TechnowledgeBase

If you ever find yourself in need of a screen capture, both Windows and Max OSX have the built-in capability to do it for you. No, you do NOT need to buy some extra-special software just to take a picture of what’s on your screen. Here’s how you do it.

Windows:
Find the PrintScreen key on your keyboard.

PrintScreen - will capture the entire desktop
Alt-PrintScreen - will capture the current application’s window

Use Control-V to paste the captured images in your image editor of choice.

MAC OSX
Find the Command key on your keyboard. (That’s the weird-looking apple squiggly-thing key)

Command+Shift+3 - will capture the entire screen
Command+Shift+4 - will turn the cursor into a crosshairs, allowing you to draw a rectangle around whatever you want to capture.

On my Mac, the copied images are automatically put on the desktop as PNG files. If you’d rather have the images end up on the clipboard, hold down the SHIFT key while using either of the above keystrokes. After capturing, a simple Command+V will paste the captured image.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The Problem:
You are brand new to Mac OS and you want to install some essential software (like Firefox!). You figured out how to download the application and double-click on it… but you don’t get an installer.

All you get is an icon that looks like a mounted hard drive:





And a window with some kind of Mac hieroglyphics in it:

The Cause:
Just like with Windows, some applications come with an installer, and some don’t. A lot of them don’t. What you downloaded was the MAC equivalent of a ZIP file with your application in it. You have to manually copy the files into the directory where you want them to go. The heiroglypics are supposed to be some kind of “clue” telling you to do that… but damned if I could figure that out without doing a google search. Neither could you, else you wouldn’t be reading this, n00b.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

You have a Mac. You’ve downloaded a file with an SIT extension. This is an archive, sort of like a ZIP file in Windows. You need to open it with an archive program to extract the file(s) that you want. But when you double click on it, the damn thing opens up in WORD… that is to say, it TRIES to. If you’re like me, you don’t actually have word on your Mac, but you haven’t gotten around to uninstalling the Office:Mac trial version that was stinking up the place like a diseased turd pre-installed when you bought your machine. So in our case, what happens when we double click on the SIT file is we get a splash screen/License agreement for Word, as if we were trying to activate our trial version.

Yeah, THAT’LL happen….

The Problem:
Your Mac tries to open SIT archive files in WORD (of all things!)
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Popularity: 13% [?]

My webcam, a Creative LIVE! Notebook Pro, didn’t want to work with my MacMini. They wouldn’t talk. They had “issues” that needed to be resolved. True… the cam was never originally INTENDED to work with a Mac, but when the wife torched, destroyed, couldn’t use the laptop she had any more, I dragged the Mac Mini out of semi-retirement and plugged it in for her. My experiences getting her files and applications transferred from failing PC to Mac will probably be the subject of other blog postings, but I figured that the webcam would at least be easy. Find some MAC drivers, install them, and plug it in, right?

WRONG! If Creative had Mac OS drivers on their website, they had ‘em hid pretty good. I’m not saying that there AREN’T any, but at this point I had to proceed as if there weren’t.

The Problem:
My webcam won’t work with Mac OS X. There are no drivers to download from the vendor, and if I simply pug the webcam in, the light on the cam turns on but the operating system (and all the programs on it) tells me that there’s no cam attached. Damn.
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Popularity: 15% [?]