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Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is an app that guides you in creating romantic photos. It does this by helping you shape your body into different positions that then are mosaicked into a larger photo of a heart, for example. Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is a free app available from the App Store; it installs quickly.

The intent of Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is to help you position your body by matching an onscreen outline. These images are then combined into a larger tiled image to match a shape … Read more

Aliases in OS X are analogous to the Windows shortcuts, in which you create a small pointer file that references another location or file on disk, so you can quickly access that resource without continuously having to reveal it first. In a sense aliases allow a similar function as the OS X Dock or the Finder sidebar, except they can be placed anywhere on the file system. A benefit to this is that you can create a folder that contains aliases of all the common documents, remote folders, and other items you access, and then add this to your Dock … Read more

Text substitution is a convenient option for quickly composing documents without needing to learn special methods for accessing symbols or full names or phrases that you regularly use.

This option is so commonly used that OS X has a central text substitution service that you can set up in the system preferences; however, not all programs are built to use this. Unfortunately many word processors, such as Microsoft Word and Apple's Pages, do not use central text substitution services, and instead incorporate their own text substitution options. As a result, if you set up text substitution in the OS … Read more

The keyboard offers a number of common characters for the language layout you have chosen, especially when you use modifier keys such as Shift, Command, and Option to invoke alternative character sets; however, while those that are mapped to various keys are common, they are only a minor subset of the characters that are available for you to use when composing documents.

OS X's support for unicode fonts makes a vast array of characters available for you to use in applications that are coded with Apple's Cocoa frameworks, and while some programs have their own input methods for … Read more

When composing documents, it's convenient to have text-handling tools available to quickly access anything from word definition look-ups to suggestions, spell checkers, and options for finding obscure symbols that may be handy in a document.

While the Mac OS has for a long time had keyboard shortcuts and character pallets for quickly accessing needed symbols, in the latest versions of the OS, Apple has incorporated a number of new features for quickly accessing relevant characters, substitutions, and other text-handling features that may be convenient when typing.

OS X has vast unicode font libraries that not only contain alternative alphanumeric characters and symbols, but also numerous fun and unique characters that may be useful when composing documents. There are several approaches to accessing odd characters in OS X, and the other day I covered some options for accessing these, including using Lion's new special characters menu and the keyboard viewer.

In addition to these options, the system has a character viewer that will allow you to browse through all the characters and font possibilities that OS X has to offer, and provide you with an option … Read more

Every now and then you may need to enter special characters and symbols when writing, which can be for relatively common tasks such as character accents or "degree" signs, but also for more obscure or specialized symbols. In the past, many of these came from using special fonts (Wingdings or Dingbats) that contained these symbols as alternates to the standard alphanumeric characters, but these days fonts make use of the Unicode system and can include hundreds or thousands of available symbols.

As with other PC systems, the Mac keyboard layout is a standard one for the most commonly … Read more

PopChar has been around since nearly the dawn of time, at least in terms of the Mac operating system. PopChar started as a Turbo Pascal-based substitute for Key Caps, created on a Mac Plus way back in 1987. Its core functionality remains the same today, helping users insert unusual characters directly into documents--choosing from an increasingly arcane array of strange and foreign symbols, across thousands of Unicode-supported characters, all without having to learn any difficult key combinations.

Similar to the built-in Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer in OS X, PopChar X is accessed from your menu bar (or with an … Read more

Chinese characters have become popular fodder for tattoos, but we've all heard the stories of foreign-language tattoos gone awry. Chinese Symbol Studio provides translations of many tattoo-appropriate words and phrases, but be careful; we can't vouch for their accuracy.

The program seems to be designed specifically for those seeking tattoo ideas, although a more general translation feature is included as well. Along the left side of the interface there's a nested list of words and phrases, including names, numbers, and words relating to topics like family, religion, animals, the zodiac, and more. There's also a long, … Read more