Posts Tagged ‘alternative’

Mac OS X Leopard has a tool to dump all or part of the screen built into the desktop, with handy (if difficult to remember) hot key-chords:

• cmd+shift+3 to dump the whole screen
• cmd+shift+4 to select an area of the screen (then press space for a whole window).

However, there are times when the above won’t do. Typically, it’s when you’re already pressing keys to get the image you need — the key chord cmd+shift+4 isn’t going to work if you’re already holding down alt for example.

That’s where grab comes in — it’s what Mac users used before cmd+shift+3/4 came along, it’s still there, and it can dump the screen after a ten second delay.

So, start up grab. I use Spotlight to do that, so I type cmd+space grab:

Then, to do the delayed screen dump, select Timed Screen from grab‘s Capture menu:

You then have ten seconds to set up the screen as needed, and grab does the rest.

Then select File->Save As… to save the resulting tiff file, and you’re done.

First, the hard way

When you wish to open a file using a particular application, it’s simple. Just right-click on the file (ctrl+click) and select Open With.

However, if you’d like that file to always open with the selected application then things are less elegant: right click, Open With, Other…, select the application and tick Always Open With. Fiddly.

The easy way

Fortunately there is an easier way.

Right click on the file as before, but this time depress the alt key. Hey-presto, the Open With option changes into Always Open With.

How’s that for handy?

Changing the default application for all files of a kind

The above method sets the default application for this file only. If you’d like to change the default application for all files of a type (a kind in Mac OS speak) then here’s how to do it.