If you do any sort of content creation on your mac, I’m sure you have needed to take a screenshot of something at sometime. When that time came you either accomplished that task with ease due to your amazing short-cut knowledge or you didn’t.
If you didn’t conquer the previous task listen up. And even if you did, pay attention and you might learn something new.

If you’re looking to grab a shot of you’re beautiful desktop and capture the whole screen, you simply need to press Command-Shift-3. Looking to select the area you want captured? Command-Shift-4.

But now I’m gonna tell you about the ever so useful third option. Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.

We’re not surprised by this but we sure are glad to see it out so soon!

All you netbook owners, current or prospective, may exhale your sigh of relief.
The support for Atom is acquired by actually injecting a different kernel into OS X itself, so, your talking a pretty serious hack. Rest assured, most hacks can be fine tuned to make it much easier and or automated.
We can thank the hacker teateam for this gem. He can be found on the InsanelyMac Forums

So here’s to hoping Apple leaves the door open to Atom users in 10.6.3 and showing us how great of a company they really can be.

Listing at $999.99, The mini Snow Leopard server doesn’t carry a very mini price tag. But it’s only $100 more than a Mac mini equipped with the same CPU and RAM and an optical drive instead of the second 500GB HD.

So Apple is basically charging you $100 to remove the optical drive and install an additional 500GB HD. Which, in all honesty isn’t that bad of a price for a 2.5″ 500GB SATA drive. This second drive in place of the optical drive brings the mini’s total internal storage capacity to 1TB! Pair that with it’s GeForce 9400M and you have HD ready media center. Set this next to your beautiful Plasma or LCD and you could experience a truly wonderful experience.

So although it may be a slight investment, Your getting 1TB of internal storage and 4GBs of RAM in box less than 2″ high and 6.5″ long. So, great storage capabilities, a solid amount of RAM, a speedy 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and a powerful 9400M make for a pretty powerful system in a small, functional package.

More info about the mini server here

If you bought yourself a nice new quad-core iMac and your looking to max out the RAM, you may notice that Apple charges almost as much as you paid for the machine itself. $1400 to be exact. 4GB sticks of DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) are not cheap, but I can tell you that you can find them for a bit less than the $350 a piece Apple charges.

1. [G.SKILL - F3-8500CL7S-4GBSQ] Running $249.99 a piece, these quality sticks are $150 cheaper then Apple’s stock selection. If you max out your iMac with these it will set you back an even grand, about $400 cheaper than Apple’s 16GB offering.
2. [Mushkin - Enhanced Essentials 996644] You can get a pair of 4GB sticks (8GB) from Mushkin for $489.99. That means if you wanted a full 16GB you could do it for about $980, $420 cheaper than Apple.
3. [RamJet -MBALX4G] At $235.99 a piece, these are the least expensive chips I was able to find. 16GBs can be yours for as little as $970.

Is over innovating a possibility? If so, the new Apple Remote is a victim of it. Apple’s Last remote was perfect. Simple, stylish, and functional. Yet Apple managed to completely ruin the svelt feel of the Apple Remote by introducing this new overly designed product.

It starts out at the same price point, $19 so I can’t complain. But other than the price there isn’t much else to love. It features the same 5 buttons, but this time they made it look like there are three buttons instead of two. The remote itself is just as thin and a bit taller and longer than its predecessor. A silver matte finish coats the entire device except for the buttons which have a black matte finish.

Not digging the new remote either? Well head to your local Apple store and stock up as it seems they haven’t pulled the old ones yet.

Fancy this one? you can pick it up online @ the Apple Store.

Adobe’s new iPhone/iPod Touch app allows you to edit and share your photos on the go. A free photoshop.com account is required. However, signing up allows you to store 2GBs of images online to be edited and/or shared.

Editing Features Include:

• Basic: Crop, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White
• Filters: Sketch and Soft Focus
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black and White

Find out more by going to mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Via Smoking Apples Blog.

“For night owls like myself, having a super bright display is one curse. We can never use a bright white wallpaper, and turning down the brightness only helps so much. Opening up a web page usually involves some amount of eye tear. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating, but this is a common experience, especially with the larger displays of the iMacs or perhaps even a dual 30” monitor setup.

So far the only app I’ve known to reduce brightness below the point allowed by system hardware, is ScreenShade. But the problem—which wasn’t evident at the time—was that it dims the entire screen, which isn’t the ideal way to go about things. I’ve just stumbled upon this brilliant app Blackout from BravoBug Software, and it brings a unique twist to the tale of night lighting.”

The dock is an amazing feature of OS X, so why settle for just one? Utilize the full potential of your mac by setting up specialized docks for the various aspects of your life. Have a dock for when you’re working, when you’re gaming, or when you’re looking to be creative.

iDock 9.0 lets you reduce the clutter of your existing dock by adding additional on demand docks to your desktop.

What’s New in this Version:
- New Metal Theme
- New Opacity Setting for Dock Menu
- Live Preferences updating
- New icon
- New dock menu
- New Preferences panel
- New Dock options controls
- New Toggle 2D Dock option
- New Toggle Active Dock option
- Re-designed menu
- New delete dock menu
- New application drop onto dock menu

Learn more about iDock here.

Operating system aside, the one thing that draws me to a mac more than anything else is it’s minimal yet creative design. From a Mini to an iMac, all of Apple’s products get high marks when it comes to functional design. From day one Apple has produced an all in one computer such as the eMac and iMac. These computers usually get the most creative freedom when it comes to design. The G4 iMac (pictured right) is, in my opinion, the most well designed mac ever. Second only to the beautiful Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4.

With this attachment to design, we mac users sometimes lose out on nifty new features. I speak now of the 2008-2009 MacBook (aluminum body) which sports a pathetic array of ports.

• 2xUSB
• 1xEthernet
• 1xMini Display
• Audio in&out

That’s it! No FireWire, No SD Card Reader, Not even an ExpressCard slot! In all honesty, throw out that second USB port and give me my FireWire. Aesthetically however, this model is also practically perfect. The magnetic closing mechanism is ingenious and down right slick. The recessed, crumb resistant keyboard is also a solid performer. And the aluminum unibody enclosure is beautiful yet strong.

Alas, the point I am trying to make is that I feel like Apple is becoming less and less revolutionary. They always used to be the first kid on the block with new technology. Yet in the last couple of years Apple has really strayed away. Blu-ray has been commercially available for over six years now and still not one Apple ships with a Blu-ray drive or Blu-ray playback support. To me, that is simply un-acceptable. In comparison Apple’s PowerBook G3 (1999) Picked up 802.11b less than two years after initial consumer inception and FireWire and DVD four years after. Get your game together Apple and let me see you introduce something new with your next mac.

If your addicted to Apple’s app store and you’re looking for a PMP (Portable Media Player) stop reading. However, if your down with a touch screen media player that just handles movies, music, pictures, and e-books, keep reading.

All of the following PMP’s are OS X compatible.

We start out with Mach Speed’s TRIO TCH843. – $89
The TRIO TCH843 is an 8GB touch screen beauty. It features a touch responsive 4.3″ TFT LCD which is almost a full inch bigger then the iPod Touch’s 3.5″ Display. The TRIO also sport a MicroSD slot which allows you to double your storage for less then $20 with an 8GB MicroSD card. It’s also less then 1/2 an inch thick.

Here are the detailed specs:

• 480×272 Resolution
• Supported Video Formats: AVI,FLV,RM,RMVB,AVI,DAT
• Supported Audio Formats: Mp3,WMA,FLAC,APE
• Supported Image Formats: JPG,BMP,GIF
• Two Headphone Jacks
• Mic in Jack
• E-Book Reader

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