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Mac OS X Hints Boost your productivity with our Mac OS X tips and tricks
Make apps appear correctly in Mission Control
With the switch from Snow Leopard to Lion, some users have reported a peculiarity in the way OS X handles multiple workspaces. (Those virtual desktops were managed by Spaces in Snow Leopard, by Mission Control in Lion): If you try to assign a given app to a specific Mission Control workspace, that assignment doesn’t always stick. And if you try to tell an app to appear in every workspace, that may not stick, either. If you’ve been experiencing this sticking problem, an anonymous Hints reader found a workaround solution.
Typically, you assign an app to a specific workplace in OS X Lion either by dragging it from one workspace to another in Mission Control or by going to the workspace you want, opening the app there, then right-clicking on the app’s Dock Icon and selecting This Desktop from the Options menu. To assign an app to every workspace, you need to go to that same Dock icon menu and select All Desktops instead.
If those assignments aren’t sticking, try switching them around: In other words, if you’ve tried to assign a given app to one specific workspace, go to the Dock icon and select All Desktops instead. Close the menu, then open it back up and select This Desktop. In the same way, if you want an app to appear in all desktops, go the Dock icon menu, select This Desktop, close the menu, open it up again, and select All Desktops. Toggling those selections may make the app behave the way you want it to.
Remove unnecessary System Preferences icons
Many Mac OS X hints involve quick trips into System Preferences. The app, built into the operating system, gathers together all sorts of systemwide options—which is why it can get a bit cluttered.
An anonymous Hints reader shared a great tip for cleaning up System Preferences by hiding those icons that you need to access less often. This technique was introduced with Lion, but we realized we hadn't yet written it up.
In the System Preferences app (launched from the Dock or from the Applications folder), go the View menu and select Customize. Or, alternatively, click and hold on the Show All button in the System Preferences header, and then choose Customize at the very bottom of the pop-up menu. In either case, you'll see all of your available Systems Preferences icons, with a checkbox next to each one.
If there are preferences you never need, uncheck them. On my Mac, for example, I know I don’t need MobileMe (since I don’t use it) or Parental Controls (since I don’t use them, either). Once you’ve unchecked the preferences you no longer need, click the Done button in the header (or deselect Customize from the View menu). That’s all there is to it—the preferences you uncheck have vanished.
Quickly create new Sticky notes
The Stickies app built into Mac OS X isn’t for everyone, but its devotees—and I count myself among them—can’t live without it. Using the app, which lets you play Post-It-style notes on your desktop, is pretty simple. But a pair of hints from Keir Thomas’s excellent Mac Kung Fu streamlines the steps for starting a Sticky so simply that you’ll soon be Stickying more speedily than ever before.
The first option Thomas shares involves using a built-in Service. We’ve extolled Services plenty, but one such Service makes the act of creating a new note as easy as highlighting the text and/or images you want to jot down and pressing a keyboard shortcut. That shortcut? Command-Shift-Y. (That’s the same as going to the current application’s self-named menu, choosing Services, and then selecting Make New Sticky Note.) Your new note will near-instantly appear on your screen, containing the text you just had selected.
If keyboard shortcuts aren’t your preference, Thomas shares a second approach, too. You still start by highlighting whatever it is you’d like to save in Sticky form. In this method, however, you simply drag your selection onto the Stickies icon in your Dock. Once again, your newly-created note will leap to the front of your screen, reflecting the entirety of your selection.
Enable local Time Machine snapshots on a desktop Mac
With Lion, Apple introduced local Time Machine snapshots. This mostly-silent feature lets your Mac use free space on your main drive to create iterative backups of your files when you’re away from your external Time Machine disk.
By default, Apple disables local snapshots on desktop Macs; the assumption is that you only need them when you're using a laptop, and that your trusty desktop machine is always connected to a Time Machine drive. But what if that’s not always the case? Perhaps you disconnect your Time Machine drive to connect other USB peripherals, or maybe you share the drive with other folks in your home. In any case, there's a way to enable local Time Machine snapshots on desktop Macs that Keir Thomas (author of the excellent Mac Kung Fu) discovered. All it takes is a quick trip to Terminal.
Local snapshots are shown in gray, Time Machine backups in purple.
After launching Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), paste in the following command:
Select and copy text within Quick Look previews
Quick Look is a delightfully simple way to browse the contents of the files on your Mac without launching their parent apps. (Select a file, press the space bar, that's it.) But if you’re looking at, say, a PDF or Word document, Quick Look can frustrate, because it doesn't provide any way to select and copy text; if you find a snippet of text you’d like to copy and paste, you still need to launch the parent app. Unless, that is, you know a secret shared by Keir Thomas (author of the excellent Mac Kung Fu).
To make text selectable in Quick Look previews, you just need to enable a hidden Finder setting. Select and copy the code below, open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities), paste that code at the prompt, then press Return:
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE; killall Finder
Clean out Launchpad completely
Launchpad takes the iOS home screen springboard and recreates it on your Mac. Some users love this new Lion feature; others aren't sold. If you're among the latter, you can ignore Launchpad pretty easily: Remove its icon from your Dock, turn off the Launchpad gesture, and you can live fairly Launchpad-free from then on. But what if you want to get a fresh-start with Launchpad, configuring it to give you quick access only to those apps you choose?
You could manually remove entries from Launchpad while it's onscreen by holding down the Option key and clicking on the jiggling apps. But that won't work on stock Apple apps, which seem permanently affixed to Launchpad’s surface. And it's a laborious process if you have a lot of apps.
But there is a way to empty Launchpad completely—removing even Apple's own apps. The crux of this trick is wiping out the contents of the database Lion uses to know what goes where in Launchpad. To do so, launch Terminal (which, as always, is in /Applications/Utilities) and paste in this sequence of commands at the command line:
Post to Twitter with Siri
Siri on the iPhone 4S can understand a lot of instructions. Ask the virtual assistant to send a tweet to Twitter, however, and Siri will respond that she just can’t do that.
The truth is, however, she can. Here’s how: First, add a new contact on your iPhone. Make the first name Twitter, the phone number 404-04 (Twitter’s SMS shortcode), and save the contact.
Next, send a text message to that number containing only the word start. You’ll get a reply with instructions on how to log into Twitter via text message. Once you finish texting your login credentials to Twitter, you can send tweets at any time by texting them to that number. That’s where Siri can help.
Software » Photography Software
Photo Booth power user features
You may have forgotten about Photo Booth, but Apple sure hasn’t. In Lion, Apple updated its software for quickly capturing photos from your Mac’s built in camera, adding full-screen mode and new visual effects that leverage face-detection features. But while Photo Booth’s feature set is still pretty simple, there are a few power user tricks to the software that may help you get more out of it.
First of all, there's the flash. When you snap a photo with Photo Booth, the software briefly makes your Mac’s display go bright white, to simulate camera lighting. But there's a new option in Lion to disable that flash permanently: Go to the Camera menu, and deselect Enable Screen Flash.
Even before Lion, you could disable that flash on a photo-by-photo basis, and that trick still works: Simply hold down the Shift key as you snap your photo. If your room is well-lit, disabling that screen flash may help you prevent that blueish tint from characterizing your photos.
Hidden Lion gesture switches to previous space
One of Lion’s hallmark features was its introduction of a slew of multitouch gestures. By now, you may well have learned most of them. But Keir Thomas discovered one you probably don't know about, a hidden gesture that lets you quickly return to your most recently used space. If you use the four-finger swipe to move from your main desktop to another, or to a full-screen app or the Dashboard, you can quickly go right back to where you were before by executing a four-finger double-tap.
But if you try that right now, it won’t work. First, you need to fire up Terminal and paste in this command:
defaults write com.apple.dock double-tap-jump-back -bool TRUE;killall DockThe first part of that command enables the double-tap jump-back setting; the second restarts the Dock, which puts that change into effect. To try out your new gesture, swipe to the right with four fingers to reveal the Dashboard, and then double-tap with four fingers to come right back here again.
Fix Lion's erroneous autocorrections, permanently
Sometimes, one person’s hint is another person’s incredibly obvious feature. In this case, I was the guy who needed a hint that—once it was pointed out to me—I felt silly for not thinking of on my own.
I was getting frustrated by Lion’s built-in, iOS-style autocorrection. I normally like the feature, which corrects misspellings as you type, but it was making life difficult for me when I searched my email for messages from Macworld senior editors Chris Breen and Scholle Sawyer McFarland. When searching for messages from Chris, I’d type “from:breen” into Gmail; for Scholle, I’d type “from:scholle” instead. Lion unhelpfully wanted to replace their names with “green” and “school,” respectively.
I griped on Twitter, and Flying Meat Software’s Gus Mueller shared the easy fix. If Lion’s autocorrecting a word that you’d prefer it simply leave alone, let it make the correction, then fix the word so that it’s spelled the way you’d prefer again. Next, Control-click (or right-click) on the word in question, and choose Learn Spelling from the contextual menu that appears. From now on, Lion won’t autocorrect that word any longer.
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