OS X secrets revealed

• Article 72 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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The contextual menu for the Dock reveals many options. You can change what side of the screen it’s on, make it hide itself when it’s not use and turn magnification on and off. If you add things to the Dock and open their contextual menus, you’ll also get a wealth of options – although they’re the same ones you’ll get if you just click and hold down the mouse button. Adding folders like the Applications folder or the Downloads folder to get easy access to them is an obvious must, particularly if you then use the contextual menus to change what happens if you click on them: setting a folder full of items to display as a ‘List’ will work better than setting it to a fan or a grid, which will spread their contents over your desktop, but will quickly run out of space. You can also change how it displays in the Dock: a folder set to display as a stack will show the first item in it on top

Finding things with Spotlight
There are a number of ways to find items that you’re looking for on your Mac but can’t quite put a finger on. In the top-right hand corner of the screen is a magnifying glass. Clicking on it reveals a search box, into which you can type the text you’re looking for - it can be part of a filename or part of a file itself – and your Mac will find everything that matches your search in just a few seconds. Click on a result to open it, or hold down the alt/option key while you’re doing it to reveal it in the Finder instead. The Show All entry at the top will let you see a complete list of results if they won’t all fit in. You can also customise what shows up in searches using the Spotlight System Preferences pane, including files you don’t want to appear and the order you want files to be listed. Spotlight doesn’t just search file names - it also searches content and metadata for matches

Special Finder folders

As well as standard folders for sorting files, the Finder has two special kinds of folders: Burn folders and Smart Folders, both accessible from the File menu. Burn folders allow you to create a CD or DVD, simply by dragging files into the burn folder and then clicking Burn when the CD is ready to make. Smart Folders let you create folders whose contents are based on rules. So if you want a folder of all your movies, whether they’re in your Movies folder or anywhere else on your hard drive, all you need to do is create a Smart Folder, click on the + sign to create a new rule then pick “Kind” is “Movies” from the list of rules available (there are many others), before clicking Save. You can save the folder anywhere and you can also let it appear in your Finder windows sidebar using the “Add to sidebar” checkbox. Smart folders let you create folders full of files picked according to rules

Top 10 Helper Apps
Apple provides dozens of programs with every Mac. The most obvious and most powerful of these are iLife, Mail and iCal. However, there are plenty of other useful applications on your Mac with some impressive features designed to help you.

Image Capture seems like a very simple and actually quite redundant program at first. Who needs Image Capture when they have iPhoto? Yet Image Capture is a very powerful, almost pro-grade program for getting images from various devices – not just cameras but also scanners – and then manipulating them, colour correcting them, giving them custom icons in the Finder, copying pictures back to the camera and even setting its date and time. Your device needn’t even be connected to your computer via a USB cable: you can also use Image Capture to share your devices on a network or over the Internet and then use them on another computer. You can even connect a camera to your computer at home, connect to your Mac over the web then view your home through the camera and take pictures.

At first, Stickies looks a little useless. Okay, it simulates Post-It notes so you can leave messages to yourself to remind you to do things. But as soon as you click out of it – woah, the Post-Its are covered up by other windows and you practically need a Post-It to remind yourself to look at your stickies. Fortunately, if you click on a sticky note, you can make it stay on top by turning it into a ‘floating window’ using the Note menu, which you can also use to make this the default option for stickies. If a floating sticky blocks your view, you can still have it float on top but ‘rolled up’ so you can only see its title, by double-clicking on the bar at the top. And if that still doesn’t make Stickies sound helpful, think of how useful having multiple clipboards might be – you can copy and paste virtually anything into a sticky.

Dictionary does pretty much what it says on the tin at first – it’s a dictionary, and an American one by default. This, at least, you can change it to use British pronunciations using its Preferences option. But it’s also a thesaurus, as well as a direct link to Wikipedia – it even does a good job of reformatting Wikipedia pages to make them more aesthetically pleasing.

Disk Utility, lurking in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder, is normally the first port of call if there’s a problem with your Mac’s disks or you need to format or partition a new disk. However, it also provides a great way to back up disks to a single file and to keep secrets if you don’t want to go the whole hog of FileVault and encrypt your home folder.

QuickTime Player is the obvious first place to look when you want at a video. But if you register it and upgrade to QuickTime Pro through System Preferences QuickTime pane, you get a whole slew of features for editing videos. You can copy and paste them, trim them, change the audio tracks, change their shapes and convert them to other formats. You also get functions for recording audio and video.

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