fudgegraphics | for lovers » mac

Mac Tip: Reverse Screen Colours

Franz Jeitz — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:36:39 +0000

At first I though it was just a little fun thing they added to Mac OSX, but today I discovered that it actually feeds a purpose. I was reading an interview on a dark website and half way through my eyes started to hurt. So I used the shortcut to reverse my screen colours which allowed me to read black text on a white background which really helped getting through it. Below are screenshots of what it looks like. I used this site as an example.

To access this shortcut press: ctrl+alt+apple+8
Hit it again to reverse to the original display.

Mac Tip: Master the Screencap Function

Franz Jeitz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:14:31 +0000

Every once in a while you need the screen capture function, maybe it’s because you can’t download an image from flickr but still want it in your library or you need to record your workflow for a tutorial. Whatever the reason, Mac OSX offers two simple shortcuts to grab a screenshot. The first one makes a simple fullscreen shot. Just use the combination “apple+shift+3“. It should save it as png on your desktop. At least those were my default settings. It even makes a nice shutter sound.

The second shortcut is what makes it interesting. Clicking “apple+shift+4” gives you a little crosshair which lets you draw a rectangle of the screen portion you want grab. It works exactly like the Marquee tool in Photoshop. Once you’ve started your selection you can release the keys (not the mouse click) and

hold ALT to draw from center
hold SHIFT to constrain height or width (depending on your next mouse movement)
hold SPACE to move the current selection

Once you’ve released the mouse you’ve got a perfectly cropped picture. This technique saved me already quite some time and we all know how precious time is in a designer’s life.

iPhone 3G still not coming to Luxembourg

Franz Jeitz — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:25:09 +0000

I’ve just watched the WWDC 2008 Keynote presentation where Steve Jobs introduced the new iPhone 3G. At only 199$ for the 8Gb model there aren’t any excuses not to get one. By the end of the year this uber-phone will be available in 70 countries worldwide, but Luxembourg is not one of them. What the fudge? I don’t get it. How can one of the founding countries of the European Union not make a deal with Apple. All the primary schools in Luxembourg are operating with macs, but no iPhone for us. I guess I’ll just have to buy it in the UK with an overpriced O2 contract.

Photoshop Tip: Delete Brush Shortcut

Franz Jeitz — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:25:06 +0000

By pure accident I found out how to quickly delete a Photoshop brush from the preset list. This comes in very handy when you’re trying to save a custom brush set and don’t want any superfluous brushes to be in your .abr file. There’s a tedious way, which means right-clicking on each brush and selecting delete. There’s the obvious one by clicking the thrash icon in the brush palette. Finally there’s a hidden, much simpler, quicker way: hold the Alt-Key while clicking on the brushes you don’t want. A little pair of scissors should appear which indicates that you’re about to remove that particular brush. So simply Alt-click through your brush palette to delete them one by one. That’ll save you precious seconds and we all know that time-saving is very important when designing. FYI I am running Photoshop CS3 on a Mac so I’m not sure how compatible this shortcut is with other versions. Unfortunaltely I couldn’t produce a screenshot of the technique. It should be fairly straightforward though.

*Update*: The shortcut works on Windows running Photoshop CS3. Thanks to Mr.Ju!-ce for the info.

Word Clock: Typographic Screensaver

Franz Jeitz — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:32:53 +0000

Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes.

image taken from formfiftyfive.com