shownotes_20120418

OS X Lion Tricks
  Opening
    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.
  Finder path and status bars
    Apple tried to clean up the look of Finder windows by cleaning up extraneous stuff around the edges
    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
    Scrollbars
      System Preferences > General
      Show Scroll bars:
      Choose from 'Automatically based on input device', 'When Scrolling' or 'Always'
      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
    Status bar and Path Bar
      Finder > View > Show Path Bar
      Finder > View > Show Status Bar
      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.
        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.
      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
        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.
  Lose the floor lighting
    If you don' t like the Docks little open app glowing indicator lights you can turn them off in Lion
    System Preferences > Dock and unchecking 'Show indicator lights for open applications'.
  Amazing Arrange By
    Within a folder you can now group items in a number of ways using the Arrange By options
    Organizes the files into grouping based on the setting with a dividing line between each
    Depending on the view you can group by things like kind, date opened, added, modified, or created, size, label, or even application.
    The application option groups them by the App you have set as default to open that file type
    Kind allows you to group together all the files of a particular type
    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.
      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.
  Instant Thumbnail view
    Say you are looking at a folder of images in the Finder and want to get a quick iPhoto like thumbnail view
    Do an Edit > Select All (Command + A) and then hit Option+Space to launch Quicklook into full screen view.
    Then click the 'Thumbnail' icon to view all the items in a thumbnail grid.
  Add Faces to your Contacts
    In Address Book for a long time you have had the ability to add images to your contacts.
    The trouble is finding an image and putting it in was always kind of a chore
    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.
    Open Address Book
    Find the contact you want to add a photo to and click 'Edit' and then click to edit the photo.
    In the panel that comes up you should see a little "Face" icon.
    Click that and Lion will use the contact name and your Faces database to try and show you matching images for that contact.
    Even better, it will use it's face detection to automatically show you and set the cropping for the image.
  Active files everywhere
    Move files from the Safari Downloads dropdown
    Move files from the Spotlight search results dropdown
    Move file from Stacks in the Dock
    Hold down Option when dragging to make a copy rather than move.
    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
  Play Music from the Screensaver
    System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver
    Under the Screen Saver tab in the 'Apple' section choose 'iTunes Artwork'
    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.
    The playing track will show a pause icon over it.
    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.
  Change Launchpad background style
    The default backdrop behind Launchpad is typically a colored blurred version of your desktop background
    You can change it to be not blurred or greyscale using a keyboard shortcut
    The options are color blurred, color not blurred, greyscale, greyscale blurred
    To change it
      Activate Launchpad from the Dock or using the special key or keyboard shortcut
      When in Launchpad press Control+Command+Option+B (OS X 10.7.3)
      You just use Command+B on older version of Lion
      This will toggle through the modes each time you press it.
  Window sizing in proportion
    Most of us know my now that Lion lets us resize a window from any edge
    Holding shift while dragging from the corner resizes proportionally
    Holding shift while dragging from an edge moves every edge except the one opposite to the selected edge.
    Option+Shift resizes from the center
  Quick tap definitions
    Hovering over a word in a web site or document and pressing Command+Control+D will bring up the Dictionary and Thesaurus.
    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
  Don't restore Windows
    System Preferences > General
    Uncheck 'Restore Windows when re-opening or quitting apps'
    This is a universal setting
    You can of course hold down the Option key when going to the Application menu to get the 'Quit and close all Windows' option
    There is a 3rd party System Preference pane called RestoreMeNot, restoremenot.info
      Lets you control which apps restore their windows (or don't rather) on an app by app basis
  More Mission Control
    When your looking at all those small little window thumbnails it can often be hard to see what your looking at
    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
    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.
    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
      Now you can 2-finger tap the icon or Control+Click and choose Show all Windows
      When viewing in this mode there will be a coverflow style list of recently opened documents at the bottom of the window.
  Skip the Clipboard
    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'
    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.
  Getting the Auto-complete menu
    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.
    Then just scroll through the list to find the word you wanted, select it and hit enter to insert it.
    Easy-peasy