Go into your Applications folder and drag and drop an application on to Preview. Preview will open the app and show you all sorts of graphs stored within: icons, screens, samples, etc. A great way to get icons and buttons for tutorials or prototypes.
In Mountain Lion you can back up to more than Time Machine drive. Go to System Preferences, Time Machine, and set a new drive. You will be able to use the new one in addition to the existing one. If both are connected, backups alternate between each. If only one is connected, it uses that every hour. This way you can have a Time Machine backup for your MacBook at work and at home.
In Mountain Lion, the Dashboard gets a little iOS-like update. The active widgets look the same, but if you go to add a new widget you are taken to an iOS-app-like screen. You can re-arrange the widget icons and even drag and drop them on to each other to create folders.
File, Save As was replaced by Duplicate in Apple apps under Lion. With Mountain Lion you can use Save As once again by holding down the Option key while choosing the File menu. Duplicate changes to Save As and works as it did before Lion.
You can use Mission Control to quickly jump to recent documents from within an app. For instance, if you are in Pages you can press F10 (or whatever keyboard shortcut you have set for Mission Control application windows) and you’ll see all of the open windows side-by-side, plus recent documents in a row at the bottom of the screen. Click one to open it.
When you have a file open in an application like Preview you will see the name of the file as the title of that document window. Sometimes you will also see an icon to the left of that title. That is the proxy icon. You can drag and drop that icon like you can the real file. So, for instance, if you are viewing an image in Preview, you can drag and drop that icon from the title bar onto a different app in the Dock to open it in that app.
You can use the F-keys on your keyboard (sometimes with the FN key) to adjust volume and brightness. But did you know that you can hold down Option and Shift while doing that to move in smaller increments?
Control+click or right click on any app in your Dock. Go to the Options submenu. Here you can select Open At Login. This will mark the app as something to run when you start up. You can also repeat the selection to turn it off. This is a handy way to set some apps to start automatically without having to mess with your Login Items in System Preferences.
If you are looking to clean up your Address Books/Contacts App, you can use the Card, Merge Selected Cards menu command to merge two or more contacts. You can use Look For Duplicates in the same menu, but that doesn’t give you as much control as you may want. It is usually better to take the time to look through your contacts and merge ones that you know belong together.
Do you drag and drop files to the trash in the Dock? A power user tip is to select a file and use Command+Delete to move the selected files to the trash.
There are several ways to access menu bar items with the keyboard. Here is one you may not know about. Press Command+Shift+?. This gives you access to the menu bar’s help field. Then type part of the name of the command. For instance, in Safari you can type “New.” When the list of help items appears, the menu choice is usually the first one. Use the down arrow to get to it. Then Return to activate that menu item.
You can monitor your system using the Activity Monitor application in your Applications/Utilities folder. In that app you can go to View, Dock Icon and change the way the icon appears. It can show your CPU, memory, disk or network usage in a little graph in the icon. So then you can hide the app itself, but still keep tabs on your system.
When you’ve got a lot going on and you need to get to a file on your Desktop, there is a quick way to do it. Press F11 (fn+F11 depending on your keyboard settings) and all of the windows for all of your apps will clear off to the side, giving you access to your Desktop files. You can then start a drag and drop movement, press F11 again in the middle of the drag, and your windows will all come screaming back, ready to receive the file.
Did you know you can put Finder icon labels to the right of the icon instead of under it? Just select any Finder window that is using icon view — this includes the Desktop. Then choose View, Show View Options. Change the Label Position from Bottom to Right.
If you want to turn off your screen fast you can activate display sleep with a keyboard combination. Shift+Control+Eject will do it. If you have a MacBook Air without an eject key, the power key in the upper right corner will work. Then press any key to turn the screen back on.
Want to know what the official name of your Mac is? In Lion, go to the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. Then click on More Info. This launches System Information. With the overview tab selected, the name of your Mac is at the top. Examples: “Mac Pro, Early 2008,” “MacBook Air, 11-inch, Mid 2011” and “iMac, 21.5-inch, Mid 2011.” This name and date system can be used to identify your Mac when describing trouble, checking for compatibility, or reselling.
With a Finder window selected, choose View, Customize Toolbar. Then drag a Path button to your Finder’s toolbar. This lets you quickly jump to the parent folder or any folder above the current one. You can do the same thing by using Control or Command and clicking on the Finder’s title bar, but a Path button may be easier for some to use.
If you want to shift an iCal event slightly, you can do so by selecting it and using Control+Up or Control+Down to move the start time in 15 minute increments, assuming you are in the daily or weekly view mode. Using Control+Shift+Up or Down will move the end time for the event. If you are in monthly view, then the event is moved by a whole week.
When you are visiting a web page in Safari, you can jump up to the subdirectory or web site home page by Command+clicking the title bar. Then select the web page to jump to.
You can use the volume controls on your keyboard to change the volume in large steps. You may need to hold down the FN key to do this, depending on your keyboard settings. But you can also hold down the Shift and Option keys and then the volume adjustments happen in much finer steps.
