Hidden Files on Your Mac

As the Mac OS has its heritage in BSD, many of the features work the same way.  For example, if you name a file starting with a ".", it behaves as if it is hidden.  When we use Finder, by default it does not show any of these files.  Unless you are really geeky, you have no real reason to want to see all these files.

Let's take a closer look:

1)  Here is a snapshot of a directory

2)  Open a Terminal session and enter the commands below

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true
killall Finder

3)  Finder will close and re-opens.  The directory now looks like this

4)  You can see both hidden directories and files.

5)  To restore back, enter the commands below in a Terminal session

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles false

killall Finder

6)  That's it!  Now all you need to do if figure out how to use this to your advantage.

Resize Photos using Automator

To quickly resize pictures for my Culinary Aspiration blog, I have to resize photos all the time.  To be more productive, I use Automator to help me.

To set up the Automator workflow to resize photos:

1)  Start Automator

2)  Select Workflow template.

3)  From the left column, select Files & Folders.

4)  Drag Ask for Finder Items over to the right pane.

5)  Update the Prompt to "Choose the Images to Resize", and select the checkbox for Allow Multiple Selection.

6)  From the left column, select Photos, and then drag Scale Images over to the right pane.

7)  Click Add to confirm that image files will be passed into this step.

8)  Change the pixel size as appropriate.

9)  Click File > Save As.  Type in Resize photos to 480 pixels for the name and click Save.

10)  All you need to do is open Automator with this workflow.  Click Run and follow the prompts!

Converting From DOC to PDF on a Mac

Recently I opened up a Microsoft Word document in OpenOffice on my Mac.  Possibly due to the formatting, it took over a minute to open up.  As this was a document I wanted re-open in the future, I was not going wait each time.  Within OpenOffice, there is an option to allow you to any file as a PDF.  After doing this, the PDF opens almost instantly.