 10 Quick Tips by Christopher Breen
1. In OS X 10.2, you can lock your Mac from the menu bar. Just launch Keychain Access (found in the Utilities folder) and select Show Status In Menu Bar from the View menu. To lock your Mac, choose Lock Screen from the Lock menu that appears in the menu bar. Your Mac will instantly display the currently chosen screen saver, which can't be revoked until you enter your login password.2. To cycle through views in many OS X 10.2 application toolbars (Mail and Preview, for example), command-click on the Toolbar button (the transparent button in the upper right corner of a document window). Once you do, you can cycle through the follwoing toolbar views: Large Icon and Text, Small Icon and Text, Large Icon Only, Small Icon Only, Large Text Only, and Small Text Only. 3. Need to see an Address Book contact's phone number from across the room? Open OS X 10.2's Address Book, select a contact, click and hold on the Phone heading next to the phone number, and select Large Type--the number appears in gigantic type across your screen. To see such large numbers in calculator, control click on the total and select Large Type. 4. Don't miss the Calculator utility's impresssive productivity boosters. It not ony sports a "paper tape," so you can view past calculations, but also performs converstions (via the Convert menu) -- including speed, volume, and temperature. It can even convert currency and download the latest currency rates from the Internet--select Convert: Update Currency Exchange Rates.... 5. Do you want to use your scroll-wheel equipped mouse to move through windows horizontally instead of just vertically? Can do--in finder windows and Microsoft Excel X. Hold down the shift key and move the wheel down to scroll to the right and up to scroll to the left. In Microsoft Word, hold down the control key and scroll to zoom in and out of the document. 6. Place helpful commands at your fingertips by double-clicking on the ScriptMenu.menu item inside the Application folder's AppleScript folder. Doing so adds an AppleScript menu with more than 70 scripts to OS X 10.2's menu bar.... 7. speaking of AppleScript, you can download even more scripts to add to OS X 10.2's Toolbars from www.apple.com/applescript/ toolbar.... 8. When is a user not a user? When it's a project. You can easily archive projects in OS X 10.2 by creating a new user, assuming that user identity to create a project -- a newsletter or Web site, for example -- and then deleting that user. When you do, all the files within that user's folder are placed in a single disk image (.dmg) file inside the Deletetd Users folder in OS X's Users folder...Should you need these files at a later date, simply double-click on the .dmg file to mount it's image and grab the files you need.... 9. To take a screen shot of a particular object--an open window or active menu-- press z-shift-4 and then the spacebar. The cursor will change to a camera. Place it over the object you want to capture (selected objects turn light blue) and click the mouse button. The screen shot is saved as a PDF file on the desktop. 10. And finally, one antiproductivity tip: Make your OS X 10.2 desktop come alive by replacing your desktop with a running screen saver. [Editor Note: Proceed at your own risk!] To do so, open the Screen Effects system preference and choose a screen effect. Open Terminal and type
nice +20 /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
Then press return to make the active screen saver your desktop piture. When you press return, a number will appear in the Terminal window--it follows [1]. This number is the process you just invoked. To turn off this effect, type kill and the process number -- kill 541, for example. Note that using a screen saver as a background will effect the performance of even the fastest Macs.... This article reprinted with permission from the November 2002 issue of MacWorld.
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