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OS X Lion Tricks
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Opening
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There are lots of great new features in Lion and while some are obvious quite a few are a little more hidden. In this episode I hope to reveal a trick or two that you might not know.
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Finder path and status bars
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Apple tried to clean up the look of Finder windows by cleaning up extraneous stuff around the edges
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Functionality like permanently visible scrollbars and icon size adjustment sliders were lost in the process. Luckily it's easy to get that stuff back if you know where to look
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Scrollbars
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System Preferences > General
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Show Scroll bars:
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Choose from 'Automatically based on input device', 'When Scrolling' or 'Always'
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Bonus: Can also set the 'Sidebar Icon Size' in this pane which adjusts not only the Finder Sidebar icons, but also the ones in Mail.app
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Status bar and Path Bar
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Finder > View > Show Path Bar
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Finder > View > Show Status Bar
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Status bar will show you the number of items in a folder. how many items you have currently selected in the Finder, and the amount of disk space being used by the current folder.
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In icon view the Status bar is also where the icon size adjustment slider is displayed. eliminated the need to go to Finder > View > Show View Options… to adjust the icon size.
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Path bar sits at the bottom of the Finder window and displays a breadcrumb path to the item you are currently viewing in the Finder
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Like many things in Lion the items in that path are "active" meaning you can click and drag them as if they are the original item.
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Lose the floor lighting
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If you don' t like the Docks little open app glowing indicator lights you can turn them off in Lion
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System Preferences > Dock and unchecking 'Show indicator lights for open applications'.
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Amazing Arrange By
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Within a folder you can now group items in a number of ways using the Arrange By options
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Organizes the files into grouping based on the setting with a dividing line between each
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Depending on the view you can group by things like kind, date opened, added, modified, or created, size, label, or even application.
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The application option groups them by the App you have set as default to open that file type
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Kind allows you to group together all the files of a particular type
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I really like to use the 'Date Last Opened' setting in the new "All My Files" sidebar item because then the latest files I have been working with throughout the day are always at the top of the list.
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This works out great when I've just finished working on a file and then need to find it to attach for sending in an email.
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Instant Thumbnail view
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Say you are looking at a folder of images in the Finder and want to get a quick iPhoto like thumbnail view
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Do an Edit > Select All (Command + A) and then hit Option+Space to launch Quicklook into full screen view.
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Then click the 'Thumbnail' icon to view all the items in a thumbnail grid.
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Add Faces to your Contacts
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In Address Book for a long time you have had the ability to add images to your contacts.
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The trouble is finding an image and putting it in was always kind of a chore
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Apple added Face detection and recognition to iPhoto and Aperture a while back and if you use that feature Lion can make the process of adding images to your contacts a bit easier.
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Open Address Book
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Find the contact you want to add a photo to and click 'Edit' and then click to edit the photo.
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In the panel that comes up you should see a little "Face" icon.
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Click that and Lion will use the contact name and your Faces database to try and show you matching images for that contact.
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Even better, it will use it's face detection to automatically show you and set the cropping for the image.
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Active files everywhere
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Move files from the Safari Downloads dropdown
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Move files from the Spotlight search results dropdown
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Move file from Stacks in the Dock
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Hold down Option when dragging to make a copy rather than move.
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Quicklook works in stacks now too. Hover over the item in the stack window and tap the spacebar to get a Quicklook view of that item
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Play Music from the Screensaver
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System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver
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Under the Screen Saver tab in the 'Apple' section choose 'iTunes Artwork'
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When the Screen Saver is active hovering over a piece of artwork will display a play control and clicking it will start playing that track.
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The playing track will show a pause icon over it.
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An Exit button appears in the lower right to exit the screen saver or you could press any key on the keyboard to exit the screen saver.
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Change Launchpad background style
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The default backdrop behind Launchpad is typically a colored blurred version of your desktop background
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You can change it to be not blurred or greyscale using a keyboard shortcut
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The options are color blurred, color not blurred, greyscale, greyscale blurred
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To change it
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Activate Launchpad from the Dock or using the special key or keyboard shortcut
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When in Launchpad press Control+Command+Option+B (OS X 10.7.3)
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You just use Command+B on older version of Lion
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This will toggle through the modes each time you press it.
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Window sizing in proportion
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Most of us know my now that Lion lets us resize a window from any edge
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Holding shift while dragging from the corner resizes proportionally
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Holding shift while dragging from an edge moves every edge except the one opposite to the selected edge.
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Option+Shift resizes from the center
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Quick tap definitions
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Hovering over a word in a web site or document and pressing Command+Control+D will bring up the Dictionary and Thesaurus.
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If you have a Magic Trackpad or Mac with a trackpad you can just double click the word with three finders to pop up the definition
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Don't restore Windows
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System Preferences > General
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Uncheck 'Restore Windows when re-opening or quitting apps'
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This is a universal setting
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You can of course hold down the Option key when going to the Application menu to get the 'Quit and close all Windows' option
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Lets you control which apps restore their windows (or don't rather) on an app by app basis
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More Mission Control
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When your looking at all those small little window thumbnails it can often be hard to see what your looking at
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If you have a window you are hovering over (outlined in blue) you can tap the spacebar and it will zoom up on that item. This trick eve works for little grouping of windows for one app that has multiple open windows
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If you do have an app grouping like that, hover over it and swipe up. This will put focus on that group, zoom in a bit and spread out the thumbnails. Now you can use the spacebar trick to further inspect individual windows within the group.
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It used to be you could click+hold an item in the dock to get an Expose view of just the windows open in that dock
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Now you can 2-finger tap the icon or Control+Click and choose Show all Windows
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When viewing in this mode there will be a coverflow style list of recently opened documents at the bottom of the window.
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Skip the Clipboard
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If you need to do a Cut and Paste, but don't want to have it overwrite what is currently stored in your clipboard you can do a 'Kill' and 'Yank'
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Select the text you want to cut as normal, but instead of Command+X (cut), hit Control+K (kill). Then to "paste" type Command+Y (yank) and "paste" it where you want.
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Getting the Auto-complete menu
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When you are typing in a document and you hit a word that you might have trouble spelling you can start the first few characters and then hit F5 to bring up the auto-complete menu.
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Then just scroll through the list to find the word you wanted, select it and hit enter to insert it.
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Easy-peasy
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