Note that when you click in the sticky to start taking notes, the main menu bar will appear, as Stickies is now the frontmost application. If that bothers you, you can use this hint to hide Stickies’ menu bar while it’s active.

Another built-in solution, at least for OS X 10.4 users, is to use Dashboard’s Stickies widget. Since the Dashboard layer floats above all others, your sticky note will be visible on top of the playing movie. Of course, so will any other Dashboard widgets you have open, which could lead to a bad case of visual clutter—and it’s something of a pain to close all those open widgets any time you want to comment on a movie.

Third-party solutions

There are a number good solutions involving third-party tools. Movie Time, for instance, is a free movie player that lets you specify on which “layer” you’d like your movie to appear (behind regular windows or on the desktop, for instance). You could then use your favorite text editor to take notes on top of the playing movie.

If you use Unsanity’s $10 WindowShadeX, you can make any window from any application float on top—so you could take your notes in BBEdit, TextEdit, or any other editor of choice.

The free SideNote is a notepad that slides out from the edge of the screen, letting you comment when you need to before disappearing until it’s time for the next comment. It supports many of the same features as Stickies, including colored notes, font and style settings, and support for images. It even includes system-wide hotkey access.

Finally, if none of the above seem to meet your needs exactly, you can always go old school: grab a pen or pencil and some paper, and you can take notes in full-screen movie playback mode without any visual distractions at all!

By Rob Griffiths
MacWorld.com

You can spell check in Safari, iChat or any other Cocoa applications, thanks to its Cocoa roots. Here's how:

1) Highlight the word you wish to spell check and Control-click (Right-Click) on the highlighted text.

2) Select Spelling from the contextual menu and then Check Spelling from the submenu. Or choose from the list of close matches at the top of the submenu.

OS X's spell checker will kick in and check spelling for you.

mac OSX hints

If a picture really is worth a thousand words, then OS X Tiger can make you eloquent with a click of your mouse.

The secret is Slideshow, a handy feature that will fill your screen (or a connected monitor or projector) with images selected from your Mac. You probably already know that iPhoto can create slideshows, but now you can also launch slideshows directly from e-mail messages, folders on the desktop, or even while searching your system with Spotlight. It’s perfect for on-the-fly presentations, searching for just the right image, or browsing your sister’s latest baby photos

Here’s how it works

Mail: Open any mail message that has pictures attached, and you’ll find a slideshow button in the header. Just click the button to display all of the attached images in a slideshow sequence.

Finder: Whenever you select at least one image in the Finder window, “Slideshow” appears as a menu item in Finder’s action menu (accessible through the button with a gear icon). Click to launch the slideshow. Remember, you can select the entire contents of a folder by typing Command-A.

Spotlight: Whenever a Spotlight search finds images, a slideshow icon button appears in the search results window. Click the button to show all of the found images in a slideshow, or select the images you want from the results window and then click the button

Whether you’re working on a gorgeous 30-inch Cinema display or a compact 12-inch PowerBook, Slideshow will render your images in a crisp, stunning fullscreen mode.

Simple yet powerful controls allow you to customize your experience: Stop/Play, Back and Next: Control the automatic playback of images, and move forward or back at your own pace.

Index Sheet: Bring up an Exposé-like index sheet and navigate instantly to any image in the show.

Tiger Tip of the Week

In Tiger, a subtle change has made this process much easier. You can drag and drop a folder onto Preview's icon—just hold down Command-option while you drag (this command forces any program to try to open anything you drop on it). You can drop the folder onto any Preview icon, whether it's in the Dock, the Finder's toolbar or sidebar, or even the Finder itself.

When you drop the folder, Preview opens a new window containing all the images inside it—the drawer displays a thumbnail for each one. Each PDF file, however, opens in its own window.

This feature lets you quickly find all the interesting images that are sometimes hidden within an application. An application is nothing more than a special type of folder.

Just hold down Command-option and drop an application
(TextEdit, for example) onto Preview’s icon.

Preview displays any images it finds in a new Preview window.

Just be careful about trying this with large applications such as DVD Studio Pro. The process of collecting all the images can take a very long time. If you run into trouble, click on the Cancel button in the dialog box to stop the process.

Rob Griffiths
Macworld.com