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October 29, 2007

tips

The Little Stuff: black out! your screen

Posted Oct. 29, ’07, 2:15 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Tips

sleepDisplay.jpgAs everyone (myself included) emphasizes over and over again, while Leopard’s got some great headlining features, most of the coolest additions are the small, refinement-like tweaks that add to an overall better user experience. Many of them are undocumented, things you run into by accident. And man there are a lot of them.

Take this, for example: In the past (viz: last week), when you wanted to black out your screen, the traditional, to-the-point method of doing it (on notebooks, at least) was hitting down the brightness meter until you reached the lowest setting. Another option was enabling a hot corner for a screen saver in a sorta pseudo black-out-display technique, except instead of black you covered the screen with whirly colors or pictures of your pet.

Well, in Leopard, Apple added an option in the Exposé & Spaces preference pane that enables you to put your display to sleep by hitting a hot corner (see image). Great little addition. And what you use it for is your own business. I won’t even ask.

But I will ask: What little, undocumented featurettes have you found in Leopard? Let’s get ‘em gathered and posted because there’s no way — none whatsoever so don’t even think about it, you damned overachiever — that we’ll find all of them by ourselves.


9 Comments

Nathan said:

Not sure if this is totally new to Leopard, but I think the new Photo Booth Effects are pretty neat, especially Rollercoaster and Earthrise.

October 29, 2007 2:37 PM
Christofer Author Profile Page said:

So simple, yet so good. The constant tapping of the brightness buttons are finally over.
Thanks for the tip!

October 29, 2007 4:12 PM
Anonymous said:

Mail.app now supports Address Book's nicknames!

October 29, 2007 4:45 PM
pdkoenig Author Profile Page said:

CoverFlow and QuickLook continue to work for files that are in the Trash. No more dragging something out to the desktop just to double check if you actually meant to throw it out (well, less of that at least).

October 29, 2007 5:48 PM
Anthony said:

My favourite new feature that I haven't seen mentioned yet is being able to stretch 4:3 videos to fill out a widescreen and visa-versa in Quicktime.

October 29, 2007 6:04 PM
Jesper Author Profile Page said:

Exposé works in Spaces! Try F8 for Spaces and then F9 for "All Windows".
Also, while in Spaces you can just press the number of the desktop you want to switch to (a small number identifying each desktop would have been useful, though).

October 30, 2007 12:33 AM
Heyyou said:

I've noticed in Keynote that the print dialogue box has become much more useful, as the standard printer and number of copies options has gained what was formerly the "Keynote" entry of the pulldown menu. Handy.

October 30, 2007 6:48 AM
Dave-O said:

Definitely the new Subscription List in the Account Info dialog in Mail. Finally, I don't have to worry about Mail fetching messages in the accursed "Public Folder" (ginormous collection of worthless meeting notices from 2 years ago) box at work.

October 31, 2007 9:24 AM
Dan said:

The improvements in the PDF plugin of Safari are very helpful for me. If you point the mouse to the bottom of the window, the appearing buttons will let you directly save and print the PDF (even if it is in a frame).

November 2, 2007 5:04 PM

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