Holy cow. Tim Royer has posted a graph of GeekBench benchmark test suite scores for the iMac 27″ Core i5
Suddenly my MacBook Pro with a 3300 GeekBench score seems hopelessly inadequate!
Command-Tab in Mac OS X works really well as a quick application switcher and I use it all the time, but there’s more features available within the Command-Tab application switcher than just hitting Command+Tab itself. Once you’re in the application switcher you can try some of these other commands.
Command+Tab launches the Application Switcher. Continue holding down the Command key and then try the following buttons:
Memorize these tips to master the Mac application switcher and speed up your workflow! (Note: the expose features appear to be Snow Leopard only)
The easiest free way to convert an AVI file to MOV format in Mac OS X is by using the Perian plugin for QuickTime, here’s a step by step guide of what you’ll need to do:
First you’ll need to get Perian, it is a free open source QuickTime component that adds support for many popular video formats.
* Download Perian and install it
After you have installed Perian, you’ll use Apple’s own QuickTime Player (we’re using the Snow Leopard version in this walkthrough)
* Open the AVI movie you want converted to MOV within QuickTime
* From the File menu, select “Save As”
* In the pop-up save menu, select ‘movie’ and as you can see the file type will be .mov
* Click “Save”
* Now just wait until the AVI is converted to MOV, the time it takes will depend on the file size, but for most files it is pretty fast.
That’s it! You have just converted an AVI file to MOV format!
If anyone knows any easier ways to convert avi to mov than this (that are also free), please post them in the comments!
You can quickly access Wikipedia by typing a topic into Spotlight, then launching the built-in Dictionary app. Across the top you’ll see a “Wikipedia” tab where the article will be accessible directly from Dictionary in Mac OS X
[ via TwitPic ]
Sunday Funday… and now we’re driving cars with iPhones. We all know that texting and driving is distracting, but what about using your iPhone to actually drive a car? Someone actually figured out how to do this, and here’s the video. This seems nice and safe, nothing could possibly go wrong here…
You can combine PDF files within the Preview app by dropping thumbnails onto one another, Lifehacker explains:
The trick is to drag thumbnails on top of a thumbnail in the document you’re dragging to. This combines the pages. If you want to rearrange the pages, just drag them where you like—they’ll stay within the combined document. Save your document and you’re done.
This is a pretty good PDF management tip and one I’ll be sure to use. This appears to be Snow Leopard
Apple’s newest snazzy NYC store got 10,000 job applications and just over 200 were hired, making a 2% acceptance rate. BusinessInsider points out this is lower than the 7% acceptance rate at Harvard University. I imagine the economic situation contributes to the slew of resumes, but even still, those are some pretty remarkable statistics.
Listening to a great song that you think everyone should hear? You can easily share music with your friends thanks to iChat and iTunes, just drag a song from iTunes into an iChat window and off it goes! This may be Snow Leopard and iTunes 9 only, I don’t recall this feature working in Leopard.
Flash cookies are not deleted when you remove your browser cookies, because they are stored independent of your browser, meaning Flash cookies from Safari are accessible via Firefox, and vice versa. The interesting thing about Flash cookies though is that they could technically track your web browsing long after you have left the site that originated the Flash cookie, this is particularly the case with some advertising networks that appear ubiquitously around the web. Flash cookies actually have another name, they are known as Locally Stored Objects, or LSO’s, but whatever you want to call them, here is how to delete and remove Flash cookies, or LSO’s.
* Flash cookies are located in two locations, shown as follows:
~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects
~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/
Note that ~ signifies the user home directory
* You can navigate to these directories by using the Finder or by hitting Command+Shift+G and pasting the above location one at a time into the Go To Folder box and hitting “Go”
* You’ll now see a directory with a bunch of randomly generated names like VDZJH1CX
* Delete all of these folders if you want to delete ALL Flash cookies
* Repeat with the other directory listed above to completely remove all Flash cookies from your Mac
Now if you’ve used an Adobe AIR application, you might want to delete those AIR cookies too since they can track things outside of their realm as well, these are a little more tricky to delete because they are in the following location format:
~/Library/Preferences/AIR App Name/Local Store/#SharedObjects/flash file.swf/flash object.sol
You’ll need to know the specific Adobe AIR application name to delete the AIR cookies.
If you want to read more about Locally Stored Objects (Flash Cookies) check out Wikipedia’s entry on LSO’s, it is informative and helpful in understanding the technology.
If you don’t want to go mucking around in various Mac system preference folders, try out this application called Flush. Flush is very easy to use and will delete the Flash cookies itself, so you don’t have to do much except launch the app. Flush works with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Download Flush Now
Flush Developer Home
Another option is to use Kill Flash Cookies, the cross platform compatible LSO deletion tool discussed below:
Easy, try out the aptly named Kill Flash Cookies, it’s got the most simple GUI in the world and it deletes flash LSO files in an instant whether you’re running Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Linux. Try it out!
Did you know that iChat and iCal work very well together? If you’re having a conversation in iChat and you or anyone else mentions a date or a day, you can hover over that mentioned date/day and add an iCal event directly from iChat without ever launching iCal! Try it out yourself with any iChat conversation, just throw in a day and see how well it works, it’s quite impressive.
OS X Daily editor Ryan pointed this out to me via Twitter a couple weeks ago, and I was surprised to learn just how well it worked. It’s now part of my daily workflow, it is very handy. Thanks Ryan!
