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:

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:

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!

Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted – over the last 10 years these ideas have changed – if not virtually reversed.

Though there is an “official definition” of what open source is; simply put, open source is any software or webware which has been released with its code available for review, modification, adaptation and improvement. Oh yeah, and it’s usually free.

Here is a list of what I feel to be the best or most notable open source applications:

Browsers / Mail / Office Suite

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser, which is the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. Firefox is a standards-compliant browser which uses the Gecko layout engine. It includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system. Its strongest feature, however, is that it can be infinitely expanded through countless additional add-ons created by third-party developers.

OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages (as of v3, it can even read MS Office’s Docx format). It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Like it’s browser cousin, Firefox, Thunderbird is free and open source. A full featured e-mail client, it easily replaces Microsoft’s Outlook Express, and through the use of add-ons, is quickly gaining ground on the power of MS Office’s Outlook

(see how to add full appointment/calendar functions to Thunderbird).

Google Chrome: Though quite new, Google’s open source entrance into the Internet browser market shows quite a bit of potential. It is lacking some of the slick add-ons that Firefox features, but it’s isolated sandbox and ground-up modern build make it a fast and secure alternative that is destined for great things down the road.

Multimedia / Audio / Video

Miro: Miro is a free open source application for watching channels of internet video (aka video podcasts and video rss). Miro is easy to use and offers full-screen viewing abilities. You simply “subscribe” to the video (or audio) podcast you want to watch and Miro will then automatically download the latest videos for skipless and stutter-free viewing. You can tell Miro to automatically download the newest videos, only download the ones you wish, and if you’re short on hard drive space you can specify how long the downloaded videos stay on your system before being cleaned up.

VLC Media Player: VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols – basically it can pretty much play whatever you throw at it. Additionally, it is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for BeOS, Syllable, BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, MorphOS and Solaris, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads.

Audacity: Audacity is a free, easy-to-use cross-platform audio editor and recorder. You can use Audacity to record live audio; convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs; edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files; cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together; change the speed or pitch of a recording; and more. With the proliferation of home recording and podcasting, Audacity is a program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.

Songbird: Though still under “active” development, Songbird is a promising open source music player. Features included (or to be included) are library management, multi-language support, media importing, album art display, meta data management, customizable UI and automatic updates. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s a project to be watched.

MediaCoder: MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution. With a flexible and extendable architecture, new codecs and tools are added in constantly as well as supports for new devices. MediaCoder intends to be the swiss army knife for media transcoding.

HandBrake: HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Basically, it’ll rip any DVD (or DVD-like) source into an MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM. It also supports the ripping of subtitles (burned into the video).

Graphics / Design

GIMP: GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program that can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. Like it’s commercial counter-part, Photoshop, it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.), and it’s streamlined interface makes it easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.

Paint.net: An alternative to GIMP – or commercial apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It offers support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Blender: Blender is a full-featured open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems. I don’t know the first thing about 3D modeling, but one look at the Blender Gallery and it’s easy to tell this is an impressively powerful free program.

OS / Utilities / Misc

Ubuntu: Deriving its name from the Zulu word for “humanity”, Ubuntu is a free, open source, operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. Generally considered the most popular Linux distribution, and there are a lot of them, Ubuntu does pretty much everything your OS should – what can we say, it’s an OS, not inherently interesting. It’s decently pretty, damn simple to install and use, and has an extremely active community of users/developers.

Pidgin: Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. It supports [deep breath]: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr. About the only big IM it doesn’t cover is Skype, because Skype’s protocol isn’t open.

Filezilla: If you have reason to connect to a server via FTP, FileZilla is the FTP program of choice. The FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It also supports drag and drop transfers, resumption of upload/download, configurable speed limits, keep-alive scripting and automatic upgrades.

7zip: A fantastic replacement to Windows’ default ZIP archiver, 7-Zip is open source software that offers a 2-10% compression increase over PKZip or WinZip. It also packs and unpacks 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR files; while also supporting the ability to unpack RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, MSI, WIM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS files. Additionally it fully integrates with Windows and offers localizations for 69 languages.

Know some great open source applications that haven’t been mentioned here? Please share them in the comments below.

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.

Twhirl is a desktop Twitter client that runs under the rather clever Adobe AIR platform on both Mac and PC operating systems. At the forefront of it’s impressive feature list is the ability to quickly manage multiple Twitter accounts, and runs somewhat akin to an IM client (MSN Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, etc.) making the act of posting new tweets a breeze.

Despite the Twirl project still being in its infancy, its feature list is quite impressive (from the site):

Twirl Feature List (v0.7.3)

• remembering login credentials on user’s computer
• all-in-one timeline with tweets, replies and direct messages
• configurable auto-updates for the timeline
• displaying user’s latest 20 status updates and direct messages sent
• sending status updates
• sending replies to other users (with quick buttons on others’ statuses)
• sending direct messages to other users
• showing user’s friends and followers
• deleting own status updates and direct messages
• input area can be hidden (configurable auto-hiding)
• multi-account support
• keyboard shortcuts
• sys tray / dock icon support
• audible and visual notifications
• viewing and (un)setting favorites
• (un)following users
• auto-updating the program
• changeable color schemes
• searching for public tweets (powered by terraminds)
• filtering the timeline

All lists (statuses, direct messages, users) can be cleared and refreshed. To keep the user interface compact, the different lists are on seperate “layers”, of which only one is visible. You can change the visible layer using a combo box.

The free download installs quickly (despite requiring the Adobe AIR runtime – get it here) and its customizable interface is slick and easy to get the hang of. Twhirl is essential for anyone that likes the idea of Twitter, but finds the browser-bound interface cumbersome.

Oh, and be sure to follow the official Tip. Trick. Mod. Twitter for instant updates on what’s happening around here.