The Graphic Mac

If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, your battery is vital to the usefulness of the machine. While Apple offers you basic information about your battery life, little information is displayed about the overall health of the battery. This is where coconutBattery comes in.

coconutBattery is a simple utility that goes beyond just showing you the current charge of your MacBook’s battery. You might say it gives your battery a complete physical exam. coconutBattery can show you the current maximum capacity of the battery compared to what it was when you first took it out of the box; perfect for anyone who’s thought “the battery used to last longer.”

coconutBattery offers a wealth of information about your laptop's battery

The diagnostics don’t stop there. You can get a better idea of how many complete charge cycles are left in the life of your battery by checking the loadcycles (how many times you’ve fully charged your battery) – useful because every battery has a set amount of full battery charges before it just doesn’t charge anymore.

If you’re a multiple-laptop family, you’ve no doubt been faced with the question “is that the MacBook charger or my wife’s MacBook Pro’s charger?” coconutBattery can let you know if you’ve plugged your laptop in with the wrong charger.

coconutBattery is a free, Universal Binary you can download here.

UrbanFonts has a huge collection of free fonts in dozens of categories. One of those categories is Famous Fonts, where you can find Batman Forever (pictured above). Granted, this isn’t the type of font one uses every day, it will most likely find a use once or twice – thus making it worthy of download. Be sure to check out the rest of the Famous Fonts.

It may not be apparent to you that you can switch from one Adobe Photoshop CS4 tool to another, then back again with just a single click. It wasn’t to me, until I came across it by accident. Let’s say you’re carefully cloning an area of your image with the Stamp tool and you have a slight lapse in concentration… doh! Simply hit the E (switches to the Eraser tool) key and hold it down, erase the goof with your cursor, then let go of the E key. You automatically switch back to the Stamp tool so you can quickly finish the cloning job. The key is to hold down the key while performing the task of the second tool.

When tabs finally found their way into Web browsers some years ago, people immediately fell in love with them. In fact, most people wonder how someone could live without them. With Apple’s love for a minimalist interface, you have to wonder why we still don’t have them on the desktop. Whatever the reason, we’ve been left to wait for a third-party solution.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.
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You may recall I wrote about Alien Skin Software’s February charity promotion where they were to donate 10% of their profits to Haiti relief. I’m happy to announce that Alien Skin Software donated over $10,000, which includes sale proceeds and a donation made early in February. The donations went to funds specifically for Haiti through the American Red Cross and the Community Coalition for Haiti.

I already loved their software, but stepping up to the plate like this is just fantastic. Many thanks to Alien Skin; I wish more developers would give back to the community like this.

Caleb Kimbrough has released his latest set of free high-resolution textures. Five beautiful grungy looking brick walls are available for download here.

Bricks by Caleb Kimbrough at Flickr

Each image is of very high quality, and measures in at 3888 x 2592 pixels. Don’t forget to honor the Creative Commons license and attribute the images to the author if you use them.

From March 1 through April 30, 2010, For Dummies invites customers to join its annual “Dummies Month” celebration, offering a $5 mail-in rebate with a purchase of any For Dummies book or Audio Set (with the price of $6.99 or more).

Along with the rebate, Dummies.com is hosting a special sweepstakes; from March 1 through April 30, visitors can enter for a chance to win an Apple iPad loaded with For Dummies Apps.

If nothing else, you can visit the Snow Leopard for Dummies section to read some helpful tips for Apple’s latest operating system.

Adobe InDesign offers plenty of shortcuts, but there are a few that don’t get much attention that are quite handy once you get used to using them. One of the areas that is often neglected is InDesign’s ability to drag & drop text, rather than using copy & paste.

To take advantage of InDesign’s drag & drop features, you first have to turn it on. You can do this by visiting InDesign’s preferences by navigating to InDesign>Preferences>Type, or hitting Command + K and selecting the Type item in the source list on the left of the prefs window. About half-way down in the Type prefs window you’ll see the Drag & Drop Text Editing section. Check the Enable in Layout View box.

Now that the feature is turned on, you can select any text in an InDesign text frame, then click, hold and drag the highlighted text. Releasing the mouse button drops the text into place. That alone can be a real time saver when you’re editing text. But the fun is just starting…
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