Reader Simon sent in a cool tip that I’ll definitely be using in the future. Spotlight can be used to perform simple calculations, such as 190*42. Just type it in, and it spits out the answer. For those who may be unfamiliar with keyboard mathematical symbols, here’s a quick rundown:

* is multiplication, / is division, ^ is to the power of (exponents), ! is factorial, and then of course there’s + and - for addition and subtraction, respectively.

I just recently noticed a simple method of making certain applications start themselves up upon logging in. If an application is in the dock, you can right-click it, and put a check next to “Open at Login”. This automatically adds it to your list of startup items.

Alternatively, you can open System Preferences, the go to the Accounts tab, and click on the Login items tab. Here, you can delete startup items, as well as add new ones.

Some applications which I suggest you run upon login (which aren’t already automatically launched upon Login) are Caffeine, NetNewsWire, and Mail.app. While Login applications may be convenient in many cases, don’t have too many of them, or else it could affect the performance of your computer.

Safari and Firefox are the two largest browsers in the Mac market. They’ve also both recently released new beta versions. This is the first in a short series on the similarities and differences you can expect in the final versions of Firefox 3 and Safari 3.

It’s important to note, I went with the latest nightly builds of each browser (as of March 5th, 2008)–dubbed Webkit (r30790 ) and Minefield (3.0b5pre). The advantage to this is the browsers are on a level playing field–but each may have potentially buggy or incomplete features.

The Fastest Browser Wins

Safari is advertised as the fastest browser in the world, but FireFox 3 is rumored to be catching up quickly.

The best tool available for benchmarking Javascript is WebKit’s SunSpider. According to SunSpider, Safari 3 is 1.32x faster than Firefox 3.

I performed the next test on CSS to make sure the results were representative. Unfortunately this benchmark also included some Javascript so the tests weren’t completely independent (test available here, but tuned down to not break the server).

The CSS benchmark tests the CSS background-color attribute on 60,000 divs. I ran each test 5 times. The results show Safari renders CSS 4.5x faster than Firefox.

Still not satisfied these results were completely representative, I wanted to try another test. The SunSpider test was created by Apple, so there was a chance for a bias. I wanted to run the browsers through one more test that was independent–I decided on Quirksmode Javascript benchmark.

The Quirksmode test is a benchmark for generating large amounts of data using the following Javascript methods: DOM 1, DOM 2, Table, innerHTML 1 and innerHTML 2. I ran each test 10 times and aggregated the results. The winner? You guessed it, Safari was 1.6x faster than Firefox.

The Fastest Browser is: Safari

From these results it’s clear Safari is much quicker rendering Javascript and CSS. Benchmarking other parts of the browser (SVG, Sockets, etc…) is more difficult and outside the scope of this article. I tried to give Firefox as fair a chance as possible–but the results always came up in Safari’s favor.

(This image looked so ridiculous I decided to keep it.)

Round 1 Winner: Safari

Don’t fret Firefox, there’s a few more rounds coming–and I have a feeling you’ll make up for your speed with your many other features.

Stay tuned for the next couple rounds where we outline the features in Safari 3 and Firefox 3.

Other rounds in Safari 3 vs Firefox 3 series:

• Safari 3 vs Firefox 3 - Round 2: Security and Standards

One of the major draws of the iPhone/iPod Touch is its flick and scroll touchscreen capabilities. I have often wondered, “Why can’t Apple release this for our computers with a simple software/firmware update?”. Apple still has not provided us with such a solution, but Marc Moini has.

Smart Scroll is a great application that makes inertial scrolling possible on any mac computer (10.4 +) After you install the program, you can scroll much faster because it makes it so that you scroll “with momentum” using either a mouse or touchpad. I could spend all day attempting to explain what I mean, but this video from jkontherun does a much better job.

While this is a neat program, it does cost $19. I would gladly pay that fee for such a cool application; except for the fact that unlike the iPhone, you cannot stop the scrolling by placing a finger on the screen (or in this case, touch pad). For this reason, Mr. Moini does not have my money yet, but he is aware of the desire for this feature and is presumably working on it (as is evident from the Most Requested Fixes section).

Not everyone wants this type of functionality and even fewer will pay for it. If you can’t decide whether this app is for you, there is a fully functional demo version available.

[Product Page: Smart Scroll] via [jkontherun]

Say you’re using Quick Look on a document and you want to know when it was created or how large the file is, Quick Look can’t tell you this, but Inspector sure can. Hit Command + Option + I and Inspector will appear, ready to answer all your questions

Note: this works anywhere in Finder, not just Quick Look

I noticed this feature when watching a movie in the background and trying to scroll in Safari. If you scroll with 2 fingers while in Quicktime, the video you’re watching will fast-forward frame by frame (if you scroll up or to the right) or rewind frame by frame (if you scroll down or to the left).

This also works with the scroll-wheel if you have a mouse.

I find that this tip comes in handy when wish to replay a section in slow motion (the frame rate will be faster or slower depending on how fast you scroll). It also makes it easier to find your place if you forget to press pause when you go to the bathroom or zone out. It’s much more precise than the regular rewind and fast forward buttons.

You probably already know that pressing Tab while in Safari, cycles through all the text fields on your current page. What you might not be aware of is that if you hold Option when pressing Tab, it will highlight the next object the site (or text field).

For example, if I hit Option + Tab while on the MacTips home page, the first object on the page gets highlighted in blue (in this case, the MacTips banner). To open a highlighted link, hit Return.

It used to be that in order to look at files from the trash, you would have to drag everything out and open each file. It took Apple 4 iterations of OS X to get it right but they’ve finally fixed this glaring issue. As the title suggests, you can use Quick Look to look at files that are in the trash. Just highlight the file and hit the Space Bar.

Astute reader Miki pointed out a solution for those still using Tiger. Drag the file from the trash over the appropriate program icon in the Dock and drop them there by holding Command + Option

The good folks over at Lifehacker have compiled a list of 10 ways you can improve your BitTorrent experience. They endorse a few of our favorite products, such as Transmission, and also bring new ones to the table such as Bitlet, a webapp torrent client for torrenting at work/school (may not work with Safari). They also included many other tips on how to torrent like a pro with everything from setting up Season Passes for TV shows, to getting the best quality Torrent files, it’s a great list definitely worth checking out.

[Image and list via Lifehacker]

Transmission is one of the best BitTorrent clients out there; one of the reasons it is great is because it’s very fast! However, sometimes it gets too fast and hogs all your bandwidth which will make you lag when playing games online and will also make streaming video near-impossible. Fortunately, there’s a built in bandwidth limiter that can be activated at the touch of a button.

See the little turtle that I’ve circled in the above picture? Clicking that button activates the bandwidth limiter. To adjust the settings for the limiter, go to preferences -> bandwidth and fill in your desired bandwidth limit

As I mentioned before, this feature really comes in handy when using another application which requires lots of bandwidth or when playing XBox Live/Playstation network, etc while downloading stuff.