Monolingual

I have highlighted this amazing freeware many times in the past, but I think it is so useful that I will give it another mention.

As you all know Mac OS X is a multi-lingual OS, which means that the OS is translated into a multitude of languages which most of us will never use.

Also many software packages use these language translations, and all this boils down to about 2GB (you heard right) of diskspace which you have paid for and will (most likely) never use.

Monolingual, brought to us by Sourceforge.net, gives you the option to remove all these unwanted translations thereby saving all this diskspace for more useful data. For the record, those multi-linguists among us need not be put off by the name - although it is called “Mono” Lingual it gives you the option to keep as many languages as you like!

Download Monolingual here.

Change preferred application to open files

Sometimes your Mac may open certain files with a less preferred application, and you would like to tell it to use a different application from now on.

This is very easy to use, following these steps as illustrated above.

First, select the file (or one of the series of files) in the finder, and choose “File > Get Info” (or press “Command i” or Right-click and select Get Info) to bring up the “Get Info” window as in Fig. 1.

Then go to the “Open With” part of the Get Info window as in Fig. 2 and select the application of your choice. If your preferred application does not appear in the resulting pop-up menu (and you are sure it can open this file) click “Other” and select the application.

Once this is done you may want to click the “Change All” button (Fig 3.) which tells OS X to open this type of file with your preferred application from now on.

Quick calculations

A friend showed me this quick way of performing calculations on your Mac when you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to open your calculator app or widget.

Just click on spotlight and enter your calculation string there, and the answer will be displayed as in the above image.

Its the simplicity of this that I really like - give it a try!