Saginaw Macintosh Users Group

10.7: Dragging files from Stacks and Desktop access
~MacOSXHints.com
Just as you can now drag files from Safari’s downloads list, you can also drag them from a stack. They can be dragged to the Desktop, Trash, Finder window, folder, folders and volumes in the Sidebar and Toolbar and even another Stack.

This is also very handy for dragging images and items in the downloads menu from a fullscreen app like Safari to the Desktop. The Dock even automatically pops up if you drag the item to the bottom of the screen without having to use the double down motion normally required to access the Dock in fullscreen apps.

iPhone 4S Raise to Speak also works for text entry
~MacOSXHints.com
We know Siri has a raise to speak feature, but I discovered that raise to speak also works for text entry.

Whenever a keyboard is on the screen, you can simply raise the phone to your ear. A single tone will confirm that it’s listening (as opposed to Siri’s double tone). Whatever you say will be transcribed to text when you lower the phone.

This works in any app any time the keyboard is displayed.

10.7: Expand an application’s windows in Mission Control updates
~MacOSXHints.com
When you enter Mission Control, an application’s windows are stacked atop each other. If you’re after a particular window, but it’s not the front-most one in an application, it could be difficult to identify it.

To solve this, after you’ve entered Mission Control, move the mouse cursor over a stack of windows and scroll up. They fan out somewhat from each other, allowing you to see more of the windows’ contents. Other applications and the Desktop dim.

To exit this mode, either scroll down or click off in one of the dimmed areas.

Oddly, Apple did not choose to use the ‘pinch out’ gesture for this feature. This is unfortunate, since it’s a much more intuitive way of commanding stacked items to spread out.

10.7 Zoom in on windows in Mission Control
~MacOSXHints.com
Mission Control displays miniatures of all your open windows, grouped by application; what’s left of Exposé in Lion shows all the windows for a specific application. (Set keyboard shortcuts for these features in Keyboard or Mission Control preferences; set other triggers in the Trackpad or Mouse preference pane.)

You can’t always see the contents of a miniature window sufficiently to decide whether it’s the one you want. But select a window by simply pointing to it—you’ll see a blue frame around the current selection—and then press the spacebar to zoom it up to an easily readable size. Note that this is not the same as a Quick Look window, which shows you the contents of a file and lets you open it; this shows you a window.

Pressing the spacebar again shrinks the window down to its petite self. (Pressing Esc while the window’s enlarged switches you into its parent app and brings that window to the front.

Use the new iBooks fonts
~MacOSXHints.com
When Apple updated its iBooks e-book application to 1.5, they included some nice new fonts: Ahtelas, Charter, Iowan, and Servavek. With a little work, you can extract these from the application and use them on your Mac.

If you haven’t already, download the free iBooks app from the App Store.

Locate the application in the Finder. (Select iBooks in iTunes and choose ‘Show in Finder’ from the File menu. It will be named ‘iBooks 1.5.ipa’).

Make a copy of the file.

Change the file extension of the copy from .ipa to .zip.

Extract the resulting zip file by double-clicking on it. You will get a folder named iBooks 1.5.

In this folder open the Payload folder to find the app ‘iBooks.’

Right or control-click on the application to show the contextual menu and choose ‘Show Package Content.’

A folder will open with the font files in it. (The easiest way to locate them is to search the folder on .ttf.).

There are 16 font files in total; four for each font. Install them as you would do any font.

[crarko adds: Works as described. As always with fonts, be aware of copy-right restrictions when making use of them.]

iOS 5: Quickly reopen recently closed tabs
~MacOSXHints.com
In the latest version of Safari for iOS, pressing and holding the add tab [+] button will show a list of recently closed tabs. Touching one of the listed pages will open it in a new tab.

10.7: Un-hide the User Library folder
~MacOSXHints.com
By default, the ~/Library folder is hidden in Lion. This is a big problem to many of the readers of this site, as many hints involve this folder (especially any involving hidden preferences).

You can easily un-hide this folder for easy access. Simply run the following command in Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

If, for some reason, you want to re-hide it, you can run the same command using ‘hidden’ instead of ‘nohidden’.

You can actually use this command to hide or unhide any folder. Just put it’s path in place of ~/Library.

10.7: Zoom the magnifier tool in Preview with keyboard shortcuts
~MacOSXHints.com
Lion introduces a new tool in Preview. Press ` (the backtick key) or go to Tools » Show Magnifier to launch the magnifier.

This produces a floating window that you can drag over your document, and it will zoom in on whatever area of the document is underneath the magnifier. The size of the magnifier window appears to be fixed, but you can press + or – to change its size. At full zoom, the magnifier tool can end up larger than the size of the document window that you are viewing.

10.7: Spotlight indexing of Applications folder required for App Store
~MacOSXHints.com
The Mac App store seems to refuse to let you update existing apps if it can’t find those applications in the Spotlight index. This affects any user who has turned off Spotlight completely, or has just turned off the indexing of the Applications folder.

This problem has been much discussed on the Apple Support Communities pages and the following solution has been mentioned by several people there (so credit is due to them rather than me).

If Spotlight indexing of your Applications folder is disabled then the ‘Updates’ tab of the Mac App Store will not list any updates. However, you will see those updates if you click on the ‘Purchases’ tab. If you try clicking on ‘Update’ button from this tab, an error message appears indicating that you are not signed into the correct Apple account.

In my case, I only have one account, so this message seemed to be erroneous. I tried signing out and back into my Apple account, but this didn’t help. Note that this problem was not fixed by the 10.7.1 update.

Following advice in this Apple Discussion thread I checked my Spotlight indexing rules and discovered that I had turned off indexing of the Applications folder (see the ‘Privacy’ tab of the Spotlight preference pane).

Removing the rule on ignoring the Applications folder fixed the problem. I waited until Spotlight could now find all of my applications, and then reopened the Mac App Store and was able to update applications.

10.7: A text selection shortcut
~MacOSXHints.com
I cannot get the hang of 3-finger drag especially when trying to select a row(s) of text. The obvious method is to put the cursor at the beginning and drag, or hold down Shift as you select the last character. Here’s a better way, I think.

Double-tap the first word (using two fingers) to select it, then hold the Shift key and double-tap the last word — all is selected in between. Subtle but to me much better, and it requires much less finger coordination.

10.7: Quit and Close all Windows
~MacOSXHints.com
This hint shows a way to close an application AND its windows.

In Lion Command+Option+Q lets you quit an application and close all of its windows so that when you reopen the app there won’t be open windows.

[crarko adds: In Snow Leopard it there are options to close all windows (generally Command+Shift+Option+W) but it’s not tied into the Quit operation. I imagine since Lion re-opens all the previous windows when the application launches the new shortcut was added to prevent that.]

10.7: Mail message mouse rollover
~MacOSXHints.com
When rolling the pointer over the message dividing line four new instant selections appear for trash, reply, reply all and forward.

If you roll the pointer over the message dividing line four instant selections popup for Trash, Reply, Reply All and Forward.

This can be somewhat useful and avoids a trip to the tool bar or menus, especially if you are in a threaded message with numerous responses.

I never noticed this behavior before for the Mail client, and thought it was worth a mention.

10.7: Show Bluetooth signal strength
~MacOSXHints.com
It’s often useful to know the signal strength of a Bluetooth connection. For instance, my Magic Trackpad becomes much more responsive when it’s on the left-hand side of my MacBook Pro, rather than the right. It took me some time to figure this out, and it would have been a lot easier if I could have easily measured the signal strength myself. Until now OS X hasn’t given any easy way to show the signal strength.

But 10.7 adds an easy display of the signal strength! Go into System Preferences » Bluetooth. The window show a list of all your connected Bluetooth devices, one per line. Click on a device and then press the Option key, and a bar graph and number will appear on the right showing the current strength. These are displayed and recalculated as long as you hold down the Option key. Like Wi-Fi signal strengths, the number is a negative integer, and numbers closer to zero are better. For instance, -50 indicates a strong connection, while -80 is very weak. [crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I also verified this is not available in 10.6.8.]

10.7: Preview.app Magnifying Glass
~MacOSXHints.com
Open up a PDF document in Preview. Now, move your mouse over the body of the document.

Press the accent/tilde key, and a magnifying glass will appear. You can drag it over the document to zoom in, and then dismiss is by pressing the accent/tilde key again. [crarko adds: There’s also a corresponding new ‘Show Magnifier’ menu item in the ‘Tools’ menu of Preview.]

10.7: Shrink page width in full-screen Safari
~MacOSXHints.com
Full-screen Safari is nice, but some pages don’t do well with the Reader option, and are hard to read on an extremely wide-screen monitor.

If you move the mouse cursor all the way left (or right), the pointer changes to a horizontal-resize indicator. At this point, you can click and drag toward the center, to change the width of the page while the browser stays in full-screen mode. A gray linen background appears on the left and right of the resulting narrower page.

Each tab can be adjusted independently. [crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. I tried this in Preview and it seemed to resize the page automatically when switched to full-screen mode.]

iTunes Cover Art Screen saver feature
~MacOSXHints.com
The iTunes Album cover screen saver just got a cool new feature.

Start up the iTunes screen saver and you’ll see that you can now click on an album cover to start playing it. To exit there’s now a button on the bottom right corner to exit.

An excellent way to spot an album you’d forgotten about and start playing it right away.

10.7: View Calculator results in large type
~MacOSXHints.com
Right click on the display in Calculator.app and select ‘Large Type.’ An overlay appears with the number in large type so you can see it easily. Simple, but cool.

This works in the Lion version of Calculator.app. I don’t know if it was there in earlier versions. It works just like the ‘Show Large Type’ feature for phone numbers in Address Book.

10.7: Navigate iCal calendars using gestures
~MacOSXHints.com
In iCal 5.0, which is included with Lion, you can navigate between dates, weeks, months, or years using a finger swipe left or right using an Apple Magic Mouse or Trackpad.

Click on the Day, Week, Month, or Year button. Navigate between dates, weeks, months, or years using a finger swipe left or right. The left or right swipes will advance or reverse the displayed calendar.

With the Magic Mouse use a single finger swipe, and on a Trackpad use a two-finger swipe (you must check ‘Swipe between pages’ in their respective Control Panels).

Reveal the Dock in Lion’s fullscreen apps
~tuaw.com
MacWorld has published a nice little tip that allows Lion users to reveal the Dock while in fullscreen apps. To do so, while in any fullscreen app, simply move the pointer all the way to the edge where the Dock is pinned. Once your cursor is resting on that edge of the screen, swipe or move the mouse in that same direction again, as if you were trying to move beyond the edge. The Dock will then spring right up. Pretty cool, huh?

Mac 101: Capture your signature using OS X
~tuaw.com
OS X Lion has made signing PDFs easier than ever before. It’s been possible to scan in your handwritten signature and sign documents in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it was a complex process and one most people probably never trifled with. More often than not, I found it easier to simply print out the document, sign it the normal way, and scan the whole document back into Preview using my flatbed scanner.

Lion’s version of Preview comes with a built-in signature scanner that makes signing documents far simpler. In the Annotations toolbar you now have an option to create a signature from your Mac’s built-in iSight camera. All you need to do is use black ink to sign a piece of white paper, align your signature toward the camera using the onscreen guides, and take a snapshot of the signature.

Preview can store multiple signatures, so if you need to both sign and initial documents, you’re able to do so easily using Preview’s annotation functions. It’s a great feature, and one that ensures my printer will be gathering even more dust than it already has. And that should let everyone sleep better.

10.7: Quick Look .weblock files
~MacOSXHints.com
Quick Look in 10.7 will now render the webpage for a .webloc file. In previous versions, Quick Look would simply present the .webloc file’s icon along with the page’s title, URL, etc.

I like to drag URLs to my desktop if it’s something I’d like to come back to later, but don’t necessarily need to bookmark. I noticed that in Lion, .webloc files are fully rendered by Quick Look. To duplicate, drag a URL form your web browser of choice to your desktop (or a Finder window), select it and hit your spacebar. Pretty useful for quickly getting at the saved information.

10.7: iCal Month View New Event behavior
~MacOSXHints.com
Lion’s iCal changes default behavior of new event creation in Month View and creates all day events by default.

The single behavior in Lion that makes me grumble the most is the behavior in iCal when creating a new event in Month View (things work as before in day and week views). In Lion, when creating a new event by double clicking on the day the event is automatically assigned as an all day event. In most instances where an appointment is being created this will need to be changed.

The solution is that in Month view double click on the day you want to make the event on and then type ‘Steve 9am’ and it will correctly define an event called Steve that starts at 9am and ends one hour later.

You can even get fancy and define an event’s length in the title, e.g. ‘Steve 9am-2pm’ and it will correctly set an event that starts at 9am and runs until 2pm.

Identify the print jobs in the queue
~MacOSXHints.com
If you double-click a print job in a printer’s queue, it will open a Quick Look window showing the printing preview of that job. Especially useful when the file names don’t have descriptive titles.

10.7: Make Dashboard translucent again
~MacOSXHints.com
Lion by default opens the Dashboard as its own space, which means you can’t see the desktop ‘through’ it like you could in 10.6. You can return the Dashboard to its former transparent splendor by telling Mission Control to not open the Dashboard as a space.

To return the Dashboard to its pre-Lion behavior:
Open System Preferences.
Click the Mission Control panel.
Un-select the ‘Show dashboard as a space’ check box.
Close the System Preferences.

Not only will the Dashboard return to displaying as an overlay above the desk, but as a bonus, you will have back the cool ‘ripple’ effect when adding new widgets.

Reveal the Dock in Lion’s fullscreen apps 
~tuaw.com
MacWorld has published a nice little tip that allows Lion users to reveal the Dock while in fullscreen apps. To do so, while in any fullscreen app, simply move the pointer all the way to the edge where the Dock is pinned. Once your cursor is resting on that edge of the screen, swipe or move the mouse in that same direction again, as if you were trying to move beyond the edge. The Dock will then spring right up. Pretty cool, huh?

Silently set an iPhone alarm
~MacWorld
It’s late at night, your spouse is already asleep, and you realize you before you go to bed that you need to set an iPhone alarm to wake you up the next morning. You launch the Clock app, schedule the time, and then want to adjust the alarm sound to be sure it’s loud enough to startle you awake tomorrow. As you begin to tap the sound, though, panic strikes: You remember that the iPhone helpfully previews the sound the moment you tap it. So, essentially, your alarm will go off, wake up your loved one, and make nobody happy.

Hints reader imaldonado found the quiet solution: When you’re choosing your alarm sound, double-tap it instead of single-tapping it. You’ll select the sound without auditioning it first.

10.7: Cut and Paste files in Finder
~MacOSXHints.com
Lion introduces a long-requested ‘copy and move’ command in Finder, similar to ‘cut and paste’ in Windows Explorer.