The Mighty Mouse has an awful default button mapping. First off, both right and left button are assigned to left-click (primary). Secondly, for some inexplicable reason, clicking the scroll wheel brings up Dashboard. Third, I find the scrolling to be much to slow for my needs.

To fix these problems and any other issues you have with the button layout, open System Preferences and click on Keyboard & Mouse. Then fiddle with the button-mapping as much as you like. Currently, I have it setup so that clicking the scroll wheel brings up the Command+Tab application switcher, and clicking the right half of the mouse brings up the secondary click (right click) menu. I also sped up the scrolling and tracking.

Another possibility is for you to create your own scripts to be assigned to the buttons. Some possibilities include Dictionary lookup and search in Spotlight/Quicksilver

In Mac OS 10.5 you’ll notice a completely new firewall menu, and you’ll notice that it is now under the “Security” tab of System Preferences.

So the question was asked, “What is the best way to set up my 10.5 Firewall?”

The word firewall is originally an automotive term that was used as the barrier between the passenger compartment and the engine. The “firewall” in the car was designed to protect the passenger from a fire in the engine.

In the same way your computer firewall is designed to protect you from a security breach. Since these security breaches come in all shapes and sizes (from port exploits and Safari bugs to finding your password and using ARD or SSH).

So naturally the best way to secure your computer with a firewall is to choose the, “Set access for specific services and applications”. If you then leave the following window blank (don’t give access to any programs), you’re pretty safe and that is the safest way to use your firewall.

Using this setting you would need to set every program that you want to allow an incoming connection from. Keep in mind that this includes programs like iMovie when it tries to connect to YouTube to share videos. Also you would need to allow your printer drivers to accept connections if you use printer sharing.

If you choose to use this setting, which is the most secure, realize that when you choose to block everything, you’ll probably run into unexpected problems. If that happens, first check your firewall and see if that is causing the problem before emailing your technical support!

Pixelmator is a great Photoshop replacement for people that don’t need all of the Photoshop features, or can’t afford to buy a $700 program. At only $59 it’s definitely a feasible replacement.

I’ve been using Pixelmator to create simple (and different) headers for web sites. Here is a way I’ve been playing with and has given me some interesting results.

Open a new file (most headers are 800 or more pixels wide). Go to Filter > Quartz Composer > Generator > Wall. Choose whatever colors seem appropriate for your website.

Next go to Filter > Tile > Affine Clamp and move it around until you’re happy with the look. Select a font and place your text. The font I chose was MutantE. Total time spent on your header ~ 2 minutes.

If interested read our full PixelMator review.

Have you ever wanted to remove items in your Finder’s sidebar? Here’s a quick and easy way: Click Finder -> Preferences… -> Sidebar and you’ll see the window below:

Simply uncheck any unwanted items.

Finally you can easily hide search items, shared servers and that pesky iDisk icon.

After our last tip on quickly switching windows in Photoshop, you all suggested I do more. So I recently found three handy tips that saved me time.

Duplicating Slices with Option

Creating slices can be a pain to make over and over again, thankfully there’s a quicker way. Select a slice with Command+Click then Option+Click to duplicate it. Too easy!

Hold Shift and Change Values in Increments of 10

Any field you can change with your keys (up and down) you can also change in increments of 10 by holding shift. So instead of 70…71…72 it would be 70..80..90.

You can also scroll your mouse wheel to change the value.

Organize Windows with Workspaces

One of the most frustrating aspects of using Photoshop is maintaining all of those tiny windows. Workspaces solve this headache by providing the ability to save and load window locations.

They also come with a couple default workspaces (Basic & Legacy) that work nicely

There you have it, 3 tips for improving productivity in Photoshop.

What do you think of multiple smaller tips like this? Good/Bad?

Download Smultron.

I’ve been using Smultron for a few years, but thanks to Alex Hwang for reminding me that not everyone has a great, and free, text editor.

I thought it would be interesting to see everyone else’s desktops.

To take a screenshot of your desktop, press Command+Shift+3.

This saves an image of your active screen straight to your desktop. The filename generally starts with “Picture”.

To upload your screenshot, head on over to http://www.mactips.org/uploader.php.

Copy/Paste the code from the text box into the comment field.

Here’s my desktop, what’s yours?

(Note: The thumbnails link to the full-sized images, which can be very large. Files may take a moment to download.)

A few months ago Travis wrote a great post on installing MacPorts. If you’ve never heard of MacPorts:

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

MacPorts makes it extremely easy to find and install tools.

As an example, let’s install wget.

First, we search by typing

port search wget

We can see here there are 3 packages that match wget. We want the one named wget in net/wget.

Let’s find out some more information before we install:

port info wget

We get the following package information:

wget 1.11.2, net/wget (Variants: universal, no_ssl)

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.

Library Dependencies: openssl, gettext

Platforms: darwin freebsd

Now to install we type:

sudo port install wget

You should see something like the output below. Ports will automatically install every dependency so your install times will vary.

Additional Commands

Update

sudo port update wget

Uninstall

sudo port uninstall wget

Update Packages: Retrieves the latest package information

sudo port selfupdate

Installed Packages: A current list of installed packages

sudo port installed

MacPorts are Great

Note: You should always exercise caution when using the sudo command. You can mess up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing.

MacPorts is a great solution for installing common Mac applications and utilities. It’s much more efficient and works quite well. One downside is MacPorts doesn’t have as extensive collection as say FreeBSD Ports, so there are some holes.

Also, the ports are often a release or two behind (Firefox is at 2.0)–so don’t expect the latest version for many of these packages. For the most part these are known stable releases.

If you’re not comfortable with the terminal, there is a GUI solution Porticus. I haven’t tried it, so I would use at your own risk.

What are your favorite MacPorts packages?

Mine are wget and lynx.

Way back in 2005 I wrote about quick dictionary lookups using the keyboard. This quickly became one of my favorite tips–but I always had trouble remember the key combination. For some reason Command+Control+D was hard to remember.

You probably know you can also access the dictionary by highlighting a word, control+clicking and selecting “Look Up in Dictionary.”

But this by default brings up the dictionary application:

To make the panel the default method, open Dictionary preferences and select “Open Dictionary panel”

Now you can easily look up a word by highlighting it, control+clicking and selecting “Look Up in Dictionary”:

The Associated Press recently launched an iPhone-friendly web application containing all their news articles in an attractive and convenient format. They join many other web sites to create Mobile Safari editions of their services, and offer some excellent features.

To access the Associated Press iPhone view, visit apnews.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The site features categorized headlines, a powerful search tool, local news, categories, and intelligent customization settings. The site fits the iPhone user interface excellently and is probably the best implementation I have seen for a news application.