The Inspector window is the key to accessing most advanced features of Pages. But you can sometimes find yourself rapidly switching between tabs in the Inspector. You can open up more than one Inspector window by holding down the option key when you click on a tab icon at the top of it. This would allow you, for instance, to see the Text Inspector and the Metrics Inspector at the same time. Or all Inspectors at once if you prefer.
If you are sending an email that has an image as an attachment, look at the bottom right corner of the message window in Mail before sending. If the image isn’t already small you will have options there to shrink the image before sending.
One of the most useful features of Apple Mail, often overlooked by many, is that you can reply with only a small selection of quoted text, rather than quoting the entire email. Before hitting the Reply button, simply select some text in the message. Then only that selected text will be quoted in the reply. This comes in handy when you are replying to a single question in a longer email.
In the Finder you can use File, New Finder Window or Command+N to open a new window. But what should appear in that new window? You can set that in Finder, Preferences. It can be your home folder, your Documents folder, your hard drive, or any folder you choose. So if you have a projects folder or something you access all the time, you may want to use that instead for the quickest access.
If you look in Safari’s preferences, under Bookmarks, you can check off “Include Bonjour” in one of the three bookmarks sections.For instance, you can turn it on for Collections so it shows up on the left when you Show All Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu. Many wifi printers and other devices will broadcast the location of their local admin web page using Bonjour. You can see these appear here and get quick access to their admin pages with information and controls.
So you know those icons that appear in the upper right part of your screen in the menu bar? If you want to re-arrange them, all you need to do is hold the Option and Command keys down, and then click and drag the icons left or right. You can also remove an icon by dragging it down and out of the menubar.
If you hold down the Option key and press the brightness keys (F1 and F2) it will bring up the System Preferences, Displays pane. You may need to hold down the “fn” key too, depending on your keyboard settings. You can also get the Expose & Spaces pane with Option+F3, and the Sound pane with the two volume keys (F11 and F12). Older keyboards will work slightly differently, so experiment.
In addition to setting the background image of the desktop, you can also set the background of a folder to an image or color. Open the folder in the Finder. Set the view to “as Icons.” Then choose View, Show View Options. You should see a Background setting which you can change from White to Color or Picture. Set it to Picture and drag and drop any image into the “Drag image here” area.
If you ever find yourself browsing over a slow connection, and you want to get to information quickly, try turning off images in Safari. Go to Safari Preferences, Appearance, and then uncheck “Display images when the page opens.”
Unfortunately, there is no way to then ask Safari to load the images. But you can leave the Appearance preferences window open, and then check the box and reload the page if you want to see the images. Or, Control+click on a specific image and open it in a new tab or window.
You can click on the wi-fi icon in the menu bar to see which wifi network you are connected to and other networks near you. But if you hold down the option key and then click, you can see other information as well, like the RSSI (signal strength), the more important Transmit Rate, and the channel you are using. Move the cursor to the other networks listed and you can see some of that information for each one. RSSI numbers, by the way, are measured backwards, with around -50 being excellent and -100 poor. But Transmit Rate is a better measurement of the connection.
If you use a MacBook and travel often, you may notice that your computer sticks to the time back at home. However, if you go into System Preferences, Date & Time, Time Zone there is an option to “Set time zone automatically using current location.” Turn this on and your MacBook’s time will adjust when you connect to a network in another time zone.
By default Mac OS X will hide filename extensions. But these can be useful. To reveal them, go to Finder Preferences, Advanced and look for “Show all filename extensions.” Now you should see the full filename for each file. This is also where you can turn off the warning you get when changing the file extension.
You can see more than just a file or folder name in the Finder’s icon view. With the desktop selected, or any Finder window showing icon view, choose View, Show View Options. Then check off Show Item Info. Folders now show the number of files in them. Some files show their size. Video and audio files show their duration. Images show their dimensions. This makes icon view much more useful.
In Safari you can scroll down a long page by simply using the spacebar. As long as no fields are selected for keyboard input, a press of the spacebar will scroll down one page. Press Shift+spacebar to scroll up.
Just about anywhere you type text on a Mac you can use autocomplete to type longer words faster. For instance, in TextEdit, type “disam” and then immediately press the Esc key. You’ll see a list of words that start with those letter. Select one to complete the word without typing.
If you use iTunes to play music on your Mac, you may want to see some basic controls on your screen without having iTunes’ huge window in the way. Try the Mini Player by choosing View, Switch to Mini Player. The keyboard shortcut is Shift+Command+M.
With a file in the Finder selected, you can press the spacebar to use Quick Look to view it in a window. But if you hold down the Option key and press the spacebar, you get a full screen Quick Look. Do that with a few images selected and you get a full screen slideshow.
Want to save an email message but not the huge attached file? You can select a single message or many messages in Mail and choose Message, Remove Attachments. This will get rid of any attached files but keep the text of the message. This comes in handy if you are using email to collaborate on documents and want to keep the correspondence, but not the old copies of the now-updated document.
While QuickTime X can’t export a video frame as an image, iPhoto can. Simply pause the video in iPhoto at the frame you want to export. Then choose File, Export. Switch from QuickTime to File Export and choose JPEG as the kind. Save the file. You’ll get file that looks like a video file, but simply rename it with the file extension .jpg and you’ll see that it is actually a jpeg file.
UPDATE: Seems this is not working anymore in the newer version (9.1.5) of iPhoto. You get the first frame of the video only.
You can open your trash folder by double-clicking on the trash icon in the Dock. Then you can select some of the files there and get a File, Put Back menu option. This will attempt to return the file to the location on your drive where it was before you put it in the trash. You can also right+click on a file and choose Put Back, or use Command+Delete. This will only work for files that have been thrown away using the Finder and where the original location is still available.
