Top 10 Little Known Cool Mac Tricks

There are many lists that cover ground breaking, well publicized Mac features like Expose, and others that are fun or goofy like MacSaber which that turns your Macbook into a lightsaber. This list covers the cool tricks that fly below the radar that you might not know about yet. So without further ado, here they are:

10. OneStep DVD When you need to just transfer your movies from your miniDV video camera to a DVD without the frills, just click the OneStep DVD button in iDVD opening screen. iDVD will automatically rewind the tape and burn the video to a blank DVD in your new Mac.

9. Sherlock Movie Times Open Sherlock, click movies and see a list of movies playing near your in column view. Select a movie and see all the theaters near by that are showing it. Select a theater and it will show you all the times it is playing that day. Even though Sherlock is an orphan application from Mac OS 9, it still displays local movie times better than any widget or web site. As an added bonus, you can view a small movie trailer within the same window.

8. Full Screen Movie Trailers in Front Row Speaking of movie trailers, when only full screen will do for watching with others, use your Apple Remote to pull up Front Row and navigate to Movie Trailers under Movies. You are presented with a grid of current movie posters that you can click to see each trailer play in full screen glory.

7. Pocket Sized Address Book You can create a micro book from a group of contacts in Address book by selecting Pocket Address book in the Print dialog box. It auto-formats to make pages that have an alphabetical index along the edge. Just print and assemble.

6. Album Art Screen Saver Many aspects of the Mac are just mesmerizing to look at. The iTunes Artwork screen saver is one of those. You can select it in the Screen Saver Preference Pane by clicking on iTunes Artwork. A grid of 30-40 album covers will cover your screen, cycling through your album art by flipping the "covers" one by one. Try it out at your next party.

5. Make Anything a PDF Any file that you can print you can make a PDF of by using the PDF button/menu in the Print dialog box. One great benefit of this is that text in your new PDFs can be searched and found by Spotlight. Unfortunately, this great universal function is hidden away in a menu that looks like a button.

4. Instant Dictionary In most newer programs (ones written in Cocoa) you can get a word definition by putting your cursor over a word and pressing Apple+Control+D. This will pop up a little dictionary excerpt right below your word. Alternately, you can double click the word to select it and Control-Click (right click) and choose "Look up in Dictionary" from the pop-up menu. That will bring up the full sized dictionary where you can hyperlink click between words to get more definitions.

3. View Lots of Images Side by Side Full Screen Have you ever wanted to view and compare 10, 15, or 30 images side by side? You can by grouping your images together in a folder, selecting them, and then either Control-Clicking or using the Action Menu in the finder widow to select "Slideshow." That will bring up the first image and the slideshow controls. Using the controls, click the Index button, the icon of four boxes. This will scatter all the images in a grid set against a black background.

2. Use your Laptop as a Baby Monitor If you have a laptop and another Mac, start a one way video chat with the laptop and set it in place where it will monitor your sleeping baby. From the other Mac you can both see and hear your child.

1. Make a Personalized Wall Calendar Everyone knows you can make prints and photo albums from iPhoto, but did you know you can create a wall calendar? You can start on any month you wish and make twelve or even more months full of pictures of friends and family. You can even import events from iCal such as birthdays, as well as create new events while creating it. The price starts at $30, but I think you will find your calendar really is priceless. Enjoy!

Did we miss one of your favorites? What are some of the other great features that many people don't know about yet? Let us all know in the Comments section below!

What is this?

Tell A Friend

Print Page

Your Comments:

I've never tried your #3 - viewing many images - I'm going to try that. What I've done in the past is open a folder full of images in icon view mode, go to View>Show View Options, select "This windowonly" - then increase the icon size to large. Then you can see the image in the windowwithout running any programs at all. It's a pretty small image - but you can usually make out what image you really want to open and work with.

 Phil
 06/11/2007  at  09:25 PM

I haven't tried #3 either - but I have been looking for a way to view my wedding photos without clicking through each one individually (or downloading the hundreds into my iphoto library). I will definitely check it out. If I can't figure it out, maybe I'll try the technique above too.

 leslie
 06/11/2007  at  10:27 PM

This might be a well-known thing; nevertheless, here it is:

If you select multiple pictures in a folder and open them in Preview (double-click on any of them if Preview is your default app for JPGs, or right-click, then 'Open with...' -> Preview), you'll get the first of the lot to open in full size, with all other images as thumbnails on the side. You can page up and down through the pictures, or click on individual thumbnails to jump around.

 Predrag
 07/12/2007  at  03:06 PM

Just discovered #3 ! This kind of surprise is typically why I love my mac. Cheers and nice website !

 Arnaud from Brussels
 07/14/2007  at  03:12 AM

Another nice one is when you right click an address in an address card, you can choose from the drop down menu "show map". Safari will show you a route planner detailing the street.... cool and nice...

On the other hand if you right click a telephone number in an address card, you can magnify the number to the whole of your screen... handy when you forgot your glasses....

 Brian Taylor
 07/14/2007  at  07:46 AM

Has anyone tried #1? I was wondering how their quality stacks up? I've made my fair share of iPhoto photobooks and have been satisfied. On that same note actually, has anyone used their greeting card services?

 Kevin Schaefer
 07/14/2007  at  12:19 PM

I think summarize is also a great trick that is very unused. I know it has saved me a bunch of time as a college student, and it is fairly accurate.

 badi
 07/14/2007  at  02:15 PM

number 3 doesn't work too well if there are too many files - something i hope apple will fix

a good tip is to force an application to launch a file by dragging the file onto a dock icon using option + command (alt + apple) keys. For example you could have a whole folder of images - you could just drag the folder onto preview's icon using cmd and option and it will force preview to open them.

 frogbat
 07/16/2007  at  05:57 AM

Fantastic list!! Thank you. The image one by far is the best kept secret.

 John Ghadimi
 07/16/2007  at  12:21 PM

Kevin Schaefer, what is summarize?

 Athos
 07/18/2007  at  04:12 AM

Page 1 of 3 pages  1 2 3 >