Productivity Tip: Floating, Transparent Reference Images Using Screenshots & Free Software Afloat

Afloat transparent window software for Mac OS X - screenshotEver need to temporarily reference another document while working on something – this may be an image, or instructions, or a PDF file. Many times you want it floating right on top of your current document so you can refer to it while you are working, and not have to switch back and forth between applications.

I do this a lot when working in Illustrator, especially working from reference images, but also the occasional email message or PDF file sent by a client.

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Annotated Keyboard Graphic With Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

annotated keyboard for photoshop shortcutsHere’s a pretty handy little reference graphic: an annotated keyboard with Photoshop’s keyboard shortcuts. And even an extended text-based shortcut chart on the bottom!

This makes me think that not only could it use a bit of spicing up in the visual sense, but also that this would be pretty handy for Illustrator users as well… maybe even incorporating Modifier key shortcuts to boot.

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Great Wacom Tablet Scrolling Software For Mac OS X: Smart Scroll X

Smart Scroll X iconIn some previous posts, I rambled on about the ability to scroll, one-handed, using the Wacom software, and a shareware alternative, Smart Scroll X. I also touched on this a bit in my Wacom Intuos graphics tablets review.
I am very pleased to report that the developer of Smart Scroll X has worked out the issues with Camino and NetNewsWire. The newly introduced scrolling feature in the Wacom tablet driver software is very cool, and should be more than sufficient for most users. Smart Scroll X fills a gap that the more nerdy of us may appreciate. And I think this is the proper situation for a shareware app – to extend functionality. Continue reading

Photoshop Tip: Resize A Marquee Selection

Photoshop Transform Selection ScreenshotSo you’ve just made a selection in Photoshop using the Marquee tool, but you didn’t start in the right place and one of the corners isn’t covering part of the area you want selected.

Yeah, you could try to place your cursor oh-so-perfectly right near the area in question and try to drag another rectangular marquee selection (using the Shift key of course to add to an existing selection). But why doesn’t Photoshop just give you interactive resize handles for the selection?

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Tip: Keyboard Shortcut To Fill A Photoshop Layer (Or Selection) With The Background or Foreground Color

Photoshop tool palette color swatchesEver just want to fill a selection or layer with the background or foreground color in Photoshop? Forget heading all the way over to the palette to choose the Paintbucket tool – just press Command (Apple key)+Delete for the foreground color, or Option+Delete for the background color (Alt+Backspace and Control+Backspace on Windows).

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Illustrator tip: Preserving transparency & effects on the clipboard (using copy/paste)

Ever find that you are trying to copy & paste ( or drag & drop) vector art from one Illustrator file to another, only to find all your transparency and other Appearance effects gone? I have to Google this every time it happens, so I thought I would make a post for it so I can look it up for myself, and help a few others along the way. Of course remembering this would be helpful, but I can’t count on that! Continue reading

Wacom Tablet: Scroll Click

Wacom Intuos3 6X11 Pen Tablet

Wacom has just updated their graphics tablet driver software for Macintosh and the release notes PDF tells us that a new feature has been introduced, “Scroll Click” (my nickname for it). This is an awesome new feature that allows the user to set a pen button to the “scroll click”, and then when pressing that button, you can drag the pen on the tablet to activate scrolling. In addition to this being very cool, it’s a feature that I suggested to the tech & PR departments a few weeks ago, I can’t help but assume this was implemented due to that request. I was initially given a not-so-encouraging response, basically because the Intuos line of tablets has the Touch Strips srcoll/zoom hardware touch-sensitive areas. Of course, their other tablets do not have these.

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