mac 101
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Mac 101: Zoom and pan images in Quick Look
Is your laptop not among those that can do Multi-touch? Don't feel badly, you can replicate those great features!Well, kind of. First, open an image with Quick Look. Next, hold down the Option key while performing a two-finger scroll. The image zooms in and out! Finally, let go of the Option key but keep your fingers in place on your trackpad. The cursor turns into a four-point directional, and then you can pan the image within the Quick Look window.This also works with a mouse and scrollwheel.Thanks, Max!
Mac 101: fine tune your Mac's volume
More Mac 101, tips for Mac beginners. Sure, you can use the volume key on your MacBook or Apple keyboard to do quick volume changes, but that doesn't adjust the volume that precisely. If you want to fine tune your volume, you have to either open System Preferences or click on the volume icon in the menu bar. However, you can also tweak the volume by holding down the option + shift keys and tapping the volume up/down keys on your keyboard. Note that this is a Leopard-only trick, as pointed out by our commenters.As an additional note, you can also hold down the shift button while pressing the volume keys to mute the "pop" that you hear when pressing the volume key. If you want to permanently silence the volume-adjust beeping, uncheck "Play feedback when volume is changed" in the Sound Effects preference pane and it won't bother you again (helpful for podcasting or other situations when you might need to adjust your volume on the fly).[via Tekzilla]
Mac 101: curing multiple-monitor mixups with Detect Displays
More Mac 101, tips for the Mac beginner in you. Lucky dual-monitor users, rejoice -- with that second display on your desk, you're bound to be the productivity envy of the entire office. Just one little problem, though: sometimes your Mac has trouble recognizing that extra real estate, and rebooting every time your resolutions get munged is beginning to get old.Relax, and check out your mini-menu for monitors over there in the menu bar. See "Detect Displays?" That's your buddy, right there -- it will tell your Mac to recheck the connected monitors and adjust resolutions as needed. Note the model number of the external display shown; if everything's connected as it should be, your Mac should autosense the type and capabilities of the display without any intervention.For an even quicker trigger on display detection, try Cmd-F2 (brightness up) on your built-in laptop keyboard. Cmd-F1 will toggle display mirroring, also handy in a pinch.There are several ways other ways to get external displays to behave; the oldest, for laptop users, is to sleep the machine and wake it back up -- this usually triggers a display detection when all else fails. There's also a Detect Displays button in the Displays preference pane.Also, to answer a reader question from the comments: it's easy to specify which display acts as the primary monitor in a dual-display setup: just drag the teensy proxy menubar from one display to the other, and your menus, drive icons etc. will follow.
Mac 101: get a floating clock on your screen saver
Welcome, once again, to Mac 101, TUAW's continuing series focusing on tips and tricks useful to new Mac users. Mac veterans might learn a thing or two along the way, but these tips are aimed squarely at our new Mac friends.Today's tip is all about knowing what time it is. If you're running Leopard you can have your Mac display the time when the screensaver is running.Simply do the following: Launch System Preferences Click on 'Desktop & Screen Saver' in the 'Personal' row Choose 'Screen Saver' You'll then see the options to the right. All you have to do is click 'Show with clock' and a clock appears on your screen saver. This clock can be overlaid onto any screen saver that is included with OS X, as well as those made by 3rd parties. Pretty neat, huh?You can't actually customize the look of the clock, but if you're looking for some customization (or you're not running Leopard yet) check out the Big Time screen saver. It lets you change the look of the clock displayed, as well as set alarms though you can't overlay the Big Time clock screen saver onto other screen savers.Read on to see what the clock looks like on the Arabesque screen saver.
Mac 101: Restore a Safari window
For those of you that use tabbed browsing in Safari, you know how frustrating it can be when you accidentally close a window full of tabs. Well, if you are using Safari 3 you can get that window back, along with all of the tabs. When you accidentally close a window full of tabs, just click "History" in the menu bar and select "Reopen Last Closed Window." You can also use "Reopen All Windows From Last Session" if you accidentally closed Safari and need to get all of your windows and tabs back after re-launching Safari.
Mac 101: Reclaim your function keys
There are a handful of things I miss from OS 9, like programmable function keys (and Extension conflicts. I kid.). Just like The Apple Menu and the Happy Mac, fully customizable function keys were killed by Apple's big cats. However, we're not at a loss. The folks at Bitbox have described the simple steps needed to get some of that old flexibility back. First, launch system preferences and click the "Keyboard" tab. Next, select the "Use all F1, F2 etc. keys as standard function keys" option.Now, you can use your function keys as nature intended. Their specialty functions are still available, too (like volume and brightness); just hold down the "fn" key while hitting the key of your choice.
Mac 101: Apple's product guide
Back to basics with Mac 101, our ongoing series of posts aimed at new Mac users. If you've got a hankering for news about the latest Mac-compatible products, you've got plenty of places to look (including, naturally, right here). What if you've got a specific product need, something obscure, small-audience or somewhat vintage? You can always hit the search engines or check our archives, but there's a one-stop shop for Mac-compatible products that doesn't always get top billing: Apple's Macintosh Product Guide, tucked away at guide.apple.com.This venerable database of Mac apps and hardware (it's under the Developer heading on Apple's site nav, and judging by the 'lasso' URLs it may run off a FileMaker back-end-- way to support the home team!) lists thousands of products, and it's got separate categories for iPod and iPhone accessories. Starting off with the guide is a great idea if you need to find a vertical-market or niche app; you'll probably come up with several good choices.
Mac 101: Boot options
We've had some questions recently on Ask TUAW about boot options so I thought it would make for a good Mac 101. Obviously, Boot Camp has brought dual-booting to the fore on the Mac platform, but there are actually a variety of boot time options built into your Mac which allow you to interact with it to some degree before loading the OS. The most important of these, of course, is choosing the boot partition and this is easily done by holding down the option (???) key after restarting the machine. This will bring up a menu of all bootable volumes (such as a Windows Boot Camp partition), including mounted external USB and FireWire drives as well as optical discs. However, there are more handy shortcuts as well: You can force OS X to boot from a mounted optical disc by holding down the C key. Holding down the T key will put that Mac into FireWire Target disk mode, which will allow another Mac to access its hard drive over a FireWire cable as if it were an external hard drive. Holding down the Shift key will boot into Safe Mode, which can be very useful if your Mac is misbehaving. Apple has a nice list of a few more boot time key combos that are worth keeping in mind.
Mac 101: Keyboard text selection
For someone who loves keyboard launchers like Quicksilver, I have to confess an embarrassing deficiency in my keyboard competency: I've never really learned to select text with the keyboard. So I thought the topic would make for a nice beginning of the year Mac 101. The keyboard text selection commands on the Mac are basically standard. To select text you hold down the SHIFT key and then use the arrow keys or HOME, END, PAGEUP, and PAGEDOWN. The left/right arrow keys (plus SHIFT) will increase the selection one character in that direction, if you hold down the OPTION (???) key the left/right arrows will select an entire word in that direction, and if you hold down the ??? key the left/right arrows will select to the beginning or end of the line. The up/down arrow keys (plus SHIFT) will select a full line up or down; with the OPTION key held down the up/down arrows will select a paragraph. The HOME key (plus SHIFT) will select all the text to the beginning of the document and the END key (plus SHIFT) will select all the text to the end of the document. Finally, the PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN keys (plus SHIFT) will select a full "page" up or down.Basically the upshot is this: hold down the SHIFT key while in a text field and it will shift to text selection. Also, if you use the keyboard shortcuts without the SHIFT key they will move the cursor without selecting text. If you play around with and internalize these commands I think you'll find that keyboard text selection is often faster than moving your hand to the mouse. These commands can be really handy if you're selecting text in very small boxes where you can't see much (e.g. long names in open and save dialog sheets). One proviso: these shortcuts should work in all Cocoa applications, but they may not all work in non-Cocoa ones.
Mac 101: Photo Booth tricks
I've got a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, so Photo Booth is a big hit in my house. They love to mug for the camera and send silly snapshot to grandma and grandpa. I've used it quite a bit, and thought I knew all the tricks.This morning, Macsupport has pointed out a few new ones. First, you can disable the countdown if you want to snap a photo immediately by Option-clicking the shutter button. Shift-click to disable the flash and finally press both the option and shift key to immediately snap a photo with no flash.These tricks seem to be unique to Leopard.
Mac 101: Drag and drop in the Application Switcher
We've talked previously about the wonders of the Application Switcher, the translucent bar that comes up when you hit ???-Tab. However, thanks to Macworld I realized today that the Leopard version adds a great feature that should have been there a long time ago: drag and drop. In Leopard the application icons in the Application Switcher are live. This means you can grab a file in the Finder, hit ???-Tab, and drop the file on the running application of your choice. So, for instance, you can easily drop a plist on a text editor instead of using the default plist editor. In previous versions of OS X you needed LiteSwitch X ($14.95) to achieve the same thing (though it's true that LiteSwitch X still has a few tricks up its sleeve that the default Application Switcher is missing).
Mac 101: Using Quick Look
So far as I can tell, practically everybody loves Leopard's Quick Look previewer. For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd share a few tips about using Quick Look. First is nice little tip from Mac OS X Hints about zooming in Quick Look. If you invoke Quick Look with the spacebar you can actually zoom in on the image in a couple of ways. You can hold down the option key and use your mouse's scrollwheel/ball (or two-finder scrolling on a touchpad) to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in by holding down the option key and clicking on the image, or zoom out by holding shift-option. While zoomed in you can also click and drag to pan the image. Strangely, the same shortcuts don't work with PDFs, but you can still zoom in and out with ??? + and ??? - (command plus/minus) with the Quick Look HUD selected. The second is that you can use Quick Look with more than one file at a time. So if you select several files in the Finder by command-clicking and then invoke Quick Look with the spacebar, you can scroll between the images with the arrow keys. However, there's also a nifty index sheet icon at the bottom that will bring up a kind of contact sheet with the selected files (as above). Finally, I know some folks had complained that the slideshow option has disappeared from the Finder's contextual menu. But if you select a group of files in the Finder and then invoke Quick Look you'll also see a play button that runs a slideshow in the Quick Look HUD.
Mac 101: Screen rotation
For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd draw your attention to a feature of the Displays tab of the System Preferences that only appears on external monitors: Rotate. If you plug in an external monitor to your Mac you should see that you have the option to rotate the display by 90 degree increments (clockwise). Now why would you want to do this? Well, if like me you have an external widescreen display, sometimes it's actually more handy to use it vertically instead of horizontally. I do this because I work entirely on the main (24") display and use the external (20") for showing my email, iTunes, etc. On my desk, I feel like this is a more efficient allocation of pixels. You can see a picture of my setup after the jump.
Mac 101: Enlarging Finder Previews
Leopard may be just around the corner but we're not ignoring you readers who aren't ready to upgrade. Here's a quick tip for those of you who plan on staying in Tiger land. Sometimes you want to view pictures by previewing them directly in Finder. To automatically view the largest possible preview, just double-tap the column resizing handle at the bottom right of the preview image. This automatically maximizes the picture without affecting your other columns.
Mac 101: Using the Up Arrow in Finder
It's no surprise to most Mac users that you can use arrow keys to navigate through Finder windows. Arrow-key presses work in all three window styles: icon view, list view and column view. What many new Mac users don't realize though is that there are Command versions of these arrow keys. When viewing folders using icon view or list view, both Command-Up-arrow and Command-Down-arrow play a special role. Command-Up-arrow moves you up to the parent folder of the currently-displayed folder. So if you are in, say, /Users/ericasadun/Pictures/Family, Command-Up-arrow would take you to /Users/ericasadun/Pictures. Press Command-Up-arrow again and you move to /Users/ericasadun. You can check your current folder by command-clicking the icon at the top of the folder window. Command-Down-arrow only works when the selected item is a folder, and, like Command-Up-arrow, only in icon and list views. Pressing Command-Down-arrow opens and selects the current folder. So it essentially does the opposite of Command-Up-arrow. It moves you further down in the folder hierarchy as opposed to Command-Up-arrow which moves you up the folder tree. These are useful shortcuts to have at hand when you prefer to use the keyboard to navigate through your files rather than the mouse.
Mac 101: How to go Home
More Mac 101, the TUAW answer to the unasked questions of novice Mac users. You've certainly seen the little house in your windows, but do you know who lives there? You do -- at least, your stuff does, and if Carlin said it that's enough for me.Unlike Mac OS 9, which pretty much let you put your files and programs wherever you wanted as long as you left System and Finder inside the System Folder, Mac OS X has certain expectations regarding paths, the hierarchy of folders leading to a particular spot on your startup disk. The distinction between your personal files -- your documents, music, email, bookmarks, preferences & settings -- and everything else that helps your computer run can be stated simply: if it's in your Home folder, it's "your stuff," and if it's outside your Home folder, it's universal to the computer (or it belongs to your spouse/kids/etc.).To get to your Home folder quickly, you can click the house icon in the sidebar of any Finder window; choose "Home" from the Go menu in the Finder, or hit Cmd-Shift-H. Once there you'll notice a few folders, including Documents, Desktop and Library. You may think "I don't like books. Why do I need a whole folder for a Library?" and be tempted to tuck it away in a "Misc" or "Stuff To Throw Out" folder. Don't be surprised, if you do, that you can no longer log into your computer -- Library has to stay exactly where it is, since it contains all your preferences and application settings. Likewise, there are some folders in Documents that have to stay put, particularly (if you use Microsoft Office) the Microsoft User Data folder.Other than the preconfigured folders, your Home folder is pretty much yours to manage as you choose; you aren't limited to storing documents in Documents. Need a folder for Projects? Go ahead and make one (Cmd-Shift-N for a new folder), just don't get funky with the original items unless you know what you're doing.One more tip on home folders: sometimes you'll see the notation "~/Desktop" or something similar in documentation for software, telling you where files will be installed. That "~" (it's called a tilde) is UNIX shorthand for the active user's home folder -- it expands to "/Users/myname/" when used in the Terminal, and whenever you see it you should assume it's talking about the place for your stuff.
Mac 101: Keychain
The Keychain on your Mac is a little application buried in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder. I say buried because I think Keychain is sadly neglected by most users. Here are some things you can do with it: Save web page passwords Save login info (aside from websites, like your IM logins) Save protected notes (secret stuff) This 101 will be a little longer than usual, so I can show you how to use Keychain to store passwords and other secret things. Later, in our Secure Your Mac series, we'll talk about making a good password so all these things stay private. Full details on how to easily use Keychain after the jump.
Mac 101: change keyboard modifier keys with a Windows keyboard
You may recall that one of Apple's slogans when the Mac mini was released was BYOKM-bring your own keyboard and mouse. Well a lot of those keyboards will of course be Windows keyboards, and while they work fine on a Mac, there's one particularly annoying thing. For some reason the keyboard Windows key is mapped to the Mac Command key and the keyboard Alt key is mapped to the Mac Alt or option key. The reason this is a problem is that on a Windows keyboard the Alt key is right next to the spacebar (where the Command key is on a Mac keyboard). So if, like me, your keyboard shortcut muscle memory is to the key next to the spacebar then all your shortcuts get messed up on a Windows keyboard. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this problem in the Keyboard tab of the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane. There if you click on the "Modifier Keys..." button you'll be taken to a dialog where you can easily remap the keys. So to make a Windows keyboard work like a Mac keyboard just change the option key to the command key and the command key to the option key as follows:
Mac 101: Shift + F5 Autocomplete
Reader Goobi wrote in reminding us of this neat little trick which I thought would make a great Mac 101. As you know OS X has a system-wide spell checker. What Goobi reminded us about is that you can access that spell checker to autocomplete words in any Cocoa text field (this only work in Cocoa applications). All you have to do is type a few letters and then hit Shift + F5. This will generate a drop-down list with all the words in the spell check dictionary that start with those letters.A great way to use this is for words that you have a hard time remembering how to spell. For example, I can never remember how to render 'bourgeois' correctly. So here I just type in the first four letters, hit Shift + F5, then scroll down.
Mac 101: Reset your Mac OS X password
We've all done this.* It's time to install something or run Software Update, but first we've got to enter our password. What was it again? Oops.You can reset your password with the CD (or DVD) that came with your Mac, but if you don't have it, try this tip from Hackszine. Restart your machine while holding down the Command Key (or "Apple Key") and the "S" key. This will start your Mac up in "Single User Mode."Now it's command line time.** Don't worry, it's just three lines: #sh /etc/rc #passwd yourusername #reboot Ta-dah! You may return to what you were originally doing. Just write that new password down first.*Well, not us, but, you know...our "friend."[Via Lifehacker]**Update: this post has raised some understandable security concerns among our readers. Our own Mike Rose had this to say:"Not this caveat, from a commenter at Hackazine: if you have a FileVault-protected home directory, you cannot use this hack. Changing your password from the command line will render your home directory completely inaccessible, probably permanently."
