As new Mac users, we’re constantly surprised by little things that our little machines can do, that seem so obvious, only once you know them. And there’s a surprising number of people who never manage to discover these little gems. Here’s a few things I’ve noticed Mac users are sometimes unaware of, that they should because they’re so awesome.
This is not a post for a veteran Mac user, nor someone who is computer savvy. Perhaps this post was written so that you can send it as an email to your friend who has just switched to a Mac.
Changing Keyboard shortcuts
Did you know that if you don’t like a keyboard shortcut for any action in any application, you can change it? This is without regard to whether the app likes it or not. There are certain exceptions to the rule, like global shortcuts, or apps that aren’t standard on the Mac, but it’s generally very easy to change shortcuts.
Just dig into System Preferences » Keyboard and Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts. In this, you add a new shortcut, specify the application, give the exact name of the action as it appears in your menubar (case sensitive), and change that shortcut!
Right-Clicking with Mouse
I don’t know why, but Apple still wants people to believe that their mice are still single button. Fact of the matter is, every mouse and trackpad that rolls out of Apple is capable of at least two buttons.
In case of the Mighty Mouse with your iMac, go to System Preferences » Keyboard and Mouse » and enable the secondary click for the right side. The trick to right-clicking, is you lift your left finger off the left side (or it will just do a regular click).
When it comes to trackpads, you can enable two finger taps, or two finger tap+click to get right click functionality. It’s time to put that Ctrl+Click philosophy to rest.
Exposé and Screen corners
I’ve noticed a lot of switchers who can’t get rid of their Windows habit of minimizing windows. You can’t really blame them, considering they don’t know what Exposé is.
Exposé basically arranges all your windows on screen, so you can choose which one you want to work with. Most Macs have the keyboard shortcut set at F3, which throws up all your windows on screen. Press Ctrl+F3 and it will show only windows of the current application. Cmd+F3 shows your desktop.
However, instead of doing all of that, it’s best to use hot corners. In the Expose preferences, you can set each screen corner to perform any one of the Exposé actions. You can even spring up your dashboard or screen saver by moving your mouse to a hot corner.
Spring Loaded Everything
When you first use Finder, the lack of a ‘cut’ option seems limiting, to say the least. So you open multiple windows to ferry your files across. But you don’t need that. Mac OS X is spring loaded! Just hover over any folder, and it will drill down into that folder. Press the spacebar while dragging to do this instantly.
You could even drag an image from your Safari window, over to the Mac HD on your hard drive, spring open a new window, and then navigate to where you want to save that file. Once you’re done, it will automatically close any spring’ed folders.
You can even spring load applications. For instance, if you want to drag in some text in TextEdit, just hover over the icon in the Dock and press the spacebar. Once a new window opens, drop in your text.
Print to PDF
The Mac OS X quartz engine is based on PDF technology. I don’t know how that makes sense, but this has resulted in the Mac’s ability to export PDFs from any application that has a print command. Simply hit File » Print, and then in the resulting window click on the PDF button at the lower left corner. You can save as PDF, encrypt it, or email it without any hassles.
Alex speaks to you
With Leopard, Apple introduced a fantastic ‘voice’ named Alex. He’s a really great speaker. Polished, clear, and natural accent, and he even takes a breather between long sentences! You can set a shortcut for him to read out any bit of selected text, which is great if you’re having lunch and wanted to read that long article on the web at the same time. Get into System Preferences » Speech to fine tune the Alex experience.
Dictionary accessible
If you ever come across a word on the web that you don’t understand, simply hover over it and press Cmd+Ctrl+D. This will spring open a mini-dictionary, and you can even switch to the Thesaurus view. This works in most Cocoa apps including Safari, TextEdit, Pages (and not Carbon apps like Firefox, Word, Photoshop).
On the other hand, if you hear a word in a movie or podcast, just invoke spotlight, and enter the word there. You get a mini preview, and upon hitting enter it will spring open the dictionary app. Sparkly eh!
Grabbing Screenshots
Mac OS X allows you to take precise screenshots without any external utility.
- Command+Option+3 will grab the full screen and save the image on the desktop.
- Cmd+Opt+4 will allows you to select out an area using the target cursor.
- Press Spacebar after previous step to ‘snap’ an application window.
- Press Ctrl while doing any the above to copy image data to clipboard instead of creating a file on your desktop.
If you’re looking for a more robust solution, you could look at Skitch or LittleSnapper.
Getting info of Multiple Files
This is an odd one in the mix, but an important one nonetheless. If you select a bunch of files, and hit Cmd+I to perhaps know how much space they’re taking up, it opens up multiple Get Info windows, which is definitely not what you wanted. Instead, if you bring in option to the mix, as in Cmd+Opt+i, it will bring up a floating palette that will dynamically show you info of any files selected. It’s a better solution really.
There’s of course a lot more gems hidden within Mac OS X, but to me the above ones are most important. If you have any important ‘must know’ features of your Mac, do share.
