Do you have a large directory of movies? Not sure what each video is? If you’re in thumbnail view at a large enough resolution (looks like 68×68 is the threshold for me) or in Cover Flow view, you can play movie files directly within the Finder by hovering over their icon to display a play button. Simply click play and the video complete with sound will play seamlessly within the Mac OS X Finder window, hover while it’s playing and there’s a pause button too.

You can easily and quickly preview fonts within Mac OS X by navigating to the font directory in /Library/Fonts/ and changing the Finder view to Cover Flow mode. Now flicking through all your available fonts is easy as can be.

An alternative method to preview fonts is navigating to /Library/Fonts/ (Hit Command+Shift+G in the Mac Finder and type in the path) and then selecting list view, and then hit the Spacebar to enter into Quick Look mode, you’ll now be able to scroll through every font and see the full alphabet rendered in the selected font in lowercase and uppercase.

You can view .PSD Adobe Photoshop files directly in Mac OS X with no additional software, thanks to Quick Look and Preview.

To get a fast preview of a PSD file, simply select the document within the Finder and hit the Spacebar to launch the PSD file rendered in Mac OS X’s very own Quick Look. If you want a bit more control over viewing the PSD file (zoom, resize, whatever), you can take it a step further by opening the PSD document within the Preview app, just drag and drop it onto the application icon and away you go (note some versions of Mac OS X will automatically open PSD files within Preview if you just double-click on them, assuming Photoshop is not installed on the Mac).

If you want to edit a PSD file with the same type of capabilities as Photoshop without paying for it, you could try using Gimp, a free open source Photoshop clone. It’s not perfect but works pretty well for image editing, and if you’re not trying to do anything overly complex, it’ll save you a few hundred bucks.

Did you know you can pause any application download or update on the iPhone and iPod Touch? This is great when you’re in a bandwidth bind or have low bars of reception.

* Pause the download/update by just tapping on the app’s icon while the download is going
* You’ll know the download is paused because the name will change to ‘Paused’ (see screenshot)
* Tap the icon again to resume the download or update

You learn something new everyday! I’ll bet this tip works for the iPad too, but since they aren’t in the wild yet we don’t know for sure.

[ screenshot and tip via MacObserver ]

You can quickly Get Info on any file or application from within Spotlight, simply highlight the file you want to Get Info on and hit Command+i to pull up the Get Info window. Very handy!

If you’re tired of having your Dock full of thumbnailed versions of minimized windows, you can change the Dock’s minimize behavior with a simple Terminal command that will minimize windows into the parent applications Dock icon. You can then tell which windows are minimized by looking for the diamond next to the window name (see screenshot). This is very helpful in particular if you’re working with a limited screen resolution, or if you have a Dock that is loaded to the brim with applications and folders.

If you want to enable this feature, launch the Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock minimize-to-application -BOOL YES

With how useful this is I’m surprised it’s not an option somewhere within the Mac OS X GUI preferences.

Converting various filetypes can be a total pain, especially when you don’t know how. OS X Daily has covered a lot of file format conversions in the past, so here’s a helpful list of them all.

Convert Music & Audio File Formats

Convert m4a to mp3

Convert WMA to MP3

Convert MP3 to iPhone Ringtone

Converting various formats is actually one of the more common questions I get from those new to Mac OS X, wondering how to ditch something like the WMV or WMA format for the Mac equivalents.

Convert Video File Formats

Convert WMV to MOV

Convert AVI to MOV

Convert DVD to MOV or AVI

Convert DVD to iPod

Convert YouTube to iPod format

It’s not only music files and movies that need the file type converted though, often you just need something simple like an image changed from PNG to GIF, or something more advanced like a disk image converted to another format.

Converting Other File Formats: Image Files, Disk Images, ISO’s, and more

Convert PNG to JPG

Convert Images in Mac OS X: JPG to GIF, PSD to JPG, BMP to JPG, JPG to PDF, and more

Convert Nero images to ISO

Convert a DMG to ISO

Convert an ISO to DMG

Burn an ISO on Mac

Convert Boot Camp partition to VMWare Image

Often when you’re trying to convert something you’re looking for a quick solution. With that in mind, our emphasis is generally on free file format conversions and utilizing what’s included with Mac OS X whenever is possible. If a download is required to convert certain file formats, we try to work with free solutions.

Using a Keyboard option you can allow the Tab Key to switch between dialog buttons, fields, and anything else in a dialog box within Mac OS X. This can greatly enhance the speed at which you use your Mac, and I’m a bit surprised Apple has never chosen to enable the feature by default.

Enable Tab Key for Navigating Mac Dialog Boxes & Buttons
* Launch System Preferences
* Click “Keyboards”
* Select “Keyboard Shortcuts”
* Near the bottom look for “Full Keyboard Access” and click the radio button next to ‘All controls’
* Close System Preferences (if you are confused see below screenshot)

Now anytime you have a dialog window pop up you can quickly navigate to the alternate choices and options by simply hitting the Tab key, very useful!

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. Resolving the backup delay is easy to do, just pull down the Time Machine menu and select ‘Backup Now’, as long as you have the Time Machine drive attached, your backup will go as usual.

Common reasons to have the ‘Time Machine Backup Delayed’ message:
* You have manually stopped the Time Machine backup process several times
* You have detached the external device that Time Machine was backing up to
* You have recently changed the Time Machine backup drive

If you have recently changed the Time Machine device, make sure Time Machine is aware of the new disk location by checking out the Time Machine preferences within System Preferences > Time Machine. The name of the backup disk will be listed, if it’s an old drive or you want to switch it, just hit the ‘Select Disk’ button and select your new backup disk.

I recommend to just let Time Machine run on it’s regular backup schedule so you can prevent delays and keep your Mac backups as accurate and relevant as possible. You may not need them often, but when you do, you’ll be glad you have a recent Time Machine snapshot to revert back to.

Recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason, I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it. I know the images are fine because they open fine in Windows and even in Photoshop, so how can I force Preview to open the images? Pretty easy really: hold down Command+Option keys while dragging a file onto the Preview icon, this will force any file to open through Preview (you could force a text file into preview if you wanted with this, but obviously preview will only render compatible files).

Using this method, the images worked fine, I was able to resave them, and now they’re back to opening in Preview as usual. I’m not sure what the cause of this problem is, perhaps the image EXIF or meta data was corrupted. I remembered this trick from a post a few years back by our very own David Mendez, how to force open a file in Mac OS X, and this actually will work with nearly every application and file, so if you want to force an image file into TextWrangler, you could do that too.