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Ask TUAW: Windows Printing, AutoFill, FireWire HDs, MacBook power adapters and more
It's time again for Ask TUAW, our weekly feature where you ask the questions and we make up the answers... er, I mean carefully research and determine the optimal solution. This week we'll be tackling questions about printing from OS X to a printer connected to a Windows box, AutoFill in Safari, problems with a FireWire hard drive, using a MacBook Pro power adapter with a MacBook, and more.As always readers' suggested answers are most welcome! Please leave your questions for next week in the comments.
The Little Things: Infinitely large targets
Some of the unsung wonders of working in Mac OS X are the features influenced by Fitts' Law. I first saw this concept mentioned and articulated by John Gruber in his Fitts's Law and the Apple and Spotlight Menus portion of a Tiger Details page he was maintaining after the launch of 10.4. In fact, I might as well just quote John for a summary on the basics of Fitts' Law:The gist of Fitts's Law is that the time it takes to point to a target - in our case here, with your mouse or trackpad - is a function of the distance and size of the target. Bigger and closer targets are easier to hit.The beauty here is in how Apple has leveraged this concept with Mac OS X's UI, right down to the reason behind the menubar being pinned and always accessible at the top of your display. Basically speaking, there are five primary targets that are dead simple to hit, without even having to look at them: the four corners of your display and the menubar (and sure, the Dock could count as a sixth, but I'm leaving it out for now). You can easily just fling your mouse 'up' and hit the menu that governs the application you're working in (or any you can quickly switch to); it might seem like a minor detail, but it's one that makes it a lot easier to land on the menu you need and keep working. The four corners of your display are even easier, according to Fitts' Law, since they are what John called 'infinitely large targets.' You can close your eyes and fling your mouse 'down and to the left' and know that you've hit the lower left corner of any display. Attach an action like invoking Dashboard or an Exposé view to those corners (accessible via the Dashboard and Exposé System Preferences pane) and you have just enabled a powerful way to access information and organize your windows. Tack on a 3rd party tool like MaxMenus, CornerClick (a download is available but their site is under renovation) or Spanner and you open up even more possibilities for using these incredibly easy targets to enhance the way you work.
Ask TUAW: Printing Finder window contents, CornerClick, a Finder hotkey, editing AVIs and more
This week's Ask TUAW takes us into questions about printing Finder window contents, assigning programs to the corner of your screen, bringing up the Finder with a HotKey, integrating Apple productivity programs, recording TV on your Mac and editing AVIs . Remember new Mac users and Switchers who are enjoying our Mac 101 series should feel very welcome to post questions for Ask TUAW; we're happy to take questions from all levels. As always, please submit your questions by commenting to this post or using our tip form.
Mac and Mobile: tips for Notebook Users
Samuel Cohen over at theappleblog has a nice post up on ten top apps for laptop-toting Mac users. Many of his selections are old favorites (Quicksilver), but there are a few here that are new to me. The CornerClick Preference Pane allows you to assign various actions to the corners of your screen. According to Sam, fKeys lets you "remap the enter key (not the return key. The enter key. It's the one that's in between the command key and the arrow keys on the right-hand side of your laptop keyboard) to an option key, just like on a full-size keyboard." Finally, Noise is a simple app for generating pink noise for when you want to tune out the Muzak at your local coffee house. Check out the original post for the rest, while I go play with CornerClick.[Edit: Corrected CornerClick description; thanks Dan. I was probably thinking of the replacement trackpad driver SideTrack which does allow for assigning functions to corner clicks on the trackpad].
