Preference files

Every application in your hard drive creates at least one Preference file inside the Preference folder. Preference files generally contain customization setting for the application, for example, the custom keypad map for a game and the application's registration information. Some applications even create their own sub-folder within the Preferences folder and use it for the storage of important files. For example, Microsoft Internet Explorer (OS 9 version) stores its cache file inside a folder called "MS Internet Cache". Every time an application is launched, it will read its preference file and restore the settings you customized in your last session. Unfortunately, preference files get corrupted easily and cause applications to behave differently. In this case, you should quit the application, delete its preference file and launch the application again. You will loose all the custom settings you have in the application, since the application automatically creates a new preferences file when launched. You just need to re-customize the user settings within the application.

In OS 9 the Preferences folder is in the System folder. In OS X Preferences are found in ~/Library (where ~ represents your User name).

Screen Savers

A Screen Saver is a small program that takes over the display screen if there are no keystrokes or mouse activity for a specified period. They were originally designed for use on old monochrome monitors where the same text could be displayed for a long time and "burned in" on the monitor. Screen savers are intended to prevent this by either blanking out the screen entirely or by displaying a constantly moving image.

Modern computer display screens do not suffer so much from this problem. Today, therefore, screen savers are mostly an adornment, a way to liven up the computer. Many screen savers provide another benefit - hiding a work from would-be snoopers. These screen savers fill the display with an image or animation until the user enters a password.

Screen Savers for Mac OS X can be divided into two types, slidesaver and saver. Slidesaver will display a series of photos, An example of slidesaver is the Abstract, Beach, Cosmos, Forest screen saver that comes with Mac OS X. On the other hand, saver is a screen saver that uses images generated randomly by the program.

How to create your own screensavers
In Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), Apple provided an application called Build slide show located at /Library/Image Capture/Scripts/Build slide show.app that allows you to create your own screensaver (.slideSaver). Just drop a folder containing the images onto the appliation. The application will name the screensaver as Recent Photos.slideSaver and save it at /Users/<UserName>/Library/Screen Savers
Note this is missing from OS X 10.3 (Panther).

Services

The Services menu (located in the menu under the current Application name - next to the blue Apple) allows certain applications to offer their capabilities to other applications. "Services" let you quickly manipulate the content in one application using the capability of other application. The content may include text, graphics, pictures, or movies. For example, Mail provides a service that lets you place a picture created in a drawing application into an email message, you can also highlight a sentence and select "Start Speaking Text" and let your Mac read out the sentence. Select the content you want to work with, then choose the service from the Services menu. If the service is dimmed, you may have selected content that doesn't work with that service.

What is a Contextual Menu Item?

A contextual menu is a menu displayed when a user presses the "Control" key while clicking the mouse button (or clicking the right mouse button if you have a two-button mouse) while the cursor is over an object or area associated with that menu. Contextual menus provide quick access to menu items available elsewhere in an application. Contextual Menu Items have the extension of .plugin.

What are Fonts?

A set of glyphs (images) representing the characters from some particular character set in a particular size and typeface. The image of each character may be encoded either as a bitmap (in a bitmap font) or by a higher-level description in terms of lines and areas (an outline font).

Computers and devices use two methods to represent fonts. In a bit-mapped font, every character is represented by an arrangement of dots. To print a bit-mapped character, a printer simply locates the character's bit-mapped representation stored in memory and prints the corresponding dots. Each different font, even when the typeface is the same, requires a different set of bit maps.

The other method utilizes a vector graphics system to define fonts. In vector graphics systems, the shape or outline of each character is defined geometrically. The typeface can be displayed in any size, so a single font description really represents innumerable fonts. For this reason, vector fonts are called scalable fonts - they can be any size (scale). Other terms for vector fonts are object-oriented fonts or outline fonts. The most widely used scalable-font systems are PostScript and TrueType.

MACinations April 04