Installing a new operating system on your Mac is like unwrapping a much-anticipated holiday gift: There are just so many goodies inside waiting to be pored over and played with. We dug deep into Mac OS 10.5 - better known as Leopard - and found powerful tools, entertaining toys, and the occasional rock-hard fruitcake. Our in-depth Leopard primer is at www.maclife.com/article/living_with_leopard, but we’ve found more teeth on this cat. Come along for a tour of the hidden treats that are waiting for you inside Apple’s latest and greatest OS.
LEOPARD QUICK TIPS
Whether it’s Leopard’s brand-new Finder, its upgraded apps, the enhanced file-sharing, or the ultra-convenience that is Spaces, power users - like you - won’t be content until they uncover all of the cat’s hidden powers. Here’s a set of starter secrets you can use to begin your journey to Leopard mastery.
Finder
> If you find it hard to distinguish between, say, spreadsheets and text documents in a Finder window, uncheck Show Icon Preview in the View Options window (press Command-J to bring it up) to view the files by their application icon instead.
> You can use Cover Flow view to see thumbnails of your fonts. Select one and press the spacebar to bring up Quick Look, and you’ll be presented with all that font’s upper- and lowercase letterforms.
> In addition to using a hot corner to launch Exposé, Dashboard, or a screen saver, you can also put your display to sleep. Choose the corner you want in System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces.
> You can change the grid spacing of icons in the View Options dialog (Command-J). Although changes in the horizontal spacing are smooth and continuous, there are only two vertical-spacing positions.
Using Quick Look to display all of a font’s letterforms is a slick trick - but unfortunately, we found this capability to be slightly buggy. Your mileage may vary.
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Sharing
> You can make any folder a shared folder - just add it to the list in System Preferences > Sharing > File Sharing > Shared Folders by clicking the plus-sign icon and selecting it.
> You can run apps residing on a shared Mac, but only if those apps don’t have an activation scheme (as does Adobe’s Creative Suite) that allows that app to be run only in one user’s area.
> To see the shared volumes to which you’re connected right on the Desktop, make sure that Finder > Preferences > Show These Items On The Desktop > Connected Servers is checked.
Google Earth can view the Mac|Life office building even though the app is on another Mac, connected to this one using Leopard’s File Sharing capability.
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Apps
> The quickest way to find and play a song in iTunes is to type “kind:music by:artist name” in the Spotlight field (filling in the real artist name, of course). In the search results, double-click the song you want to hear, and iTunes will launch and play it.
> The Terminal has seven preset “looks” from which you can choose. Find them in Terminal > Preferences > Settings.
> Even if your Mac didn’t come with an Apple Remote, you can still access Front Row (which now shares the Apple TV interface). Just hold down Command-Escape, wait a few seconds for the interface to appear, then use the arrow keys, Return/Enter (forward), and Escape (back) to navigate through it.
You can easily customize the appearance of the Terminal. We’re partial to the ’80s nostalgia of the Homebrew setting.
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Spaces
> When you click the Spaces icon in the Dock to view all your Spaces in the bird’s-eye view, activating Exposé gives you the Exposé view in each of the displayed Spaces.
> When you press Command-Shift-4 to take a screenshot, the crosshairs cursor now displays Desktop pixel coordinates. When you hold the mouse button to make your selection, those coordinates change to show the size of your selection.
> If you want a certain app to show up in each Space, select System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces > Spaces, bind the app to any Space using the plus-sign icon. Then click the up/down arrow to the right of its name and choose Every Space.
If you have a lot of apps and windows open (top), even Spaces needs help. Activate Exposé in all your spaces at once (bottom) to choose that fireworks photo you’re searching for.
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The enhancements to the Finder window’s Sidebar are some of Leopard’s true treats. Here’s how to take advantage of one of its niftier features: the ability to create specific searches and then access them again later.
1. Open a Find Window. In the Finder, press Command-F and a Find window will appear. The first Find criteria you’ll see is Kind. Click on it, and you’ll see a drop-down list of default criteria. At the bottom of that list is the ever-popular Other, which will lead you to a list of 144 more criteria.
The magic word Other will reveal a world of near-unimaginable detail.
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2. Explore the Possibilities. The additional criteria range from Album to Year Recorded, and contain such esoterica as Altitude (“The altitude of the item in meters above sea level, expressed using the WGS84 datum”) and Phone Number (“The phone numbers associated with this item”). Take a moment to explore - and note that by selecting the In Menu checkbox, you can add any item to the default criteria list.
We’re willing to bet that you didn’t know some of these search criteria even existed. We sure didn’t.
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3. Refine and Save. We want to set up a search for recent JPEGs taken with a 300mm lens at ISO 400 or less. After selecting the appropriate criteria, click the Save button, give the new search set a name - in this case, Recent Long-Lens - make sure that Add To Sidebar is checked, and then click Save.
We set the options in a Finder window’s Find pane to display surreptitiously captured, nonnoisy JPEGs shot in the past half year.
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4. Search and Ye Shall Find. A new item now appears in the Sidebar’s Search For section entitled - appropriately enough - Recent Long-Lens. When we click on it, all the JPEGs we’ve taken in the last six months that meet the focal length and ISO criteria we set in step 3 are displayed. To get rid of a search set, just drag it from the Sidebar to the Desktop, and - poof!
That tie, by the way, is actually a mini washboard - the image was shot at a musical-saw festival.
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Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. In Tiger, you could place a folder in the Dock, click and hold on it, and then navigate hierarchically through its contents. Not so with Leopard’s less-capable Stacks. You can, indeed, drag a folder into the Dock, but you can’t navigate through multiple levels without opening a Finder window (choose View > Show Path Bar to make it easy to retrace your steps). Here are some ways to get around some of Stacks’ other annoying limitations.
1. Winnow Your Options. The number of items that can show up in Stacks’ grid view is limited by the size of your display. On a 20-inch display, for example, only 107 items can be displayed, with the 108th being a back-arrow icon that, when clicked, opens a Finder window that contains all that folder’s items. If this chock-full-o’-nuts folder is your app-stuffed Applications folder, you’re going to want easier access to your commonly used apps. Easy: Create another folder, fill it with aliases to your most-used apps, and drop it onto the Dock instead of your full Applications folder.
If you have a ton of apps, a Dock-based Applications folder is ridiculous. Create a folder of aliases to your favorite apps, instead.
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2. Put on a Happy Face. The icon that graces a folder in the Dock is the icon of whatever item is first in the folder’s search order. (To sort, click and hold on the folder, then choose Sort By in the menu that pops up.) While this may be useful for displaying your latest download, it’s not conducive to instant recognition of folders that change frequently. To stabilize your Dock folders’ appearance, create a square JPEG that’s large enough to look good in Cover Flow view (500 by 500 pixels is sufficient for a 20-inch display). When you name it, use a space as the first character of its filename so that it will be first in a Sort By > Name sort. Drop that JPEG into the Dock-based folder, and that image will appear in the Dock to identify that folder - you’ll always be able to find your Home, Applications, or whatever folder, even if you change its contents.
Here are newly decorated Dock folders (from left): Applications, a Top Apps folder that contains aliases to most-used apps, a Home folder decorated by the user’s mug, and the Downloads folder.
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Help Wanted: Leopard fixes that need attention
Whenever Apple rolls out another iteration of Mac OS X, every Mac lifer worth his or her salt wants to either improve it or to restore some feature that didn’t survive the transition. To help, plucky programmers fire up their copies of Xcode (the integrated development environment, or IDE, that’s included on Leopard’s installation DVD) and hack away. Here’s our list of things we’d love their help with.
> Why can’t we use our mouse’s scrollwheel to zip back and forth through time in Time Machine? We should.
> Maybe we all don’t want our menubar to be translucent. Could someone please make it opaque again?
> Using the arrow keys to switch between Spaces requires two hands - one for the arrow keys and another for the modifier key. How ’bout fixing it so we could skip the modifier key when we want to?
> If we could set a different Desktop image in each Space, it’d be a heck of a lot easier to tell in a glance which Space we were in.
> Pre-Leopard application icons look all jaggy in Cover Flow view. Surely it shouldn’t be hard to make a tool to enlarge them.
> Not everyone thinks that Time Machine’s spacelike interface is cool. Some Core Animation jockey should be able to supply us with some less-cheesy alternatives, right?
> When a Stack that’s sorted by the filename pops up into fan view, its alphabetical order is reversed. That’s just wrong.
When we learned the alphabet, it started with “A” - did something change and we didn’t get the memo?
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Links:
[1] http://www.maclife.com/article/living_with_leopard
[2] http://www.maclife.com/article/5_ways_to_make_tiger_roar_like_leopard
[3] http://www.maclife.com/article/mac_life_leopard_guide