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I just stumbled upon a couple of awesome Mac shortcuts that make it extremely easy to take a screenshot.

Without further a due, here they are:

• Command-Shift-4: presents a crosshair cursor so that you can take a screenshot of the selected area (saved to Desktop as a png file).
• Command-Shift-3: Takes a screenshot of the entire desktop (saved to Desktop as a png file).

There are also two variations on the previous commands. Both of these commands capture the same area however, instead of saving an image to the desktop, these commands will save the screenshot to the clipboard so that you can then paste it into another app.

• Control-Command-Shift-3
• Control-Command-Shift-4

Pretty cool hunh? Hat Tip: Apple Pro Tips.

Update: I just read over at MacDevCenter.com that OS X also ships with a utility known as Grab which allows you to take even more advanced screenshots. I’ll give it a try and let you know how it works.

Here’s how to colorize output from the ls command in OS X Terminal.

Edit ~/.bash_profile and add the following two lines:

export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad

This will generate output with the following color scheme:

• directory: bold blue, default foreground or background
• symbolic link: bold magenta, default foreground or background
• socket: bold green, default ” or ”
• pipe: bold brown (usually shows up as yellow), default ” or ”
• executable: bold red, default ” or ”
• block special: blue foreground, cyan background
• character special: blue, brown background or foreground
• executable with setuid bit set: black foreground, red background
• executable with setgid bit set: black foreground, cyan background
• directory writable to others, with sticky bit: black foreground, green background
• directory writable to others, without sticky bit: black foreground, brown background

For those of you who really want to know what this means, here’s some information taken directly from the man page for ls.

LSCOLORS: The value of this variable describes what color to use for which attribute when colors are enabled with CLICOLOR. This string is a concatenation of pairs of the format fb, where f is the foreground color and b is the background color.

The color designators are as follows:
a black
b red
c green
d brown
e blue
f magenta
g cyan
h light grey
A bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B bold red
C bold green
D bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E bold blue
F bold magenta
G bold cyan
H bold light grey; looks like bright white
x default foreground or background

The order of the attributes are as follows:
1. directory
2. symbolic link
3. socket
4. pipe
5. executable
6. block special
7. character special
8. executable with setuid bit set
9. executable with setgid bit set
10. directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11. directory writable to others, without sticky bit

For those of you who don’t know, I recently purchased a MacBook with 2GB of RAM. That’s right, I bought a Mac! In just three short days I’ve already learned a lot about OS X and I am actually starting to feel at home. I’m kind of suprised with how comfortable I already feel considering the fact that prior to this laptop my only experience with a Mac was at the Apple store and through everything I’ve read about OS X.

Here’s what I’ve done thus far with my new MacBook:

• Installed several apps including: Office, AppZapper, Taco HTML, VLC, Software for my printer, Firefox and several other applications. Installing software on the Mac is great. No longer do I have to worry about the Windows registry
• Setup my email and several other applications including iChat so that I can communicate with the rest of the world. iChat is pretty sweet but I’m not sure how much I am actually going to use it.
• Connected my camera and a usb thumb drive just to see how well OS X handles other USB devices. Needless to say it worked like a champ.
• Played around with the entire iLife suite including GarageBand and iDVD. I think I might put together a DVD for Alex’s two year.
• Played around with most of the System preferences
• Got connected up to my network. This was the easiest wireless connection I’ve ever made. In fact, I was able to connect directly to the network during the initial setup once I remembered that I had to add my MacBook’s MAC address to my Linksys router (check out my video).

The only complaint I have thus far is in regards to the lack of a two button mouse. As you can imagine, trying to right click with a one button mouse is kind of difficult. Every once and a while I plug in a good old two button mouse just so I don’t have to screw around with the ctrl key. Anybody know why Apple insists on going with a one button mouse? It just seems like it is extremely inefficient to be using only one button. In any case, here’s a video that I took while I unboxed my MacBook. Stay tuned for more Mac/Apple info. I plan on updating this blog often with more informatio on how the switch is going.