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Mac 101: Preview's magnifying loupe
One thing I love about OS X is that no matter how long I use it, I'm often surprised by something that I didn't expect to find. That was the situation last week when i was using Apple's Preview app in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to resize an image, and found myself looking at a part of the image through a magnifying loupe. The loupe moves wherever your cursor is, and provides a nice magnified view of whatever you happen to be pointing at. While images might appear a bit pixelated within the confines of the loupe, it's a perfect way to get a closeup view of details that you might otherwise miss. I accidentally made the loupe appear when I was trying to press the "1" key on my keyboard and pressed the "grave accent / tilde" key instead. It's the key just above the tab key and just to the left of the "1" key on the US English keyboard. The loupe toggles on and off with each successive press of the key. Sure, there's not much earthshaking about this feature, but it is both useful and fun to show off to friends who think that there's nothing new to find in OS X.
Making the most of Preview.app for image editing
Inspired by Bear Grylls's (of Discovery's Man vs. Wild) "make the most out of your situation" scenarios, I present you with a tutorial for making the most out of Preview.app. While not as powerful as graphics editing powerhouse Adobe Photoshop, Preview can oftentimes get you from Point A to Point B -- and sometimes quicker too. Like Bear Grylls, you'll need to parachute out of a plane and into the house of a friend who doesn't have Photoshop -- just kidding. First, a little bit of background. Preview comes pre-installed on Mac OS X, and it's the default image viewer on the system. For PC-to-Mac converts, you could think of it as the Microsoft Paint of OS X; except that it can do a whole lot more. Besides the ability to open a host of image file formats (JPG, BMP, GIF, among them, and even PSD and AI files), Preview can also open PDF files natively. I actually prefer it over Adobe Acrobat for opening PDFs, as I find that they open much quicker using Preview. And like Adobe Reader, Preview contains advanced features, such as annotating.
