Leopard Tricks Tips and Tools » Tiger

Toggle Mirroring or Extended Desktop, Auto-Detect Displays

Lemmins — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 07:22:13 +0000

CMD+F1 : Toggle between mirroring and extended desktop modes.

CMD+F2 : Auto-detect an external display.

This is especially helpful if your built-in display stops working and you connect an external monitor, only to find yourself with an extended desktop background image!

Snow Leopard

James — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 00:52:07 +0000

Some time ago Apple announced “Snow Leopard”. Lets look at some of the features that Apple are offering with the next release of OS X.

64-bit – Snow Leopard extends the 64-bit technology in Mac OS X to support breakthrough amounts of RAM — up to a theoretical 16TB, or 500 times more than what is possible today.Microsoft Exchange Support – Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal.

Multicore - “Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors.

Media & Internet – Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a streamlined, next-generation platform that advances modern media and Internet standards. QuickTime X features optimized support for modern codecs and more efficient media playback, making it ideal for any application that needs to play media content.

Because Snow Leopard delivers the fastest implementation of JavaScript to date, web applications are more responsive. Safari runs JavaScript up to 53 percent faster with Snow Leopard.

OpenCL – Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.

Getting Sleepy

James — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:50:19 +0000

Did you know you can easily put your mac to sleep by pressing command-option-eject (if you have a dedicated eject key on your keyboard). You’ll need to hold ‘eject’ for a couple of seconds.

How about just sleeping your display? try shift-control-eject!

Of course, if configured in system prefs, you can setup your mac’s power button to put your machine to sleep too.

Got an Apple TV? Put the video-output to sleep by pressing and holding the > (play) button. Note that this doesn’t put the Apple TV to sleep, it just shut’s off the video output.

How do I know all of these? If you don’t have a fast broadband connection, you tend to push a lot buttons. LOL!

Got any more sleepy tricks? post a comment!

Put widgets on desktop…

Caballoballo — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:29:26 +0000

I found this widget called “CharacterPal”, it has an option that lets you drag the widget to the desktop. All you have to do is start dragging the widget as you press F12. The good thing is that once the option is enabled you don’t need to keep “CharacterPal” open in the dashboard, so you can close it an still drag your favorite widget to the desktop. Hope this is helpful, enjoy!

Finder keyboard navigation

svenson — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:27:51 +0000

I don’t know whether this trick has already been mentioned:
In the Finder, in List view, you can navigate using the up/down arrow keys. Now that’s well known. If the selection highlights a folder, pressing the right arrow key expands the folder (same as clicking on the “open” triangle symbol on the left side of the folders name).

Pressing the left arrow key collapses the folder again. If the selection highlights a document in an expanded folder, pressing the left arrow key moves the selection up to the containing folder, which then can be collapsed by pressing the left arrow key a 2nd time.

Tiger And Leopard Easter Egg “The Blob”

ForEverAndEverAmen — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:18:05 +0000

Heres a cool little hidden Easter egg that works in Tiger and Leopard called “The Blob”.Go to your Applications folder>Utilities folder> open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-floater -bool YES
killall Dock

To turn off type:
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-floater -bool NO
killall Dock

Heres the video on how to do it: http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/tmups-010-tiger-and-leopard-easter-egg-the-blob/4893621/

Easily close widgets

rattfink138 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 10:24:10 +0000

I accidentally stumbled on this little trick. While in the dashboard, instead of clicking the little plus in the bottom left corner to get the X for closing a widget, simply mouse over the widget you want to close while holding alt/option and the X will appear.

* note from James, This also works in Tiger, a classic!

Safari Scrolling

wesjaho — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:18:02 +0000

When browsing Safari, you can instantly scroll to the bottom (or top) of a page by holding down COMMAND and pressing the up or down key. Useful if you are browsing a long page.

Additionally, you can scroll in long increments by holding down OPTION and pressing the up or down key.

BlockSoft

JD in HD — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:13:44 +0000

Well, this really isnt a tip, but im just suggesting great software makers. BlockSoft has created 3 really cool apps that i like and that should also work for tiger. Docker lets me edit stacks and the dock, but i haven’t tried this app on tiger. iConiCal lets you edit the iCal icon in the dock to change the colors of it and in tiger you can also make it show the current date. And on Pontoon, you get to face your computer in blackjack!! they also have other cool apps, so check em out!

Drag a file to an open application window

WhizzKid — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:24:17 +0000

When you’ve several applications open and you want drag a file to a window, for example putting a JPEG into a Pages layout, and the application’s windows are not in view, Leopard has a solution.

Dragging the file to application’s icon in the dock would try to make the application open the file, but if you hold the space bar down while you drag to the icon, it pops the application’s window to the front and now you can drop that file right into place.

There is another way of doing this, and one that can be used in Tiger, and that is to drag the file and then use a ‘show all application windows’ exposé shortcut (drag corner or key press) and then drag onto the window and hold there.
But now it’s much easier. Of course.