A lot very good (and bad) content is on the internet. Unfortunately, many web site publishers decided to use weird layout and strange color themes to publish their content.
For example, the following article on the T9 text input method:
T9: Text on 9 keys
For some reason, the white text on blue background makes the reading very uncomfortable and tedious for me. Fortunately, the good people at Arc90 lab made a very good tool to deal with this problem:
Readability Bookmarklet
As indicated on the page, the easiest way to use this wonderful tool is to drag the button to the bookmark toolbar. Of course, you can also put it in your bookmark menu, invoking its function by pulling down the menu. Why one want to do this? Screen space. On my smallish 12-inch PowerBook, I hide all the toolbars, but I activate the full keyboard access within Tiger OS. So I can easily use the keyboard to invoke the readability bookmarklet function.
The default OS X 10.4 Finder window has both sidebar and toolbar. Which is good, unless you are using a small screen, like me, using a 12-inch PowerBook. A toolbar and a sidebar can waste a lot of valuable screen real estate.
Two keyboard commands can relieve the pain:
Cmd-Option-T will remove both the toolbar and sidebar, make a Finder window much smaller. However, when you open a folder inside the Finder window, a new Finder window is opened, instead of opening inside the same Finder window as with the toolbar is present. To avoid the resultant screen clutter, press the option key when opening the new window (Cmd-Option-O). The current parent window will automatically close. To return to the parent window, press Cmd-Up arrow. To return to the parent window and close the current one, Cmd-Option-Up arrow.
Cmd-Option-Ctrl-T to collapse the sidebar only, the toolbar is intact. Opening an inside folder with not open a new Finder window.
I use both Mac OS X and Windows XP, both old versions. On Mac OS X side, I use the venerable Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), and XP is even older. No plan for purchasing new hardware for the near future, so I am stuck with those two old OSes.
Constantly switched between these two OSes, some observations noted here, just in case I need to revisit them.
1. Multiple file properties
With Windows Explorer in Windows XP, the multiple files are selected, use Alt-Enter (Property command) to show the properties, the result property window will show in a single dialog the summary information of all the selected files. With OS X Finder, Cmd-I (Get Info command) will open one info dialog for each file. If you happen to have 100 files selected, Cmd-I will get you mad pretty quick. To show the summary info in a single dialog as in the case of XP, one need to use the Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command).
Actually, it is better to summarize the following three commands in Tiger Finder:
Cmd-I (Get Info command) to show a static info window for the selected file(s). It will display the same information even when a different file is selected in Finder. When multiple files are selected, this command will display one info window for each selected file.
Cmd-Option-I (Show Inspector command) similar to Get Info command, but the info window is a floating window, which dynamically displays the currently selected file info. Choose a different file, the inspector display changes with the selection.
Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command) will display only one dialog, even when multiple files are selected. It will sum up the size of all the selected files.
With XP, Alt-Enter (Property command) is like Cmd-I and Cmd-Ctrl-I combined.
2. Spotlight Comments & XP comments
When showing the Get Info (or Show Inspector) window is open, there is a Spotlight Comments text box. One can tag the selected file, which is very useful for audio and video files, since they usually don’t have text content for the Spotlight to search. Spotlight Comments provide a convenient way to tag the audio and video files.
Although it is not well know, there is a similar text field for XP files:
Select a file, Alt-Enter to open the properties window, click the Summary tab, you will be able to enter the comments for the selected file. You can also display the comments in Windows Explorer Window by select the “comments” when right-click on the column header inside Windows Explorer window.
However, unlike Spotlight in OS X, it is not guaranteed that this filed will be searched in XP. The following link, summarized the difference between OS X and XP very well:
Indexing File Contents & Metadata - XvsXP.com, Mac OS X vs. Windows XP
