Leopard Tricks Tips and Tools

I just took a picture with my built-in iSight. I then opened the file in Preview to do a quick, simple crop. This is when I noticed new options for the select functionality. I ended up doing the whole cropping in Preview - not bothering to launching Photoshop.

Using the Select - Extract shape you can very easily generate and edit a selection mask similar to photoshops colour select. Only the Preview implementation of it is much more intuitive and thus faster to work with.

written by AngryAnt \\ tags: Leopard, preview

While fooling around i figured this out. perhaps im not the first and perhaps this is very well known, but its still pretty cool.

Hold command and click on your stack to directly open the folder that the stack uses to store files.

This way if when you click your stack and you cant see all of the items in it, you can do this trick and hopefully have it easier.

written by iNate \\ tags: Leopard, stack

I hope everyone doesn’t already know this one. Quarkomatic mentioned that you can move the Finder’s title icon around and do all kinds of things with it. Did you know that you can do the reverse with the Finder button bar just below it?

You can take a file and add it to the buttons in the button bar, and click on it to open it. If you put a folder there, Finder will go there, or you can put things in it without having to open another Finder window. You can do the same thing with applications, but what’s really neat is if you want to open a file in different applications, instead of going through menus, you can just drag it to whichever of your application buttons you want to open in!

written by nextbrick \\ tags: finder title trick, Leopard

By pressing alt/option + volume up/down/mute you jump directly to the audio settings in the system preferences.

written by dennisbruentjen \\ tags: Leopard, volume

When using the volume control function keys on an Apple laptop or desktop, there’s a limited amount of control over the volume — each key press moves the volume by one entire unit in the onscreen bezel. However, by pressing Shift and Option along with the volume key you want to use, you can break up each large step in the volume control bezel into four parts, instead of having to use the menu bar item or System Preferences for fine-grained control.

I think this is leopard only, if it isn’t please let me know…

written by M Woody \\ tags: Leopard, sound

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!

written by rattfink138 \\ tags: dashboard, Leopard, widgets

Here’s one that Hugo has E-Mailed in, I don’t think we’ve mentioned this one on the site yet!

You probably know that you can move windows between spaces, but do you know that you can move spaces themselves and change their order?

Just open Spaces, click on the background of a space and move it.

Thanks Hugo

written by James \\ tags: Leopard, Spaces

Maybe this is something widely known but I stumbled upon it just recently:

When you activate Expose in Application windows mode (F10) you can use Tab to cycle through all apps’ application windows in current space.

written by emircajic \\ tags: expose, Leopard