More Goodies in Apple's New Operating System By DAVID POGUE
In today's Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/circuits/25pogue.html , I reviewed Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." I noted that Apple claims to have added over 300 new features. Trouble is, if I tried to describe them all in my 1,280-word column, I'd have 4.3 words to describe and assess each one. I try to be concise, but that's ridiculous. So I focused on reviewing the features that Apple hypes the most heavily. But even Apple doesn't list every little change to this multi-gigabyte mass of code...and here and there, I found useful little tweaks that never get any press. Just as I did following my review of Windows Vista, I've decided to take advantage of this e-newsletter to mention a few of them. * Find the Menu. You're floundering in some program. You're sure there's a Page Numbering command in those menus somewhere. But there are 11 menus and 143 submenus, and you're losing patience. In Leopard, the Help menu has a search box that appears right in the menu bar. If you type "page numbering" (or whatever) into it, the search-results menu lists the names of any matching menu commands. It also opens that menu for you, and displays a big, blue, animated, floating arrow pointing to the command you wanted. You'd have to have your eyes closed to miss it. (This works in all programs.) * Three-keystroke application launcher. Spotlight, the Mac's "instant-search" feature, has always been a good way to find and open programs entirely from the keyboard. Press Command-Space bar to open the Search box, type the first couple letters of the program's name, wait for the search results, and hit Command-Enter, which opens the first item listed, which is usually the program you want. The trouble is the "wait for the search results" part. Spotlight is not instantaneous; if your drive is full, it can take five or six seconds for the results menu to finish building. But Spotlight has been rejiggered in Leopard. Now it displays the names of matching *programs* instantaneously, before Spotlight has built the rest of the menu of results. And a simple Enter is all that's necessary to open the first listed result (not Command-Enter). In all, finding and opening a certain program takes under one second. * Menu-bar calculator. The Spotlight menu (upper-right corner of the screen) is also a tiny pocket calculator now. Hit Command-Space, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. You don't even have to fire up the Calculator. * Dictionary lookups. The Spotlight menu also searches the Leopard dictionary now. If you type, for example, "schadenfreude" into the Spotlight box, the beginning of the actual definition appears right there in the menu. Click it to open Dictionary and read the full-blown entry. (In this example, that would be: "noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.") * Bypass the fan. As I noted in the column, I'm not totally sold on the Stacks feature. That's where you click a folder icon on your Dock, and rather than a complete menu of the folder's contents, you get a fan or a grid that shows an array of the actual icons inside. Trouble is, if there are more than 24 items in that folder (depending on your screen size), you get only a partial list. To see the rest of the contents, you have to click the icon that says, "35 more in Finder," which opens that folder's actual desktop window. There's no way to make the Dock show the complete list of folder contents anymore; nor can you stick your hard drive's icon in the Dock and have complete, drill-down, hierarchical access to your entire computer, as you could before. But here's a small consolation: if you Command-click a folder on the Dock, you go directly to the Finder window that it represents, bypassing the fan or the grid altogether. * Grid spacing. Hey, grid spacing is back! A new slider lets you control the tightness of the icon grid spacing in a window (or in all windows). (Actually, it's not *that* new; the old Mac OS 9 had it.) * Telltale icons. A new option in Leopard lets every icon appear as a tiny preview of what's in it. You don't see just a generic blue Word icon with a little W in the corner; the icon is now a thumbnail of page 1 of the actual document. Here's a typical Apple grace note: You can tell just by looking at a PDF file's icon whether it's longer than one page. The icon for a one-page PDF has a curled upper-right corner. But on a multi-page PDF, only the first page's corner curls down. And in the gap it reveals, you can see a tiny bit of the *actual* page 2 showing. Coming in Mac OS X 10.6 "Ocelot:" You'll be able to turn the pages of that PDF and read the whole thing right on the icon. (That's a joke.) * Three more Time Machines. In the column today, I wrote at length about Time Machine, a truly innovative (and successful) approach to automated backup. I didn't have room to mention, though, that three of Apple's basic programs also have Time Machine built in: iPhoto (for finding lost photos), Address Book (for accidentally deleted contacts), and Mail (recovering deleted e-mail). In other words, if you want to recover certain photos, addresses or email messages that have been deleted, you start by opening iPhoto, Address Book, or Mail. Then click the Time Machine icon on the Dock. You enter the starry, animated, back-in-time recovery mode that I described. But now, each time you click the Jump Back arrow, the window before you changes to reveal the way it looked the last time your photo library, address book file, or e-mail stash changed. You can also drag through the timeline on the right if you remember the date when things went wrong. At this point, you can select individual photos (or photo albums), address book entries, or e-mail messages that you want to recover. When you click the Restore button, you return to the normal Mac OS X world, where those photos, addresses or messages are now reinstated. * iChat. As I noted, iChat, the audio/video/typed chat program, has received an enormous upgrade in Leopard. Here's a little tweak that nobody ever mentions: the preference setting called "Watch for my name in incoming messages." It alerts you any time anyone, in any of the open chats, types your name, even if you're doing something else on the Mac. (As in, "David, are you there? David!? DAVID!!") http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/circuits/25pogue-email.html?8cir&emc=cir -- Jonnie Appleseed With His Hands-On Technolog(eye)s Reducing Technology's disabilities, one byte at a time.
