You can quickly and temporarily clear away all of the windows on your Mac and view your Desktop with either the F11 key, or Command+F3. But if you have toggled the function keys, you may need to use the FN key as well. Check in System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Mission Control and look for Show Desktop to make sure it is enabled. Then you use this function, you can even drag and drop items on the Desktop before using the same keys to return to the windows.
If you have enabled the menu bar icon for volume in System Preferences, Sound, then you can also use this menu bar icon to quickly change the sound input and output devices. Just Option+click the menu bar icon and you’ll get a list if devices instead of a volume control slider.
With iOS 7, you can change Siri’s voice from female to male. Go into Settings, General, Siri, and you’ll find a Voice Gender setting.
Sometimes copying text from a web site or email can be tricky. You try to select some words, only to have the selection area snap to a larger piece of text, or some interaction on the web page deselect the text and do something else. But you don’t need to finish your selection to copy the text. While holding the mouse or trackpad down, you can use Command+C to copy the text you have highlighted so far, before you release the mouse and the web page messes up your selection.
Sometimes, you can’t even start to select text on a web page. But you can Control+Click the text to get the context menu, then hit Esc to exit the menu. The text may then be selected and you can now use Command+C to copy it.
Did you know that iTunes Store movie rentals are usually a dollar cheaper if you opt to rent standard definition instead of high definition. On Apple TV, go to Settings, iTunes Store settings and change the option for Video Resolution. With iOS and on your Mac in iTunes, you can tap the HD/SD button when viewing the movie’s information. Renting in SD also shortens the download time and takes up less space. Plus, if you are renting a romantic comedy, do you really need it in HD?
If you use a trackpad, either on a MacBook or with the Magic Trackpad, then you have two options for a standard click. The default is to press down on the trackpad, physically pushing it. But you can go into System Preferences, Trackpad, Point & Click and turn on Tap to click. This allows you to tap on the surface of the trackpad to click, without needing to physically push it down. Try Tap to click for a while to see if you like it better.
If you select an event in the Mac Calendar app, you can copy it with Command+C and then paste it into any text area, like an email, word processing document or text message. You’ll get a nicely formatted version of the event with the title, scheduled time, location, notes and other information.
If you are a developer, then you may occasionally want to open files that are normally hidden in folders. When using a standard Open File dialog box, you can make hidden files and folders appear by pressing Command+Shift+period.
When you strike the volume up or down key on your keyboard you get a “pop” sound as the volume changes. This can make matters worse when you are quickly trying to lower the volume of your Mac without disturbing anyone. You can turn these feedback sounds off by going to System Preferences, Sound, Sound Effects and switching off “Play feedback when volume is changed.”
If you use Command+Tab to quickly move between apps, then you should know there are two more keys that work with it. On your Mac, hold down Command and press Tab to move to the next app, but leave the Command key pressed while continuing to tap Tab to move forward. During this, you can also tap H to hide the selected app, or Q to quit the selected app. This makes cleaning up your working environment a snap.
Need to search multiple PDF files? Open them all at once in Preview. Then search and you’ll get results from all open documents.
One way to get the dictionary definition of a word is to use the Spotlight menu. Press Command+Space to activate it, then type the word, then press Command+D to skip the rest of the results and go right to the dictionary.
The Mountain Lion Emoji characters, discussed in episode 777 (http://macmost.com/emoji-characters-for-ios-and-mac.html), can also be used in the Finder. You can insert them into file or folder names to make the names unique and easier to spot in a crowded list.
You can change the controls in the QuickTime Player window to allow you to move through the video by controlling the playback speed. Just click and hold the Play/Pause button for a few seconds and you’ll see the controls change. Then move left or right to change the advance or rewind speed. You can move forward or back slowly, or up to 8x speed.
You can pop a Reminders list out of the main window by double-clicking on the list in the left sidebar. Then you can do this for multiple lists to view them at at the same time. You can even select more than one list, then double-click one of the selected ones to create a window that combines the items from those lists.
If you don’t like using iPhoto’s built-in email client, you can stick with using Mail to send photos. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest may be to simply select some photos, copy, and then paste into a message you are composing in Mail. You can also drag and drop from iPhoto into Mail.
Sometime you are typing in an app or web field and pressing Return will signal “done” and send the post. This happens on Facebook, Twitter and other places. If these situations, you can usually force the field to add a new line anyway by pressing Option+Return instead of just Return.
If you have quoting turned on in your Mail Composing preferences, it means that when you reply to a message the entire message will appear quoted in your composition window. But if you select a portion of that message first, then hit Reply, you will only get the selected portion quoted. This can make your replies much cleaner.
If you have a slow connection, or just want to talk to someone without the video part of FaceTime, you can simply hide the FaceTime app on your Mac (Command+H or FaceTime, Hide FaceTime). This will pause the video signal between you and the other party, but leave audio on. This uses less bandwidth and processing power. You can quickly switch back to video by unhiding the app.
Your basic message list includes the sender, subject, and the first few words of text. But you can also add a To/Bcc tag and the images stored in your Contacts app. Look for these settings in the Mail preferences under Viewing. You can also adjust the number of lines of text that will appear.
