Cool things to do on Mac
Dictionary
With Dictionary as a part of Mac OS X (10.4) there is a feature that not too many Mac users know about. When in any of the Cocoa (Mac native) applications you can hover your mouse above the word and press Ctrl-Cmd-D on your keyboard. You will get the Dictionary description for that word. Just move your mouse over to any other word and the Dictionary description for that word is displayed instantly. And no, you don’t need to have Dictionary open at all.
A few examples of applications where this works are; Safari, Mail.app, MacJournal, TextEdit, Text Wrangler, Comic Life, iWeb. Unfortunately it doesn’t work with any of the Mozilla applications, including Firefox, Camino and Flock.
Invert screen
Another function that not too many Mac users know is “Invert screen”. Just press Ctrl-Option-Cmd-8 on your keyboard and see your Mac invert it’s colours.
This would be funny if you go to the Apple shop and do it so you can watch salesperson freaks out.
Slow motion
When you want to minimise your window you simply click on yellow button on top left corner of the window. The window quickly goes down to the right end of your dock using either scaled or genie effect.
But, if you hold down shift key while clicking the yellow button the window will minimise in slow motion, approximately five times slower than normal speed.
Text clipping
I love telling this to my friends, Windows users. Not that they’re my friends because they use windows, but because they are, well… friends. They use Windows because life is sometimes tough. I ask them how would they save a piece of text from the document they are viewving at the moment, for example a web page.
Their answer is usually something like: “Oh easy. You select the text, right click and copy. Then you go to desktop, right click and select New | Text file, give the file some name and click away. Now you double click the file to open it, paste the text in there and save it. Simple, innit?”
Then I show them how I do it on Mac. I select text, click it and drag to desktop and that’s it. Oh, there is one more thing, my friend’s jaw that drops.
If you want to include this text somewhere, say an email, you simply click the file on desktop and drag it into your composed email. Simple as that.
Screen capturing
This is my favourite of the Mac goodies. There are a few ways to capture screen on Mac.
Firstly, you can capture the whole screen. Simply press Cmd-Shift-3 on your keyboard and the screen will be captured in a PNG file and saved on your desktop as something like Picture 1.png
You can also capture a selection, just press Cmd-Shift-4 on your keyboard and you will see a small target-like selector on your screen.
Simply select the area you want to capture and let go, the file will be saved on your desktop, again something like Picture 1.png
And finally you can capture the active window. Simply follow the steps above and once you see the selector, press space bar and you will get a camera icon. Hover the camera above any window and the window will get the gray overlay indicating it’s in hot-sopt. Click on it and the window will be captured.
And again, the file will be safely placed on your desktop as … good guess, Photo 1.png
