OS X secrets revealed

• Article 72 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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Hard to believe it but OS X is eight years old and is now on version 10.5 or Leopard. There have been six different OS Xs, before that, including Tiger, Panther, Puma and Cheetah, and before that, of course, there were nine previous versions of the Mac OS. So, as you can imagine, over the years, Apple has added hundreds and hundreds of useful features to its operating system, designed to make our lives easier.

The trouble is, you can’t just give everyone a great big list of features on their screens and say, “Go on. Use them.” That would be impractical to say the least. Instead, Apple has made simplicity and ease-of-use its hallmark and that inevitably has meant hiding some things away. The result? There may be a whole loads of things your Mac could be helping you with that you don’t know about.

Over the next few pages, we’re going to look at the best – and best hidden – features of Leopard, and how to use them. Since most of your Mac life is probably lived in the Finder and the Dock, we’ll run you through some top tricks to make you more productive there. We’ll then take you through some of the applications that Apple has given us but we don’t often have the time to explore, despite their hidden talents. Then finally, we’ll look at some of the more advanced features of OS X that can speed things up and enhance your Mac, not just for you but for everyone who uses it.

No matter what applications you run, the Dock, your desktop, and the Finder unite every Mac user. They’re what we all use every day and over the years, Apple has made them more and more powerful.   

For most users, the Desktop is where they store everything they use frequently, so being able to see it is very important. Exposé (usually activated by launching Exposé in the Applications folder or through the keyboard shortcuts configured in the System Preferences pane “Exposé & Spaces”) allows you to page through the windows of all the applications or just your current application, but it also moves all the windows out the way so you can get to the desktop easily.

Spaces also allows you to expand your desktop into multiple areas. Activate Spaces in the Applications folder or by pressing F8 and you can switch between these areas, dragging files and folders to these separate spaces to keep them organised for particular activities, for example; alternatively, once you’ve activated spaces, you can simply drag the file or folder to a corner of the screen and wait - if there’s a Space next to the current one on that side of the screen, OS X will switch to the new one.

Even with Spaces to help, finding files can be tricky if you have many of them. Finder view options (View>Show View Options) lets you change the icon size of files in any folder, including the desktop, change the spacing between them, and get them to snap to a grid arranged by date, name or type of file. You can also sort by label, since you can give any file a coloured label using the bottom of the Finder’s Edit menu.

The Edit menu also gives you a few useful other functions: the ability to compress files and folders into zip archives; the ability to duplicate anything; the ability to create ‘aliases’ of files and folders, which act as proxies for operations like double-clicking and opening, that you can drag around and store in more convenient or useful locations; ‘Show Original’ which reveals which file an alias is pointing to; you can add files, folders and other objects to sidebars in windows if they’ve been selected; ‘Get Info’ on a file or folder to find out more about it; and ‘Open with’ so you can choose which program will open a file you’ve selected.

What appears in a Finder window is also customisable. There is a path bar available (View>Show Path Bar) to show you where a file is in your hard drive using breadcrumbs. You can hide both the toolbar and the sidebar by clicking in the lozenge in the top right-hand corner, and the toolbar is even more customisable than the sidebar: you can set it to use text as well as icons or just text; and you can change or reorder the icons that appear in the toolbar.

The key to this is the “contextual menu”, which you can get hold of by holding down the Ctrl key when you press click your mouse button - you can also get it on a new Mac with a trackpad by putting two fingers on the trackpad and clicking the mouse button. The contextual menu is so-called because it gives you access to functions depending on when and where you click. So if you click on the toolbar, you’ll get options to customise it; if you click on a file, you’ll get options such as “Move to trash”, “Compress” and “Open”. To keep it short and sweet, there’s also a “More” option, since programs you install can add extra contextual menu items to the list: so Stuffit will install a menu item that lets you explore zip archives without decompressing them, ClamXav will let you scan an individual file you’ve selected, Toast will let you burn a disc and so on.

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.

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.

5 Keychain
Keychain saves you the hassle of having to remember passwords, while simultaneously keeping all your data secure. Available through most programs that access the Internet, including Mail and Safari, whenever you type in a password, you can save it in your keychain. When you return to that site, use the email server again or need to decrypt something, Keychain provides the password – providing you’ve authorised it – meaning you won’t have to type it in. The Keychain Access application in the Utilities folder allows you to edit your keychain, find out what a particular password is and specify your security settings as much as you need. If you’re worried, set your keychain to lock after five minutes of inactivity by using Edit>Change settings for keychain login.

6 FileVault
If your Mac is ever stolen – God forbid – although you can password protect it to stop people gaining easy access, they could try taking your hard drive out and read the data directly. FileVault, accessible through the FileVault tab of the Security System Preferences, encrypts everything in your home folder so that if your Mac is ever stolen, the thief won’t been able to read the data. It’ll be completely seamless, so you’ll hardly notice it working, although if you’re worried about passwords getting lost, you can set a master password for FileVault that will unlock any FileVault account on your Mac.

7 MobileMe
MobileMe is Apple’s “in the cloud” system for storing information and syncing it between computers. Available almost everywhere on your Mac but configured primarily in the MobileMe System Preferences pane, MobileMe provides you with gigabytes of online storage for sharing files, an email account, software for backing up files to the Internet or another medium such as a DVD, as well as a way to keep your contacts, calendar, keychain items and other information in sync. Programs such as Transmit and Microsoft Entourage can use MobileMe to sync their own information, too.

8 Screenshots
If you need to take a screenshot, hold down the Apple, Shift and 3 keys. If you hold down Apple, Shift and 4, you’ll be able to mark out an area of the screen you’d like to capture. To get a time-delayed screenshot, use the Grab application in your Utilities folder then select Timed Screen from the Capture menu and you’ll get 10 seconds to get things ready.

9 Time Machine
Making sure you have a back up of all your important data is vital. And that’s not just your emails – don’t forget all those purchases from the iTunes Store, your iPhoto library and every document you’ve got in your Documents folder. But remembering to do it is another matter. Time Machine is designed to make backing up and recovering your files easy.

Just plug a hard drive into your Mac and it’ll ask if you want to use the hard drive for backing up files. Leave it on overnight and your Mac will save virtually every file it has onto the hard drive. Then, every hour afterwards, it’ll scan to see if you’ve changed any files and if you have, it’ll save those as well, without deleting the other copies it’s already made. Then, if you need to recover any of the previous versions of the file, just click Time Machine in the Dock or the Applications folder and locate the file you need – Time Machine will do the rest. Time Machine keeps backups of all your work then lets you search through them using a simple interface

10 Boot Camp
If you have an Intel-based Mac, Boot Camp gives you the chance to experience both OS X and Windows on the same machine. When you run it – it’s in the Utilities folder – it’ll split your Mac’s hard drive into two chunks: one for Mac OS X, the other for Windows – either Vista or XP SP2. Then, providing you have a full installer CD or DVD, you’ll be able to boot off the installer, install Windows on the chunk of the hard drive you’ve set aside and be able to choose which one you want to use whenever you start up, just by holding down the Alt or Option key. If you ever decide you don’t need Windows any more, you can use Boot Camp to delete it and restore the hard drive so that OS X can use all of it again. Boot Camp can partition your hard drive so you can use Windows on your Mac

11 Sharing
Your Mac is a pretty powerful machine, and there might be a whole range of things you want to share with others, such as your files, any printers you’ve connected to it or even its Internet connection. The Sharing System Preferences pane lets you share many functions of your Mac – both with Macs and Windows PCs. The most popular option is File Sharing, which lets you share either your whole Mac or just folders on it. If click on the Options button, you can choose whether to share files using AFP (other Macs), FTP (anyone with a special FTP program) or SMB (Windows and Linux). Your Mac will then appear in the Finder sidebar of any other Mac on the network.

But it also gives you some remote control functions, allowing you to connect to it over a network and take charge of it. If you know UNIX, you can use Terminal and the ‘ssh’ to access your Mac and issue it commands by activating the Remote Login function; you can also share let other Macs take over and control your Mac – but only if they have an account – using the Screen Sharing function.

If you have a MacBook Air and didn’t buy the optional plug-in DVD player, you can still access DVDs over a network by sharing another Mac’s DVD drive using DVD or CD Sharing. And if you feel like it, you can turn your Mac into a web server as well with Web Sharing.

12 Back to My Mac
If you did buy a MobileMe subscription and the gods of computer are looking favourably on you, Back To My Mac lets you connect back to your home Mac if you’ve left it on, from any other Leopard-equipped Mac you happen to be working on. You’ll need to Start it in the Back to My Mac tab of the MobileMe Systems Preferences pane first, and configure the Mac you’re on with your MobileMe account details. But once you do, if everything’s working fine, you should be able to see your Mac appear in the list of devices in the Finder’s sidebars and either grab files from it or take it over to make it do whatever you want.

13 Keyboard shortcuts
Over time, you’ll become proficient with your Mac and instead of using its menus for functions, you’ll learn keyboard shortcuts that you can press instead to activate menu options. But if you don’t like the shortcuts, you can change them, not just in OS X’s bundled applications but in any other application on your Mac. Locate the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences pane, select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and you’ll see a list of all the existing shortcuts. Double click on a shortcut to change it or click on the checkbox next to it to deactivate it. You can add new shortcuts by clicking on the + sign in the window, selecting an application and then choose the menu command to add a shortcut to.

14 Universal access
If you have a disability, Universal access, available in the System Preferences, will make your Mac far easier to use. As well as providing access to VoiceOver, which is also in the Utilities folder and reads out the Mac’s screen contents for those who have trouble seeing the Mac’s display, it also makes the Mac’s screen easier to read by changing the contrast and makes the keyboard and mouse easier to use. If you’re deaf or simply work in an environment where constant beeps would be irritating, you can use the Hearing tab to make the screen flash whenever there’s an alert.

15 Voice control
Amazing though it may seem, you can control your Mac using your voice. The Speech System Preferences pane lets you activate this feature. Then, depending on how you’ve set it, by pressing a key to let the Mac know you’re talking to it, you can give it orders. The orders you can give it are called ‘Speakable Items’ and you can see a list of them by clicking on the Commands tab then clicking on the Open Speakable Items Folder. Your Mac can’t work miracles though, so you will need to train it to recognise your voice. It’ll also help to use a microphone if you can.

Once you’ve got Speech working well for you, you can expand it to include even more sophisticated controls, by enabling the “Front Window” and “Menu Bar” command sets so you can trigger menu options using your voice.

16 Create an Airport network
If you want to link two computers together and don’t have any cables and there’s no WiFi network nearby, you can make your own network instead. Simply go to the Airport menubar item, click ‘Create Network…’, accept the default settings and click OK. Now any other WiFi equipped computer will be able to see your Mac’s network, join it and you can use it as you would any other network for sharing files, printers and so on.

17 Terminal
Housed underneath OS X is the power of Unix. If you know your ‘awk’ from your ‘grep’, you can use Terminal in the Utility folder to really take charge of what’s under the Mac’s bonnet

18 Zooming
Having trouble reading the screen? You can zoom in and out by holding down the Ctrl key and using two fingers on the trackpad or using the trackball on a Mighty Mouse.

19 International
Although you may not need to run any of your applications in a foreign language, the International System Preferences pane still has some useful functions for monoglots. Formats lets your Mac what languages you prefer and although it’s not on the list – you’ll need to click on the Edit List button to add it – British English is one option and you can drag it to the top of the list. By default, OS X’s built-in spelling and grammar checker uses these preferences so changing this will ensure your spelling remains on the right side of the Atlantic. But the Input Menu tab also provides a way to help those who haven’t yet mastered every single key press on their keyboard. As well as giving you a way to switch between the keyboards for different languages, the available layouts include a Character Palette for embedding rare characters in documents and a Keyboard viewer for seeing what happens when click a particular key. The International menu can give you access to a keyboard viewer as well as a palette of hard to find characters

20 Securing your Mac
Keeping your Mac secure against sneak thieves can be very easy, thanks to OS X’s built in functions, such as FileVault and Keychain – although you’re going to have to decide on how much inconvenience you feel like putting yourself through. There are some features of the Security System Preferences pane that are no-brainers if you’re worried about people playing with your Mac’s settings while you’re away, and you don’t mind having to enter passwords now and again. Requiring a password to wake a computer from sleep or a screen saver should be your first move and since anyone can press Command/Apple, Ctrl and the Power keys to restart your Mac instantly, disabling automatic login will prevent them getting in that way. Other options, especially ‘Use secure virtual memory’ are for the more paranoid but are worth considering.

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