João's posterous

Just for the lulz...

Filed under: quick

Mac Quick Tip: Adding a signature to PDFs with Preview

Preview is the most underrated piece of software ever. If you spend some time with it you'll find out that you can use it to perform a lot of, sometimes less obvious, functions.

Today I'm going to talk about digital signatures. If you send documents that are (or should) be signed, you probably print them, then sign and then scan them again so they're properly signed. The thing is, it's a lot of trouble and you know that scanned docs don't look as good.

Preview has a tool that allows you to scan a signature, without even needing to have a scanner at hand as long as your Mac has a built-n iSight camera (which it probably has), and add them to your PDFs in a jiffy.

The process is really simple:

1. Write your letter or whatever it is using your favourite text processing app (just make sure you can save the document has PDF) and save it as a FDP file.

2. Make your signature with a black pen on a white paper. Make it pretty and a little bigger than usual (use a black felt pen since it works best).

3. Open it with Preview and click the Annotations icon.

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4. The Annotation Bar will pop down. Click on the Signature icon.

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Here you can see two options (don't mind my other signature - you probably don't have any there). Click "Create Signature from Built-in iSight".

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A new window opens with a kind of scanning window that shows the image captured by your camera. Hold the paper steady and so that the signature rests on the blue line as you see below. Once you're happy with the scanned signature, click Accept (tip: use the Return (Enter) key).

Make sure you have enough light on it and hold it really steady or it won't scan properly.

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Don't mind if you can't get it right on the first attempt. It took me a few trials to get it just right.

5. And that's it. You're signature is saved and you can use it to sign your docs without all the print-sign-scan hassle. All you have to do now is to click the signature icon again

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and choose the signature you want and click in the place you want it in the document (you can resize it there).

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And you're off to impress with your properly signed document.

-João

Mac Quick Tips: App switcher maximize trick & full-screen windows

Hey there. Here's a new tip to boost your window minimize/maximize process.

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If you've been using a Mac for a while, you probably figured out already that Cmd + M minimizes the foreground window. But, whenever you want it back, you've always had to rely on the mouse.

The app switcher on the Mac allows you to maximize (or un-minimize, if you want) without using the mouse, and it's quite simple actually: 

1. hit Cmd + Tab to bring up the app switcher;
2. cycle through the apps with the Tab key and pick the one you want;
3. and then, before releasing the Cmd key, hold Option (Alt) down and the minimized window will come up.

This works with apps without any windows opened too. In this case, a new window will be opened.

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If you're a switcher, you've probably noticed that Macs don't handle windows like Windows do and that the feature you miss more is that maximize button that resizes the window to match the whole screen (by default, the maximize button on windows [on the Mac] resizes the window to match it's content, and toggles between this size and the original size).

Well, OS X can do it too and, again, is pretty simple: just hold Shift while you click on the green + (plus) button on the top left corner of each window.

Hope this will help to improve your experience with OS X.

-João

Mac Quick Tip: Force Spotlight to re-index

Here's another Mac Quick Tip to solve problems with Spotlight. Recently, I came across some things that Spotlight indexed but were no longer on my hard drive and had to find a way to force it to index my entire HDD again. It's quite simple actually.

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Here's what you need to do:

1) Open System Preferences and click the Spotlight option;

2) Choose the Privacy tab where you can add locations you don't want Spotlight to index. Adding a location here, not only prevents results from that location to appear on searches, but it also deletes what was already indexed regarding that location. In my case, I wanted to do that to the entire disk, so I simply dragged my Macintosh HD icon from the desktop into there. You can do this to any folder, or disk;

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3) Close System Preferences and open it again, Spotlight section, Privacy tab;

4) Select the location(s) you want to re-index and click the "minus" sign at the bottom of the list and then close System Preferences.

Wait a few seconds and you'll see the Spotlight icon in the top-right corner of the screen with a little dot in the middle. That means it's indexing. If you click it you can see the progress of the indexing process (it may take a while, depending on how much it has to index).

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-João

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