This is a guest article written by Emma Best from laptopical.com, laptopical is a great resource for those looking for reviews on new laptop computers and laptop related news.

Macs are branded as simple, out of the box convenient machines, and they are, but it only takes a little knowhow to make them even more convenient. If you use a Mac every day chances are you may have a few favorite hacks already, but you probably don’t know every one. The following are all relatively simple ways that, with just a few clicks or a little tweaking, can help you to get the most out of your Mac experience.

5. Keep That Tiger Look In Leopard

If you miss the way things used to be, worry not, there are people out there who have developed hacks so that you can do things like turn that menubar opaque again (OpaqueMenuBar download) , revert the Dock to 2d (DockDoctor download), and more. Wired has a manual way to alter the dock to 2d if you like to play with the terminal, along with a few other tips.

4. Move Time Machine

If you’ve ever been annoyed by accidentally clicking Time Machine in your dock, but like the functionality too much to remove it entirely, then just move it to the finder! It’s really simple, just drag and drop from the Applications folder. See here for a screenshot.

3. Slim Down That Power Cord

MacBooks come with fairly bulky power cords, but there is a way around it, and it’s simpler than you may have thought. Just unplug the Mac power cord and plug in something smaller. Read here for an account of someone using a PlayStation cord to do the trick. Warning – this hack is at your own risk.

2. Keyboard Shortcuts

There are a ton of keyboard shortcuts out there for Macs, but here are a few favorites. Cmd+Shft+4 will draw a screenshot box on your screen, enabling you to capture exactly what you want. Pressing Cmd+H will hide your current window without closing it. Holding CTRL while brushing the trackpad upwards or downwards will zoom in or out on your screen. Use and enjoy!

1. Use Leopard On a Non-Mac

Heard of the Hackintosh? There are tons of examples of users hacking Leopard to work on various PCs. Often these take a little work, but if you have the drive and the time, then take a look at examples of a Hackintosh built from scratch, or hacked netbooks like the Dell Mini 9, MSI Wind, or the Eee PC.

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1. IE Netrender (Firefox Addon)

It adds buttons, tools menu and contextual menu entries to render the current page with various versions of IE (5.5/6/7/8 Beta 1)

2. IE Tab (Another Firefox Addon)

Another great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. * But it can render only one version of IE (the version which is already installed in your PC) and works only with IE.

3. IETester (Freeware)

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. * But still in alpha version and has some bugs

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Then I asked help to the most helpful thing in the world -google!. Yeah, it gave me lots of forum links with the same problem reported. But none of them had a working solution. I tried a lot, none of the solutions I found was capable to manage six SELECT boxes and three drop downs at a time. At last I found something like below in a blog.

“Windowed controls in IE will always cover DHTML layers. That means if you have a DIV that pops up or floats on the page and it intersects with a windowed control (such as the common SELECT box), the windowed control will obscure the DIV, no matter what zIndex you have set for each element. “

That is, in IE6 SELECT box was considered to be a windowed element and they have changed it to a windowless element in IE7. The problem is based on the historical fact that form fields have typically been rendered by the operating system/windowing system, where everything else on the page is rendered by the browser. This for a long time caused problems because the OS rendered form fields would draw on top of everything since the operating system has no idea what elements on the page are being drawn.

So.. What’s the solution..?

We can overcome this problem by using iframe. iframe can exist in both the zIndex of windowed controls and the zIndex of regular HTML elements

All we have to do is to make the drop down menus called in an IFRAME. The IFRAME control has a unique nature in IE6. It can exist in both the zIndex of windowed controls and the zIndex of regular HTML elements. Simply put, you can shim an IFRAME under your DIV. The IFRAME will block out the windowed control. I was not ready to try my luck on Javascript. I just created HTML files with only the drop down items and called it to the main page using IFRAME. I used a simple Javascript to show the menu and CSS to format the menu items.

Here is an example:

HTML PART:

<head>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”mm_menu.js“></script>
<link href=”./cssDropdown.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
</head>
<body>
<a href=“#” onmouseover=“MM_menuShowMenu(‘ContainerDropMenu2′, ‘Drop2′,0,29);“> DROP-2</a>
<div id=”ContainerDropMenu2“>
<div id=”Drop2” onmouseout=”MM_menuStartTimeout(1000);” onmouseover=”MM_menuResetTimeout();“>
<iframe src=”drop2.html” width=”150px” height=”127px” scrolling=”No” frameborder=”0″ > </iframe>
</div>
</div>
</body>

DROP2.HTML:

<head>
<link href=”./cssDropdown.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />
</head>
<body>
<div id=”DropMenu1” class=”links“>
<a href=”" id=”Drop1_Item_0” target=”_parent“> FIRST OPTION </a> <br />
<a href=“homevalue_request.php” id=”Drop1_Item_1” target=”_parent“> SECOND OPTION </a> <br />
<a href=“testimonials.php” id=”Drop1_Item_2” target=”_parent“> THIRD OPTION </a> <br />
<a href=“contactus.php” id=”Drop1_Item_3” target=”_parent“> FOURTH AND FINAL OPTION </a>
</div>
</body>

If the DIV has transparent areas, you’ll want those areas to punch through the IFRAME to the page background. There are two ways you can make an IFRAME transparent. The one that works for this situation is to set the style object’s filter property:

iframe.style.filter=’progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(style=0,opacity=0)’;

This in effect makes the entire IFRAME transparent, but it will still block out the windowed controls. The other technique, which uses the IFRAME element’s ALLOWTRANSPARENCY attribute, actually pertains to making the interior page background of the IFRAME transparent, so that any content inside the IFRAME can have transparency. However, this mode changes the nature of the IFRAME and it no longer serves our purpose for blocking out windowed controls.

I had to spent two days to solve this problem. I have the sample files attached as a zip folder. Please DOWNLOAD and go through it. There are three drop downs in the menu. In DROP1 and DROP2. I have used IFRAME to display it correctly and DROP3 is an ordinary CSS drop down.

Still I’m looking for a better solution. Have a better solution? Please share it with me..

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Everyone has seen the context menu that appears when you right-click on a Flash movie. By default, this context menu has a somewhat unprofessional appearance, and it has a couple of features that can severely disrupt the functionality of an ActionScript-driven Flash movie. The default suite of items that appear in the Flash context menu will vary depending on whether or not the Flash movie has multiple frames in its timeline. GO AHEAD!

The tutorial is written by Kpro found at http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/

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1. Social bookmark every pages!

Bookmark each page of your site and each blog entry you post. While this might seem tedious, it’s worth it. You’ll see a strong increase in traffic if you social bookmark each page on your site and each of your blog entries.

2. Speaking of your email signature line

Believe it or not, people do follow your email signature links. You’ll be amazed how many folks read email signature lines.

3. Start a blog

Start a blog and then once you do, start commenting on other people’s blogs, linking to them from your site or adding them to your blogroll.

4. Make sure your blog has an RSS feed

Make sure your blog has an RSS feed so if you capture a reader you don’t lose them if they forget to bookmark your site or blog.

5. Join in forums

Join in forums that has contents relevant to your website category and keep creating new threads and replying to other threads. Don’t ever forget to add your site’s link in your signature. Also try to make it attractive by using larger fonts and colors. Believe me, you will be amazed of the traffic.

6. Offer a freebie

Believe me it works! Offer something for free that worth some $$$. That can be a free tutorial, an icon set, wordpress themes etc.

7. Offer a help

you can be an answer person at Yahoo Answers – you don’t have to spend hours on there, but maybe a few minutes a week. Make sure and include a link back to your site following your answers.

8. Set up a social networking site using Facebook, LinkedIn, or Squidoo

It’s free and easy to do, just don’t forget the all-important link back to your site!

9. List yourself in the best directories

You’ll have to pay for this but since most people don’t do this (since everyone’s looking for a freebie) you could really enhance your traffic by getting a listing: dir dot yahoo dot com, business dot org, botw dot org.

10. Inbound links

Don’t waste your time on smaller low-traffic sites. Instead spend your time going after high traffic, high quality sites. Good sites should have a page ranking of 4-6 depending on the market. You can find out what a site’s page ranking is by downloading the Google toolbar which comes with a PR feature built in.Similar Posts:

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Creating an outstanding favicon becomes a very important part for website branding. The basic guidelines for design a good favicon are here follows..

1. create a favicon (preferably 16 x16 px)

2. upload favicon.ico to root directory

3. copy and paste the code to header section

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

4. thats it..! finished!

There are hundreds of favicon generators available online.. Most of them make your icons dirty! I surfed through net to find the best favicon generator online, tried around 50 generators.. At last I found the best tool (in my exp.).. Take a look..

This tool is developed by webscriptlab.com and I think it is the best favicon generator online.

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1. Web Developer

A developer essential, Web Developer adds an array of custom tools and menus to Firefox. Use it in tandem with Firebug for maximum functionality and control over your code.

2. Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

3. FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, file hashing, and much more!

4. ColorZilla

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there’s more…

5. Greasemonkey

Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. … Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Mark Pilgrim’s definitive Greasemonkey guide, diveintogreasemonkey.org will show you how.

6. View Source Chart

* Draws A Color-Coded Chart of a Web Page’s Source Code Source Charting… * Graphically Displays HTML Tag Boundaries * Graphically Defines Tag Nesting Order, Structure and Hierarchy * Adds A Simple but Powerful User Interface *TO* Source Code WHAT SOURCE CHARTING DOES THAT INDENTATION-ONLY FORMATTING DOES NOT: Source Charting Allows the User To… * quickly scan and recognize a document’s tags without reading a single tag * see how deeply nested an element is just by looking to its left (no scrolling/finding/reading tags) * identify an element’s containing tags without having to scroll, find and read each tag

7. Screengrab!

Screengrab saves entire webpages as images. It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images.

8. Split Browser

This splits the content area of the browser window as you like. It will help you in various cases. For example, to compare multiple webpages, to show a calendar always, and so on. There is some ways to split window. * Choose the “Split Browser to” menu in the context menu. * Choose the “Load in Split Browser” menu in the context menu on link. * Click popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area. * Drop links, bookmarks, etc. to popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area while dragging. You can split browser infinitely, as many as your RAM and your screen allow. Enjoy split and split to your heart’s content!

9. Resizeable Textarea

A lot of forums and boards provide very small textareas for new postings. If you type a longer posting, you have to scroll up and down, to read what you have written and to proceed. This situation is annoying. Now here is my solution: Resizeable Textarea extension. It lets you resize most of those text areas.

10. Copy Plain Text

Have you ever copied text from a website and pasted it into an email program, such as Thunderbird, but been frustrated that the text formatting (bold, italic, font, etc.) were copied with it? This extension copies the text without all the formatting.

11. Clipmarks

Clipmarks lets you clip and share pieces of web pages. Instead of having to bookmark entire pages, our Firefox add-on lets you “clip” the best parts (text, images and video).

You can share your clips anywhere with our ClipCast widget and save them to your online collection at clipmarks.com. Clips can also be emailed, printed or posted directly to your blog. Add the Clipmarks Application to Facebook to share clips with your friends there.

12. FirePHP

Find out what PHP code in the backend does to pages on display in Firefox browsers.

13. Codetch

Get the feel of Dreamweaver in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf.

14. ScribeFire

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

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