OS X secrets revealed

• Article 72 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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Although things like Quick View (press the spacebar when you’ve selected something) and Cover Flow in the Finder have made it less useful than before, Preview is still the number one way to view pictures and documents. But although most of its viewing functions have been absorbed elsewhere it can also edit documents.

So if you want to move pages around in a PDF (or between PDFs), open them up in Preview and drag them around in the sidebar. You highlight text (Tools>Mark Up), draw shapes and add notes and hyperlinks (Tools>Annotate), and view the pages in a slideshow (View>Slideshow). If you have favourite documents, you can also Add Bookmarks (Bookmarks>Add Bookmarks) so that Preview can open documents and then find the right page whenever you want. Preview also allows you to edit pictures. You can crop them (Tools>Crop), change their size and resolution (Tools>Adjust Size), flip them and rotate them (Tools), edit their colours and sharpness (Tools>Adjust Colour) before exporting them in a different file format (File>Save As). TextEdit does for text what Preview does pictures, but it has some tricks of its own. If you don’t have a copy of Word, it can open Word documents for you and save documents in Word format. If you want to turn a document into HTML for the web, all you have to do is save it as a web page (you can set your HTML preferences in the “Open and Save” preferences pane) in the Save dialog and TextEdit will do the rest.

PhotoBooth
Every Mac with a screen now comes equipped with a webcam – the iSight – embedded in the top. Just about every instant messaging program, including iChat and Skype but with the exception of the current version of Microsoft Messenger, can use it for web conferencing.

For still pictures, the best method is to use Photo Booth in your Applications folder. This allows you to take pictures with your webcam, as well as movies (if you click on the film strip icon), make slideshows of all your photos as well as apply special effects, including giving your pictures a pop art look.

Clicking on the arrows next to the Effects button will take you to two screens where you can appear set against different backgrounds, either ones provided by Apple or ones you provide yourself through drag and drop. It’s worth remembering that if you have a laptop, you should put it on a stable surface first, because Photo Booth will need to take a picture without you in it to remove the background from the picture.

1 User Accounts
A computer can be an expensive and potentially space-filling device. Most households are only likely to have one Mac, but if you don’t want everyone knowing what you’ve been up to, someone else would like their privacy or more trustingly, you like your Mac to run in the way you like it, with the desktop you want and the settings you like, user accounts are a great feature. You can create ordinary accounts as well as administrator accounts that have the rights to make big changes to your Mac and install software for everyone.

To create more than one account, go into your System Preferences, pick Accounts and create a new account in the same way you did when you first set up your Mac. It’s also a good idea to switch off automatic login at this point, to avoid anyone using the default account and so they don’t have to keep logging out as soon as you start up your Mac.

2 Parental Controls
Once you’ve set up a separate account for your kids, you can – if you want – decide what they can use on the computer and how they use it via the Parental Controls (available from System Preferences) settings for their account. This can make it easier for your child to use your Mac, by giving them a simpler Finder to use, but if you’re worried about what your they use it for, you can restrict access to particular applications on your Mac and web sites in Safari; hide the swear words in the OS X dictionary; limit who they can chat with and who they can email; limit how much time they spend on the Mac and when they’re allowed to go on it; and keep logs of what they’ve been browsing, what they’ve been using and who they’ve been chatting too.

3 Dashboard
A simple press of F12 or a click of Dashboard in the Dock or the Applications folder will reveal the exciting world of widgets. These are handy little applications that give you access to things like weather forecasts, your calendar, and your Address Book without the hassle of having to launch the bigger applications like iCal. But there are also thousands of widgets that you can download for free that perform an incredible range of tasks including games, file converters, webcam viewers, flight updates and more. And Dashboard comes with a built-in widget manager to make sure things don’t get too cluttered.

4 Automator
Automator lurks in the Applications folder and, as its name suggests, is designed to automate regular tasks. It’s a bit like sticking bits of Lego together: want to grab everything on your desktop that isn’t a folder, move it to another folder, hide the Dock, then start playing a track in iTunes? Then you can stick together all the parts of the process from the library of Automator functions – many applications now come with their own Automator actions as well – save the completed action and then every time you double-click or run it from a contextual menu or menu, your Mac will repeat that Lego collection.

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