MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone.

   Tiger’s Dashboard and Widgets are way cool, but do you know how to add or delete a Widget?

   You can open Dashboard by clicking it’s icon on the dock or by pressing the F12 key. Once Dashboard is running, you’ll notice an icon of a plus sign in a circle in the lower left hand corner of your screen. Click on the icon to manage your widgets. You can get rid of widgets by clicking on their close icons or you can add widgets by dragging them to the desktop.

   Okay someone just sent you an important Microsoft Word document and you don’t have Microsoft Word on your Mac, what are you going to to do? Here’s an easy way to read Microsoft Word documents. Simply right or control click on the document and in the contextual menu choose “Open With” and then choose TextEdit.

   Stickies are handy little notes for your desktop that resemble a 3M product that rhymes with “Most it note.”

   To start using Stickies double click the Stickies icon in your Applications folder. Once Stickies are running you can copy and paste text and graphics from various apps and keep the information handy on your desktop. Are stickies taking up too much space? All you have to do is click on a note’s title bar to collapse it to one line. It even shows you the first line of text so you know what’s in the note.

   Using tabs in your web browser is an easy way to switch between several websites in the same browser window. To use tabs in Safari, go to Preferences under the Safari menu and then select the Tabs, tab. Make sure that the ‘Enable Tabbed Browsing’ check box is checked. There are also options to ‘Select New Tabs As They Are Created’ and ‘Always Show Tab Bar.’ You can select those if you wish. Close Preferences and you are ready to surf using tabs. Here’s a handy tip, hold the command key down when you click on a link to open the link in a new tab.

   Using your Mac’s speech feature is handy for proofreading a document, or listening to news on your Mac while getting dressed.

   To have your Mac read you text from a website like MacMost.com, select System Preferences, and then Speech.

   Next, check the “Speak selected text when the key is pressed” checkbox and then press the “set key…” button. Choose a key combination such as “Command + Control + S” and then press OK. Next, choose a voice.

   We like “Bruce” because it sounds like Stephen Hawking. Now go to a web page and select some text. Then press Command + Control + S to have the text read to you.

   Today’s quick tip is handy for sun glare on your Mac Book screen or as an easy April fools joke.

   If you press Command+Option+Control+8, it will reverse the video on your Mac’s screen.

   If your fifth generation iPod has locked up or frozen, you may be able to reset it and save a trip to the genius bar at the Apple store. To reset a video iPod, toggle the Hold switch on and off, then press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears. This takes about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step. Also, different iPods have different reset procedures, so you might want to go to Reset iPod.com to find out how to reset your iPod.

   Have you ever wanted to take a screen shot of only a portion of your Mac’s desktop?

   It’s easy! Simply press Command+Shift+4. You will now have a cross-hair cursor that you can click, hold and drag around the area that you want a picture of. When you release the mouse button, you will snap a picture that will appear on your desktop.