I take a lot of screenshots, and while Os X makes it easy to capture the screen – Cmd + Shift + 3 to capture entire desktop, Cmd + Shift +4 to capture a portion, or Cmd + Shift + 4 and then hit the spacebar to screen grab an entire application window – it saves all the shots to the desktop. I don’t like to clutter up my desktop so I usually change the default folder for screen shots. Here’s how, open Terminal and type in:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /<yourpath>/
Replace with the full path to the directory where you want to store you screen shots (the directory has to exist). Example: /Users/Kris/Desktop/screengrabs.
Log out and back in again and your all set.
Photoshop CS4 has built in support for Macbook Pro’s multigesture trackpad. The problem is that I keep accidentally rotating the canvas, which is incredibly annoying. Luckily Adobe has released a plugin to disable this feature/annoyance. Download it here.
The host file is used to by an operating system to map hostnames to IP addresses. It’s useful for testing local files as remote domains. On Windows systems is typically located at
c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts
On a Mac you can edit the host file by opening up the Terminal app and typing in:
$ sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
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Safari ships with awesome developer tools (similar to Firebug), but it’s disabled by default. To activate the developer tools in Mac OS X, quit any running instances of Safari (or Webkit), open up the Terminal and type
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
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