It’s been over a month since the release of Leopard, but that doesn’t mean we’ve entirely plumbed its depth. There’s plenty of new functionality in Apple’s latest big cat, and there’s no better place to find it than with our fellow Macophiles over at Mac OS X Hints. Here’s a trio of handy tips that might help you with our favorite spotted cat.
Exposé is super handy when it comes to getting a bird’s-eye view of all your open windows—in fact it gets my nomination as one of the most life-changing features of OS X—but it can sometimes be hard to tell at a glance which window you want. Sure, you can mouse over any window to get its title, but you don’t want to have to do that to every window to find the one you want. Turns out there’s an easier way in Leopard: hold down the option key while you’re in Exposé and it’ll overlay the titles for every window.
When you’re looking at videos and pictures in the Finder, icon mode is a useful way to tell pictures apart. But sometimes the thumbnails are a little too small. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could adjust them for just that window on the fly, without having to go into the Finder’s view options? Unfortunately, while you can’t do it with your average folder, it is possible with Spotlight’s Smart Folders. Open up the default All Images, All Movies, or All Documents Smart Folders in the Finder’s sidebars (or make your own), and switch to icon view. You’ll see a slider in the bottom right that lets you adjust your thumbnail size in real time. Here’s hoping for an update or hack that’ll bring this functionality to your average Finder windows.
Finally, Quick Look: in the estimation of some, it’s one of the most useful Leopard features around. You probably know you can play back videos in Quick Look; you may even know that if you leave Quick Look and come back (without opening another file), it’ll pick up where you left off. You may also be aware that you can select multiple images and use Quick Look to open them all, but the same works for videos. Select as many videos as you want and hit Quick Look; OS X will open them as a video playlist and let you switch back and forth among them, even keeping track of where you are in each.
There you have it: a handy helping of hints. And we’d imagine that’s far from the end of it, so don’t forget to check out Mac OS X Hints for more.
I knew 1 of them, the other two come very handy, thanks.