Ryan's Mac OS X Tips (10.4.8)

My secrets:

• RTFM (Read The Fine Manual). Many people don't, so you'll be way ahead.
• Read release notes for new versions to be alerted to new features
• Bookmark macosxhints.com and subscribe to their RSS feed.
• Spend time going through settings and preferences for the OS and your apps, it can pay off when you find stuff you didn't know about.
• Try stuff - it might just work. Often, Apple has hidden stuff a bit to clean up the interface, but you get used to it:

Background window control

• Hold command while dragging a window in the background
• I use this to position a video in the empty space next to the window I'm working with.
• You can also click on the scroll bar arrows and drag the slider

Document and Folder proxy icon

• For windows with a proxy icon, you can command click on it to get the containing folders just as with the Finder.
• Safari: you get the containing folders for the current URL all the way back to the root of the site (middle-click also works in Safari)
• Drag folder proxy from Finder window where working to save or open dialog to go there.
• AddressBook: it's a Vcard
• Safari: you use the page icon to the left of the URL

PDF Services

• Take advantage of the whole system being based on display PDF. Add anything that deals with PDF to the print PDF menu.
• Preview with Adobe Reader
• Print to Adobe Reader for Palm
• Print to PDF to a folder with just an alias in the PDF services folder.
• In fact, you can print PDFs right to iTunes. Find a recipe, print to iTunes and keep them organized!

Preview

• Bookmark, Annotate
• Image correction, Crop.
• Select multiple and open as thumbnails in the drawer. You can even drop a folder on Preview in the dock to open all the pics in it, but you have to hold option+command when dropping to force it to accept the drop. This works for other programs as well.

Sound:

• You can hold shift to supress the sound of the volume change.
• You can select to not play feedback sound when volume is changed to avoid the sound interrupting, and with it off, pressing shift will let you hear the feedback sound for those times you want to know how loud it will be.
• You can select the sound source and outputs here, but it takes a bit to get here, however, a shortcut is to hold option while pressing the volume keys.
• Each input has its own level. Selecting it here and setting its level works for inputs that are not default but are being used specifically in a program.
• In speech > Text to speech, check announce when alerts are displayed, but change the delay to 15 seconds or more so that it only speaks if you are not there to dismiss the dialog or perhaps missed it behind other windows.

Keyboard:
Assign shortcuts to menu items. I found I could insert hyperlinks in TextEdit, but it is rather buried in the menu: Format > Text > Link... (rather than Edit > Insert), so we can add our own keyboard shortcut for it:

• Open System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse.
• Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
• Scroll to the bottom and we see "Application Keyboard Shortcuts"
• Click the "+" button.
• Choose TextEdit.
• Enter the menu title "Link..."
• Enter the key: command + K
• Start TextEdit

I have found, however, that the definitions I make seem to vanish from the System Preferences list even though they remain active.

AddressBook:

• If you use pictures, they will appear in e-mails from those people. You can use them for your buddies in iChat and Yahoo! Messenger.
• Click on the field titles to get some actions like: get driving directions or send an email.

Dictionary:

• You can access this almost anywhere by double-clicking a word then right-click > lookup in Dictionary,
• Hold control+command+D while hovering over words to see a pop-up definition.

• Open the app and choose preferences. You can set the way it pops up when you invoke it.

Safari:

• Enable Check Spelling as you Type to make typing in blog and forum entries nicer.
• Middle-click on links to open in a new tab behind. Need to define button as "button 3" or "middle". Command+click works too. Holding option+command makes it open in a window behind the current one. Adding shift makes it open in a tab or window in front.
• Option+click downloads a linked file

Mouse and Trackpad:

• New feature: control + scroll = easy zoom
• Probably have the option of two-finger scrolling.

Finder

• Know the basics of command+drag to force a move, option+drag to force a copy, command+option+drag to force an alias
• Try customizing the toolbar. The new folder or get info buttons can be handy. Check out other apps and see what custom toolbar items they have.

• Command+click on toolbar on/off button cycles through button view types.

Mail:

• you can keep your folders closed or even the list of mailboxes hidden and have them pop open when you need by dragging and hovering. They snap back closed when done.

Dashboard & Exposé:

• Hot corners are good because it allows you to easily use it when using the mouse rather than stopping to hit the F-keys.
• Hit "desktop" corner to get something on the desktop, drag it to "all windows" corner, pick window, hover to select, then drop on window. Also, could drag back to "desktop" corner to go back to the window you were working with.

Dock:

• I don't keep tons of icons on it because I don't use that many things daily and it starts to take longer to find the one I want, and you might as well just make a good app menu (demo app aliases folder)
• Just keep the main apps in the dock to leave room for the other temporary ones to come and go.
• If you are using some apps for a while in a project, you can open it, then select to keep it in the dock for a few days, then remove it later.

Calculator:

• Clicking the zoom button cycles the calculator styles.

Utilities:

• PDF Browser Plugin: http://www.schubert-it.com/. Also, look for their Word document plugin.
• Combine PDFs: http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml