Sybex)
By Ellen Anon and Josh Anon
Dateline: September 24, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

The Shadow/Highlight adjustment is an excellent way to reveal subtle detail in the shadow and/or highlight areas of your images. Although you could theoretically produce similar results with sophisticated use of Curves, the Shadow/Highlight adjustment is far easier to use when you need to recover detail that has been lost in shadow or highlight areas because of excessive contrast. It’s similar to the Fill Light and Recovery sliders in ACR, but it has additional controls so you can fine-tune the results.

Read the full article on Graphics.com

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

If you want to help a friend to fix a Mac or want to buy a used Apple machine you will need detailed and extensive information about the computer. The easiest and fastest way to create a document that can be emailed is to export a text document with all the details from System Profiler. Here are detailed instructions:

1. Open Applications/Utilities/System Profiler application
2. Select the level of detail of information from View menu: Mini / Basic / Full
3. Select File/Save as menupoint
4. Select Plain Text format from the drop down

This document can be emailed and opened with TextEdit.

Let's say you want to delete a backup from an external drive you don't need anymore. This backup will be millions of files if it includes all the system files. If you want to delete such large amount of files using the Finder's Empty Trash command it may take you hours.

A simple trick in Terminal will reduce the time by 40% to empty your trash significantly. Carefully enter this command:
sudo rm -r

Now click and drag the folder you want to delete to the end of the line. This operation will insert the correct path. It will look something like this:
sudo rm -r /Volumes/Backup_Disk/Backups

Press enter and you will be asked for your admin password. Now just wait for the command to complete.

This method is not just faster, but it also runs in the background so you can use Finder normally.