One nifty feature I’ve found with my new Apple Mac Mini is that taking screenshots is real easy. If you want to capture an image of a portion of the desktop, simply type the key sequence:

cmd-shift-4

i.e. press down both the cmd key and the shift key then press the 4 key at the same time.

The Mac then displays cursors that you can drag with the mouse to grab any portion of the screen you like – press the left mouse button to begin capture then move the mouse to encompass the desired are before releasing the left mouse button to complete the capture. The image is then automatically saved as a PNG file on the desktop.

After the image is saved onto the desktop, double-clicking the image with the mouse displays the image in the Preview tool. The Preview tool contains a number of handy features, e.g. the Tools menu lets you resize the image and the File menu contains options to export the image in different formats, e.g. as a .JPG file.

Having recently bought an Apple Mac, I’d begun working my way through tutorials on how to use XCode, Apple’s IDE for iPhone/ iPad development. Coming from a PC, I had a learning curve on how to use some of the basic Mac features. I’m not saying the Mac is better or worse than a PC, just different. It’s always good to learn something new!

One thing that did confuse me for a while was that the tutorials I was following required me to right-click the mouse on certain items to bring up a context menu. Unfortunately this simply didn’t work, I clicked on the right side of the mouse but no menu appeared. My confusion was increased as the mouse I’d bought (for over £30!) didn’t appear to have separate left and right buttons. Eventually I figured out that the mouse was configurable and that I had to enable use of the right mouse button feature as it wasn’t enabled by default. To enable the right mouse, I had to open the System Preferences by clicking on this button:

then navigate to the Mouse preferences under the Hardware section in the preferences. Finally I had to enable the Secondary button for the right mouse button as shown in this picture:

After doing this, I could right-click the mouse and bring up the context menu, just like on a PC.