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One thing that drove a former co-worker absolutely crazy was when he was zoomed into an image in Photoshop and was using the lasso tool, but because he was zoomed in so far, he couldn't see the whole image. When he tried to scroll without letting go of the mouse, Photoshop of course went crazy with the selection.

His rather creative solution, though a lot of work, was to use the Lasso Tool to make his selection of what he could see on screen, save it as a channel, then scroll the document and repeat until he had everything he wanted. I didn't have the heart to tell him that there was an easy way to do what he wanted (nor did I tell him that the Pen Tool would probably be much better for his needs).

When you're making your selection and you get close to the edge of the document window, all you need to do is hold down the Spacebar (without letting up off the mouse button, of course). The Hand Tool will do its duty moving your view around, and when you let go of the Spacebar, your selection is still intact and you can continue with your Lasso selection.

As a side note, using the Marquee Tool to make a selection, and halfway through, hold the Spacebar down while moving the mouse. Then let go of the Spacebar and continue making your selection. See what just happened? Believe it or not, I actually had a use for that feature, maybe someday you will too.

Sometimes you want to copy a page you've created in Adobe InDesign to another document. Most people would do a select all, copy, switch to the other document and past in place. This is fine, except that it's a lot of back & forth work.

Next time, try dragging the page icon from the first document's Pages palette to the new document's window - The entire page will be copied in place (except for Master Page items)

Note: It has come to my attention that the original tip wasn't working for everyone. Rather than try to troubleshoot, I have adjusted the original text of the tip. My apology to anyone who spent a lot of time attempting to get the tip to work.

This is a beginner step by step tutorial that will help you set up your Mac, so that you can run PHP and MySQL locally and test the functionality of your websites. This post is written to graphic designers, who know little about programming, but are learning to incorporate PHP engines with MySQL databases into their web sites and want to test their designs in action or want to extend their services to include basic PHP functionality. So, sorry if I sound like I'm spoonfeeding you and being overly conversational. :)

You can upload websites to your hosting servers and test them on-line, but it's much faster and easier to test them on your own machine locally. Most importantly locally you can create as many databases as you want for each of your web projects, while most hosting companies only allow one. This set-up will allow you to install opensource engines like phpBB, WordPress or Drupal. You can also start taking snippets of code from different sources and testing them on your Mac.

You need to run three applications to be able to start your own PHP webserver:

1. Apache: Web sharing application that serves pages from your hard disk to your browser.
2. PHP: PHP engine that translates your PHP code into html code.
3. MySQL: Database engine, that allows you to have databases, which PHP can communicate with to fill up the html pages with content.

Apache
First of all let me start with the good news. If you have Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), than you already have Apache and PHP installed already. You just need to start them.

To start Apache, you simply need to switch on the System Preferences /Sharing /Personal Web Sharing.

PHP
To start PHP you need to copy the line of code below, than open Terminal and paste it in. Than press enter (make sure that when you copy commands you don't copy any additional spaces or linebreaks, only the code):
sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

You will need to enter your admin password. This will open a Terminal based word processor called pico. Welcome to the eighties. :)

You will need to delete two instances of "#" from the opened file to make the lines active. The two lines are the following:
#LoadModule php4_module
#AddModule mod_php4.c

Select and copy the first line. To search in this editor you will need to press CTRL-W (instead of Apple-F). Paste in the first line to the search field and press return. Once Pico located the line your we were looking for, you need to press right arrow to align with the letter "L" and a backspace to delete the "#". Now copy the second line and do a search in Pico again. Once you have deleted the second "#" you will need to save your document by pressing CTRL-O (instead of Apple-S). Press return again. Finally quit the editor by pressing CTRL-X (instead of Apple-Q).

You are still in in Terminal and you will need to restart your Apache, so that it starts PHP, so copy the following line to the Terminal:
sudo apachectl graceful

It should give you this message:
/usr/sbin/apachectl graceful: httpd gracefully restarted

MySQL
First you need to download MySQL. You will need to install MySQL-Standard, and than the MySQLStartupItem.

Now go back to Terminal and enter the following command:
sudo -b /usr/local/mysql/bin/safe_mysqld

Finally you need to add a password to your MySQL root user. Change the "yourpasswordhere" in the code below to a password you can easily remember:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password yourpasswordhere

Test your PHP and MySQL setup
To test PHP download this file double click to decompress and put it into your Library /Webserver /Documents/. This is the folder that you will copy your sites into.

Now open your browser and type this in as a url:
http://localhost/phpinfo.php

To test your database you can simply type this into the Terminal:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql test

The message you receive means that you opened the database named test and you're ready to work on it. You can manage your databases from the Terminal but there is an easier way to do it. For now just simply type the following to quit the MySQL prompt:
\q

MySQL graphical interface
If you prefer a more graphic interface to manage databases download this little application and double click it to open the archive.

Open the config.inc.php file in the /phpMyAdmin folder in any text editor such as TextEdit or Pico. You will need to edit this file to contain your MySQL root password.

Search for "root". Under the root username there will be a password field. Enter your password in there and look further. There should be more than one insance of root in the document. Enter your password under each one. Save the file. Put the phpMyAdmin folder that now contains the edited config file into your webserver folder Library /Webserver /Documents/.

Now type this into your browser to open a graphical interface:
http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/

From now on you can create any number of databases with phpMyAdmin and create any number of folders with your websites in your Library /Webserver /Documents/ folder and you will be able to access them and test them in your browser by typing:
http://localhost/yourwebsitename/

Visit MacZealots for instruction about how to install WordPress or Drupal.

Thanks to Will for the technical guidance.

By definition kitsch is sentimentality or vulgar, often pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts: “When money tries to buy beauty it tends to purchase a kind of courteous kitsch” (William H. Gass).

I think kitsch is a deeply rooted essential basic human need like strawberry ice-cream, jokes or pop music. We need kitsch to survive. Without kitsch we would never appreciate simplicity and fine taste. It's the necessary contrast.

If you think kitsch is disgusting by default, think again. Innocent, visually uneducated children love kitsch. Their judgement of what's nice and what's not is as sincere as their words telling that grandma has a moustache. They want to learn and enjoy life to the full. They love puppies and theme parks. They are instinctively drawn to kitsch. It visually stimulates them.

If you can't stand kitsch that means your taste is refined and too much stimulation tires you. You look for gentle visual stroking rather than hard rubbing. But, it also means that your senses die like unworked muscles. By rejecting kitsch you are closer to death day by day.

Let's celebrate kitsch and give it the credit it deserves.

Many times Photoshop files can get to many layers. This can be almost impossible to manage if you work only within the layers pallet. First off, let me say that I am a big advocate of naming layers. Not only it is more descriptive than Layer 1 or Layer 2. It gives other designers the ability to sort through your mess and hopefully call you a few less dirty names. With that said, using this next tip can greatly improve your speed when selecting layers.

Select the move tool (V) and hover over the area you want to select. CTRL-Click and a contextual menu will come up with a list of all the layers directly below your mouse. simply select the appropriate layer and move on. As you can see naming your layers as you go greatly improves your ability to get through a project with as little headache as possible.

Another great tip by Mark.

Have you ever made a selection like a square and tried to use the Select /Modify /Expand method to enlarge the selection? If you have, you noticed that you did not get a square at all. It will clip the corners off your selection. If you want to get accurate results you will need to jump to quick mask mode by clicking the quick mask icon in the tool bar or by pressing the letter "Q". Once in the quick mask mode you will need to use Filter /Other /Maximum or Minimum. If your selected area is red use Minimum, otherwise use Maximum. Use the slider to adjust the amount of expansion. In my example I drew a rectangle marquee, and to enlarge it, I used the Maximum filter.

Another cool tip from Mark.

This time of the year, just before Christmas is the time for the annual reports. You migh often need to use dummy copy to fill up the areas designed to hold text. Traditionally the dummy copy called lorem ipsum was used. It has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s. It has been popularised 'recently' with desktop publishing software and in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing 'lorem ipsum' passages.

However it's not a good solution to use the latin text in all cases, because blocks of text in different languages look differently. The lenght of the words, the amount of spaces and the average composition of the letters make up a very distinct look of a copy block on the page. Using the appropriate language is important to get the right look of your sample pages. This is where Judebear software's free Mac OS X application comes into the picture.

MacLorem uses the classic “lorem ipsum” phrase to generate random text, providing more variety and a more realistic, non-repetitive and naturally uneven look. Simply clicking on a button marked Generate will create random text, placing it in MacLorem’s main window and simultaneously placing it on your clipboard so it is ready to paste into the document you are designing.

Download MacLorem 2.0 (900K).

Often when I am searching for that perfect font for a logo I will try hundreds of font faces. I used to change them one by one in the font pallet. However you can speed things up a bit if you just put your mouse in the font drop down box to select it and use the up and down arrow keys to tab through all your fonts. It makes quick work of the task and you can even find a few fonts that you never would have tried otherwise.

Thanks for the great tip Mark!

To follow up on THIS TIP about drag & drop with InDesign – You can copy an Adobe Illustrator object from AI and paste it right into ID which makes it an InDesign object where you can color it, give it a stroke, or further adjust the bezier curves. ID will not however accept objects with a gradient, it just removes the gradient when you paste the path into your document. You just need to make sure that you have a few preferences set correctly.

In Adobe InDesign's preferences, at the bottom of the General prefs you will find 3 check boxes.

Make sure that Prefer PDF When Pasting is NOT checked, Copy PDF to Clipboard IS checked, and Preserve Text Attributes When Pasting is NOT checked. We're not done yet. Now we move on to the Illustrator portion.

In Adobe Illustrator's preferences, at the bottom of the File Handling & Clipboard prefs panel, make sure the Copy As: prefs are as follows: PDF is NOT checked, AICB (no transparency support) IS checked and the radio button for Preserve Paths IS selected (these prefs will allow you to copy Illustrator objects from AI into ID and keep the paths editable).

Everyone knows you can use the Apple + or Apple - keys to zoom in and out on an image in Photoshop - or, at least I HOPE you know that.

But sometimes that can be tedius to hit the key combo several times back and forth to zoom in and out when making adjustments. There is an easier way.

If you want to fill your screen with the image at the largest size that will fit, you can double-click the little Hand Grabber tool. If you're zoomed way in on an image and want to quickly go back to 100%, you can double-click the Magnifying Glass tool.