The funny thing is that it’s usually all in the OS documentation. But who reads this stuff? Why do they even make “instructions” if nobody reads them ? ;) Well we don’t read them and sometimes we find out about some stuff either by accident or in some web article (this is what you’re doing right now, ha!). First of all let’s take the dock. The dock (in my case it’s a custom Onyx dock but it works just as your regular “shelf” in Leopard…) you have a bunch of icons and a couple of stacks probably like your Documents, your Downloads, some people (like me) also have their applications in a stack for easy access. The trick is :
Press Command, hold it and click on anything on the dock
That takes you to a finder window with the file selected. You can easily find where exactly is that app, that file dragged to the dock, or any element in stacks because if you open a stack and Command + click on an item in it it will open a finder window with that item highlited. Pretty cool huh ?
Automator can be your best friend
Imagine you have 57 png images that are 1600×1200 pixels wide. And you’d like them to be 640×480 JPG files. So you sit down for two hours and you resize them one by one, at number 29 cursing your mac and all those unfortunate people around you. There’s a better way of course. Just open up “Automator” (it’s on every mac, search for it in Spotlight for example). Click on “Workflow”. Then drag your 57 png images to the window on the right. From the list on the left choose photos – that will limit you to only the image options. Then find “Change file type” and drag it below your file list. Look for resize image and drag it also. You can edit the options of each action accordingly (set the file type to change to, set the new resolution etc). When you’re done just press play in the upper right corner of your screen. A window appears sometimes asking you if you want to make new jpg files, or just transform those PNG’s (thus deleting the originals). Select whatever you want to do and press ok. And you’re done. Boom!
The power of Preview – how to merge pdf files into one big pdf
Sure Preview has been updated in the new OS X – they even added the “resize image” function that was gone from it for many, many years. How innovative! But anyway. Did you know that preview can also combine documents into one file? For example merging pdf documents into one large document can be done easily and quickly just in preview. Just open up preview. Drag your pdf files to the preview icon in your dock. You should see the pdf files in the preview app sidebar. Then just click on one of them and drag it over the other. Preview will merge the files, and then you can save it as another PDF file. Neato!