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!

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.

I got very excited when I thought about the prospects of eating macaroni and chess on the sofa and yelling chess notation at my Macbook. I know, I know… Who wouldn’t? But after testing out the speech recognition just now, it looks that’s not going to happen. Here’s a clip of one game that I just couldn’t finish:

Click here to view the embedded video.

No self-respecting chess player is going to sit through an entire game of that. It’s just agonizing… But that said, Leopard’s speech recognition is as good as any I’ve seen, and I expect good things from Apple in the future.

My tip here: Don’t even bother. At least, not yet.

Further info on Mac OSX Speech Recognition:
Make your Mac’s Speech Recognition Work for you

That’s likely the case with Mac OS X’s Active Corners feature, which is a neat little tool that helps you do many different tasks just a little bit quicker.

Go to System Preferences, then Expose and Spaces. You’ll see Active Screen Corner options on the top of the page.

In a nutshell, what this feature allows you to do, is to activate any of the following Mac OS X processes simply by moving your mouse to any of the screens far corners:

• All Windows
• Application Windows
• Desktop
• Dashboard
• Spaces
• Start Screensaver
• Disable Screensaver
• Sleep Display
• -

The most practical of these I find is “enable sleep display.” Whenever I step away from my Macbook (which isn’t often!), I just drag the mouse to the bottom corner, thus kicking her into sleep mode — and saving me a little battery power.

If you use the spaces feature, Active Corners is a must as well.

Enjoy!