This resizing skill has been somewhat overlooked because it’s a bit buried away in the menubar under ‘Tools’. But, in my usage of it, I’ve found it to be flexible and useful – surpassing shareware apps such as EasyBatchPhoto, and rather lacklustre freeware apps such as iZoom or PhotoDrop.

Before you start resizing with Preview, though, be aware that Preview will overwrite your current files, so have back-ups ready in case you don’t like the results. So, here’s how to get Preview.app to resize a bunch of photos…

1. Open the images that you’d like to resize, in the Preview app.
2. This is important: select one image, so that the thumbnail in the sidebar is highlighted blue, then do a ‘Select All’ (hit: Command/Apple and A) so that all the thumbnails are highlighted in blue.
3. In the menubar, navigate to ‘Tools’ and then click on ‘Adjust Size…’ (see image, below):

4. Now the Image Dimensions box appears, and you can now choose how you’re going to scale all your photos. I usually take my overly-large 3648 x 2432 photos down to a more manageable 2400 x 1600, which also reduces the file size by nearly half, without any perceptible loss in quality. (see image, below):

5. Once you’ve picked the right dimensions, hit ‘OK’ on that Image Dimensions box.
6. Wait for the images to be resized, as indicated by the progress bar. This could take a few minutes for very large files, or hundreds of images.
7. Nearly finished… But, wait, because the new images have not yet been saved. Navigate to ‘File’ in the menubar and click on ‘Save All’. A progress bar appears as the images are saved. (See image, below):

Ta-da…!

OK, all done. The only caveat is that landscape- and portrait-oriented photos and images need to be done separately, which can be a bit of a pain.

So, that’s how the Preview app can save you money and get your photos resized with no loss of quality, saving you time on uploads, and space on your hard-drive.

Before you check out the video screencast, just think of a dictionary or thesaurus that you’d like to have added to your Mac’s Dictionary, and then Google around to hopefully find a free or open-source version of a Leopard-compatible dictionary. It would need to be a folder with the file-name “.dictionary”. Note that this manual method works only with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Or the third-party dictionary might come as an installer package (“.mpkg” file), which helpfully puts the new dictionary in the right place within ‘Dictionary’.

Once you’ve got the dictionary you want downloaded (see below for some links to get you started), you’re ready to see the screencast on how to add it, and get the very most from Dictionary.app on your Mac:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Additionally, here are some useful links (to free resources) to get you started in your search for an extra dictionary:

A German-to-English dictionary in the form of a plug-in, based on dict.cc site’s dictionary.
A medical terminology dictionary in the form of a “.dictionary” folder.
The OpenThesaurus German Dictionary plugin.
The BeoLingus German-to-English dictionary plugin
The CEDICT Chinese-to-English dictionary which is based on the open-source CEDICT project, which is occasionally updated. This is version 1.2.
The very large English-to-Chinese dictionary pack which contains four dictionaries (three of which are Traditional Chinese; one of which uses ‘Simplified’ characters).
An English-to-Arabic dictionary plugin.

There are more free and shareware dictionaries for Dictionary.app online.

In the screencast, we also suggest three great sources of icons for use on your Mac. You’ll need some such icons, in ‘.icns’ format, ready to modify the appearance of your folder, app, or hard-drive icons. Here are the links to those great resources:

Guipulp – a daily updated round-up of great icons (and other customisation resources) from across the web.
Pixel Delicioso – another good-looking source of icons (as well as wallpapers)
Deviantart – direct from the digital artists themselves. Search by ‘newest’ or ‘popular’ across time.

All set? Now you’re read to mod your icons with our screencast:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The idea plays to the strengths of the Mac, with it’s huge and detailed icons. In any Finder window the icon can go as large as 128 x 128 pixels (note that the 512 pixels size for icons is reserved only for in the ‘CoverFlow’ view, and only in Leopard), and most of the shelves require you set your icons as 128 x 128 (or, for two of the shelves, 64 x 64) so that the icons ‘sit’ exactly on the shelf, and the icon’s name appears on the thick part of the shelves, as you can see here:

Titles appear on edge of

Before I review all the shelves and give you this links, here’s a quick tutorial on how to set the shelves: right-click within a Finder window and select ‘Show view options’. A small options window appears. Under ‘Background:’ select ‘Picture’ and then pick the shelves image that you’ve downloaded. Lastly, you just need to adjust ‘Icon Size’ and ‘Grid Spacing’ so that it matches this:

Use these icons settings with most shelves

How awesome is that? So, here’s where you can snag all the shelves that individual designers have made so far; all of them are free. Hit the links to the artist’s page to download them:

1. Five very funky shelves with themed backgrounds which are: Dark Metal, Leather Brown, Starry Night, Cinema, and Blue. Looks great inside either ‘Applications’ or indeed any folder that has some customized icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

2. Wooden Shelves with wooden panelling and spotlights that will look especially good for the ‘Applications’ folder. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.

3. Studio wood-and-metal shelves looks particularly gorgeous and was designed specifically for the ‘Movies’ folder so as your movies and TV shows will be appear to be arranged on your shelf. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

4. Two “iShelf” versions in graphite or white are super smooth and can be used as a background inside any folder. The white version works best with colourful and high-contrast icons. For 128×128 pixel-size icons.

5. Dark 3D Shelves contrast a wooden shelf against a very dark background, with some perspective on the left-hand side to make it look as though the shelves are fixed to a wall. For 64×64 pixel-size icons.

Those five links give you 12 great shelves to use within Finder on your Mac, created by excellent designers from all over the world, who offer them up for free for the pleasure-of-use of fellow Mac users. Enjoy!

It’s absolutely mesmerizing. Have a look for yourself.
Music courtesy of Jonathan Coulton (Creative Commons).

It’s so simple  to make your own app (once you have Fluid) that you can do it in just three steps:

1. Launch Fluid
2. Enter a URL, app name, choose a location (in “/Applications“ is fine), and select an icon
3. A few seconds later, Fluid will make a ‘ping’ noise, and offer to launch your new app. All done!

When you roll-your-own app, your new app can be placed in your dock, and launched just like any application. It also brings other benefits, such as: notifications for new messages or events (Growl is supported, but it’s not seamless yet), separating out your work and personal apps, avoiding distractions, and avoiding losing all your log-in sessions in the event of your regular browser crashing.

Fluid doesn’t need to be running when you use these new apps you’ve formed. You just use Fluid itself to roll your new apps (see the three easy steps, above). Thereafter, these new apps – which are known as a “Fluid_Instance_xxx“ (where xxx is the new app’s name) within your Mac’s inner workings – are generally a mere 8 to 10 MB in size, and use as much RAM as a single window of Safari.

Indeed, Fluid’s apps are based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari, and thus your new apps look and feel right, and run natively and briskly.

Spice it up
A bit of fun can be had customising your new apps, in terms of the icon used, and its appearance. As for the icon, a whole Flickr group has sprung up featuring 512 by 512 icons in PNG format which are sharp and funky, and ready to fit into Leopard very nicely, with it’s ‘Coverflow’ browsing of applications. Generally, the site’s own icon (or “favicon“) is too poor in quality to use on your Mac, but it’s so easy to change it, that you may as well spruce it up. Here are 3 I made earlier, sitting in my dock – YouTube, Google Reader and Gmail:

As for the appearance, you can tweak the window style, so that it might be silver or black-framed; semi-transparent or opaque; always floating, or in the background, or hidden; the app can run – if you choose the “MenuExtraSSB“ option – only from the toolbar as a drop-down menu; and, lastly, the window could be split-pane and incorporate thumbnails of all linked pages – useful, say, for Facebook – which can be browsed in ‘Coverflow’ style.

More complexly, you can alter the user-agent, so that you could run, say, the iPhone twitter client Hahlo on your Mac by setting your app’s user-agent as iPhone (or iPod Touch), and it will look and feel almost exactly as it does on the iPhone.

It’s worth pointing out that Fluid is Leopard only, but it is so awesome that it pushed me to upgrade from Tiger a month ago. Better news is that Fluid is free. At the time of writing, Fluid is at version 0.9.2 and seems to be regularly updated with new features at each revision. Fluid is so problem-free and smooth that it feels like it’s version 1+ already. So, if you have Leopard already, you can soon be rolling your own apps to bring those useful web apps onto your desktop.

Not only is this support free, it is well organized – across a few key forums and discussion groups, which I shall review below – and is dished out freely by Mac experts who often reply to new queries (or cries for help!) within hours of the original post.

What do such Mac users in these forums get in return? Just some good karma, and a slight warm glow from helping out people with their knowledge.

Being in a minority of global computer users – up against the vast majority of Windows punters – actually proves to be an advantage in terms of getting clear, easy-to-search-for, and helpful free tech support for the Mac. Make a Google search for a Windows-related query or issue, and I’ll guarantee that most of the search results will be for some useless software that will claim to assist in your plight. While a similar search for a Macintosh-related issue will proffer forums and Mac-related tech blogs which have – very likely – already covered and solved your question.

So, if you haven’t already tried, here are five very useful and very active resources which you can browse freely for answers. If you wish to post to the forums you will need to register (again, for free).

Five Top Mac Forums/Resources:

Apple’s very own “Discussion” boards are very well organized by type of software and hardware. Posters are more likely seeking support or answers, than actually ‘discussing’ stuff, so it’s likely that, whatever your query, it’s already been done here.

The MacRumours Forums are a bit more discursive, with space for recent tech news and speculation on future models, as well as various tips and hacks for iPhone and iPod Touch users. More uniquely, these forums also spread into the realms of discussing digital photography, design and graphics, and various other special interests – all from a Mac perspective.

Your best bet if you have a query, however, is the MacOSXhints Forums where the principal sections are dedicated to “OS X Help Requests” which explain how, if seeking assistance from the community, to include as much detail as possible in order that a more expert Mac user might lend a hand.

Similarly, the forums of the MacOSX site are dedicated to community-based help, though it’s not so active – and a bit random – when compared to the afore-mentioned three forums.

One tech blog deserves a special mention – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (also known as TUAW) which has such a wealth of tips over recent years that, when searched via TUAW’s own search box, represent a useful way to learn new features of some complex software such as Aperture or iLife. It’s not a forum, granted, but I’ve found it useful in terms of teaching me new aspects of some software I thought I knew quite well already.

Now, with those five resources – along with TipTrickMod, of course – you’re better equipped to get to grips with your Mac. And, needless to say, support is a two-way thing, so if you feel you can assist a fellow Mac user then weigh in on their post, and feel the karma coming your way.

Many applications on your Mac, however, come bundled with an array of ‘localizations’ so that one release of a company’s app can suit the needs of practically all of their global users. But that represents a waste of valuable disk space for 99.9% of people who use their apps in just one language, and will never need to run iTunes, or Skype, in anything but their native tongue.

Thus, most apps on your Mac have nestled inside them a number of language localization files that you can notice by the designation “.lproj”. Even if you opted not to install other languages when you first installed Tiger or Leopard, many 3rd party apps will have a number of “.lproj” files, which do nothing but use up space and make your apps needlessly hefty.

If you’re curious to see these files, just right-click on an application, and select “Show Package Contents”. Then click on “Contents”, and next on “Resources”, and in here you will find all the language localizations mixed in with other bits which make up the app’s building blocks.

All you actually need are the main localizations that you currently use. So, for English-speakers, you could safely trash all the “.lproj” files within your apps except for the “English.lproj” one, and your app would be unharmed, and your Mac would lose quite a bit of weight, so to speak. The saving is likely to be somewhere from 2 to 4 gigabytes.

Slim down

To automate and ease this process across all your original and 3rd party apps, the open-source Monolingual will do the job. That light-weight app can not only remove unnecessary languages files within apps, but also remove – if you so wish – other language’s input methods, and even older architectures, such as the ‘Power PC’ framework. That seems somewhat excessive, so I’ll stick with the idea of removing the languages inside apps. This is done within Monolingual by checking the boxes next to a language’s name to remove that “.lproj” file wherever it is found.

Personally, I just unchecked the “English” option – and all national variations of English – to ensure that my apps remained in my native tongue. The first time I ran Monolingual, it took over 30 minutes to clean up within every app, which slowed my Macbook rather, so it would be wise to run this at a quiet time.

Image: Simply check the unwanted languages with Monolingual, then ‘Remove’ them

The space saving for me, on a year-old install of Tiger – now 10.4.11 – was a significant 4 gigabytes, which is space well worth saving with my meagre 80GB hard-drive. I googled to check that it works on Leopard, with commenters on various tech forums confirming that it does, and declaring savings of 3 gigs or more on quite recent installs of Apple’s latest OS.

Monolingual can then be run at intervals of the user’s discretion – it will take a mere few minutes to do it’s magic on later runs – to sort of ‘tidy up’ and keep your Mac’s drive freer for more essential things.

But I prefer Zarvox.

Off the record, I believe Zarvox is just a cover name. I suspect it’s really Soundwave from the Transformers, who having been excluded from the Transformers movie was snatched up from the unemployment line by Apple.

But seriously folks, I can see how this text-to-speech function can be extremely beneficial to visually impaired Mac users. Basically, you highlight a section of text – be it two paragraphs or two pages – and then hit the set key to trigger the reading. I have my keys set to Command+Shift + S. To demonstrate, here is “Zarvox” doing a reading of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

“The Road Not Taken” – by Zarvox, MP3 File

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Bravo Zarvox!

As for the default voice, Alex, his isn’t flawless english, but it is as good a computerized voice as I’ve seen to date. This feature could come in handy if you have any e-books that you’d like Alex to read to you, possibly while you’re doing some chores around the house. Or, for all you deadbeat dads out there, have Alex read a bedtime story to your kids while you sit back with a beer and watch the Battlestar Galactica.

Here’s Alex doing an excerpt from the Gettysburg Address:
MP3 File

Now if you’re a real a-hole, and you want to scare the beejesis out of your kids, you can have Zarvox read to them. Go to the drop down menu, and select “Show More Voices” (see below). Zarvox is hiding at the bottom.