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.

Copy the Lion Installer
~MacWorld
The good news is that, once you’ve got a Lion installer, you can copy it freely to all the Macs in your house (so long as they’re running the latest version of Snow Leopard) and upgrade them to Lion. Not only is that convenient, but it’s legal: The Lion download license covers all of the Macs in your household, making that $30 an even greater deal. If you’re planning on updating multiple Macs to Lion, though, be warned: the Lion installation app self-destructs after use. After you download it, move a copy somewhere else before installing, or you’ll have to re-download the installer from the App Store before using it on another Mac.

10.6: Option-click audio mvenu extra to choose source
~MacOSXHints.com
If you want an easy way to change the input or output sound source on your mac (say between the internal microphone and audio-in) in Mac OSX Snow Leopard you can simply option-click on the audio menu-extra in your menu bar.

Last call for AppleWorks users
~MacWorld
In recent Mac 911 entries I’ve looked forward to what will and won’t work with Lion (and swore I’d stop doing it). So now, a brief look back. And yes, I mean you die-hard AppleWorks users. If you want to use a Mac running Lion, your time has run out. AppleWorks won’t work. So, what to do with those AppleWorks documents?

Regrettably there’s no path nearly so easy for your AppleWorks database files. FileMaker has a tutorial that tells you how to move these files to Bento, but it’s inelegant. Essentially you save your file as ASCII text and add a .tsv extension to it. Then within Bento you choose File -> Import -> File, click Choose in the resulting Import window, and then select your .tsv file. You’ll lose your AppleWorks templates, but your data will move over.

AppleWorks painting files can be converted to a variety of graphics formats including jpeg, .png, and TIFF. Regrettably this is something you have to do via a Save As command. You can’t simply change the file’s extension.

And AppleWorks drawing files can be opened and edited with the $95 EazyDraw. It’s not an inexpensive option, but it’s one that doesn’t require that you futz about with converting files.

Although this should go without saying, if you’re still using AppleWorks today to generate files and wish to stay current with Apple technology, it’s time to set AppleWorks aside and start using up-to-date tools. Continue using it and you’re only generating more work for your future self.

10.7: Slideshow screensaver can be paused
~MacOSXHints.com
Unlike the previous built-in slideshow screensavers, Lion’s slideshow screensaver is pausable by hitting the spacebar. In previous system versions, hitting any key would stop the screensaver. This is handy when people ask ‘where is that,’ etc.

Preview the print queue with Quick Look
~MacWorld
When you print documents with your Mac, they show up in your printer’s queue. You can view that queue by clicking the printer icon in your Dock. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to tell exactly which documents are which in that queue—especially if you’re printing a bunch of untitled or similarly-named files. Hints reader ppinheiro76 figured out a delightfully simple way to get quick previews of the files you’re printing.

Once you’re in the print queue, just double-click on an individual print job to open a Quick Look preview of the document being printed; since it’s Quick Look, you could instead tap the spacebar to trigger the same effect.

This reminds me that Quick Look pops up in some unexpected places, and it’s often a delightful surprise. For example, I frequently use it in Open and Save dialogs to preview files there. And don’t forget that the print queue has some other hidden functionality, too: Remember the one about dragging documents directly into the queue to print them?

10.7: Shrink page width in full-screen Safari  tab
~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.]

The comma key’s hidden powers on iPad
~MacWorld
Whether you’re a touch-screen typing savant or a two finger tapper, there’s no denying that iPad typing isn’t as convenient as using a real keyboard—especially when you want to access frequently-used punctuation that isn’t even available on the virtual keyboard’s main screen. A little-known trick can help: swiping up quickly on the Comma key will instantly insert an apostrophe; swiping up on the Period key inserts a quotation mark. That’s one quick swipe, instead of a tap on the .?123 punctuation key, and then a second tap on the specific punctuation mark you’re after.

Get Account Info in Mail in Preview
~MacOSXHints.com
In Mail.app, press Command+I on the Inbox icon (or right-click on it and choose ‘Get Account Info’) and sample the awesomeness. Actually, this works with any of the main mailbox icons. Just select an account from the popup menu.

It gives space usage for each folder and quota limits for the account, plus other settings from the ‘Account Info’ preference, and works for Gmail and Exchange too. I just stumbled onto it and found it worth sharing.

Retrieve S/Ns of iPods connected to your computer
~MacOSXHints.com
If your iPod is lost or stolen you’ll want to find its serial number. Luckily, your Mac keeps a record of all the iPods that have connected to the computer with the s/n and other info.

The file that stores info about iPods is located at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iPod.plist. Open it with your favorite text editor.

Here’s the hierarchy of the XML file with (descriptions):
<dict> (everything/root)  <key>Devices</key> (the section that stores info about the iPods themselves)  <dict>   <key>XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</key> (a unique identifier for each iPod, not useful to us us <dict> <key>Connected</key> (the first iPod) (In here is the info about the iPod. Subsequently, I will refer to things at this level of the tree.)
</dict>   </dict>  (ignore stuff in here; it’s not useful to us)
<dict>Line 2 of the section I said we’d focus on is a date. This is the last time you connected the iPod.Line 4 tells us that the device is an iPod, which we already knew. Line 6 tells us what ‘family’ the iPod is. My Nano G5 is a 16. Line 8 is the firmware version in a single number (not the version that we usually see). Line 10 is the firmware version as a the number we’re used to (X.X.X). Lines 12 and 14 are about games on the iPod, and not very useful to us. Line 16 is that unique ID we saw earlier.Line 18 is the language (language-country). Line 20 is the big one: the serial number. Lines 22 and 24 are info for the software update application, and not very useful to us. Line 26 is the number of times you’ve connected that iPod. If you’ve connected more than one iPod, you’ll see another of the blocks that starts with <key>XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX</key>.

How to re-sort photos on your iPhone
~MacOSXHints.com
An anonymous Hints reader was flummoxed: He (or she) used iTunes to sync pictures from iPhoto to his (or her) iPhone. But when he looked at the pictures on his phone, iPhoto Events didn’t appear in the order he wanted. As far as he could tell, neither iTunes nor the iPhone offered any option to change the phone’s photo-sorting behavior.

As the anonymous reader discovered, however, there is a solution—one that’s less obvious than it might appear at first. The iPhone will honor whichever sorting option you select within iPhoto. To change the sorting order there, launch iPhoto, select Events, and then choose View -> Sort Events. You can then sort Events by date (in chronological or reverse-chronological order), alphabetically by name, or in a manual order of your own creation.

But, wait, there’s more: If you switched to iTunes now, your photos still wouldn’t be in the order you wanted; they’d be out of order on your phone, too. You must first quit and relaunch iPhoto. Once you’ve done so, iTunes will notice the new sort order you’ve set for your Events. When you sync your iPhone this time, events will appear the way you want them to.

Open Google search in new tab behind current
~MacOSXHints.com
In Safari, we all know if you highlight some text and then Control+click (or right mouse click) you get a pop up contextual menu. I use this to search text in Google all the time, but didn’t like that it would open in front while I was still reading the web page. So with a little experimenting, if you hold down the Command key before you click on ‘Search with Google’ in the pop up menu, the page will open in a tab behind your current one.

Launching apps quickly on iPad
~MacWorld
I have too many apps on my iPad. While I can always find certain apps quickly—I remember which home screen they’re on, and where geographically the icons are located on that screen—there are many more apps that I just can’t find. Instead of paging through home screen after home screen, I use Spotlight as a virtual keyboard launcher.

Tap the Home button to get to your first home screen, and then either tap it again or swipe to reveal Spotlight. Start typing the first few letters of the app’s name, and then tap on the right result to launch it instantly. Spotlight automatically surfaces your most frequently used apps at the top of its matching results, which is often very useful.

Quickly open two instances of the same PDF
~MacOSXHints.com
Sometimes you need to have two views of the same PDF document (e.g. to have a quick access to the list of references in a thesis without the need to scroll to it and then back to the text). However, Preview does not allow a file to be opened twice.

The quickest solution would be to hit Cmd-P and select ‘Open PDF in Preview.’ You’ll have a temporary copy of your PDF where you can select the second view and have both views handy for easy switching.

When you’re done, just hit Cancel in the temporary document.

Fix an iPhoto ‘11 slowdown
~MacOSXHints.com
As I’ve been adding photos to iPhoto ‘11 (9.1.3), it’s been getting slower and slower. On Friday, it ground just about to a complete halt, such that even force quitting took about 20 minutes to accomplish.

According to Activity Monitor, there was no CPU activity and no network activity to speak of, which stumped me because I was assuming it was Faces or Spotlight laboring mightily away in the background.

After many trials and errors, I determined that the problem was due to my entries in the Accounts preference. I had MobileMe (times two), Facebook, Flickr, and six other e-mail accounts registered there. About a minute after each launch, iPhoto had been attempting unsuccessfully to connect with at least one of the accounts, which brought iPhoto, Finder, and any other open programs to a screeching halt.

As luck would have it, I was one of the lucky ones hit with MobileMe’s latest outage, but after I deleted all the Accounts preference entries, iPhoto sprang back to life.

I subsequently determined that it is normal behavior for iPhoto to attempt indefinitely to connect to services listed in the Accounts preference, with no time-out or notification to the user about what is going on.

If you find yourself in this predicament — iPhoto open but utterly unresponsive — you may be able to shorten the time it takes your Mac to return control to you by severing all network connections (Ethernet, Airport, etc.), at which point iPhoto is supposed to detect the lack thereof and stop trying to connect.

Tapping and holding virtual keys on iPad
~MacWorld
Virtual keys hold special powers. Press and hold on a vowel, for example, and a popover containing accented versions of the selected character appears. (Certain consonants, like C, S, and N, also offer alternate versions when you tap and hold on their virtual keys.)

Press and hold a vowel key—the ‘i’ in this case—and the iPad will summon a popover with accented versions of the character in question.

Similarly, holding down punctuation marks can provide extra options. the standalone Period key—the one on the punctuation keyboard, not the main keyboard—hides an ellipsis. The hyphen offers an em-dash and bullet. And the dollar sign hides symbols for numerous currencies.

Auto-correction is your friend on iPad
~MacWorld
One last keyboard-related tip: especially when you’re using the on-screen keyboard, the easiest way to becoming a virtual typing pro is simply to trust the auto-correction algorithm. The slower your iPad typing speed, the more likely it is that you make frequent use of the backspace key. Or to put it another way: slow iPad typists only allow themselves to type precisely the right keys, and delete each individual mistake.

Not power users! Power users trust that iOS will fix their typos for them. When I type “Dippieedl,” my iPad recognizes that I’m after “Supposedly.” After just “Wkeph,” the iPad knows I want “Elephant.” Fix fewer typos, and your iPad typing will ironically improve.

Undelete from Trash to Original Locations
~MacOSXHints
If you’ve ever trashed some items and then wanted them returned to their original folders, Apple has a counterintuitive way to do so. It is rather odd, but neat!

To return the items from the Trash to their original locations, open the Trash folder, select the item or items to be returned and hit the delete button (red circle with line through it on the folders toolbar).

Your items will disappear from the Trash and reappear in their original folders. If you don’t have the delete button, you can add it to all folders using the Customize Toolbar command under View.

Removing Widgets from the Dashboard
~MacOSXHints.com
The documented way to remove widgets from the dashboard is to press the + button at the bottom left of the screen and then click on the X button of the widget to be deleted. However, there seems to be another way.
Go to the dashboard, put the cursor over the widget and then press the Option key. An X button will appear on that widget. This works in Mac OS X 10.6.7 but I suspect it also works in previous versions.

Reveal the Password in a Password Field on a Web Page
~MacOSXHints.com
If you’re ever in the situation where you have forgotten the password for some web site, but it is right there in the password field of the login form — only in the form of asterisks or bullets — and you would like to copy it from the password field, if only it were not asterisks…well, you can.

You can convert the password field to a plain text field, which will reveal the password behind the asterisks. To do so, you will need to use your browser’s web inspector. The following is the procedure for Safari; the steps are similar in Google Chrome.

Right-click the password field and select ‘Inspect Element’ in the context menu. This will open the web inspector and highlight the HTML tag for the password field.
The highlighted line should contain something like this:

<input type=”password” name=”something”>
(Don’t worry if it doesn’t look exactly like that. As long as the HTML tag contains the type=”password” part, you can proceed.)

Double-click the word “password” following “type=”. This will let you edit the text.
Replace the word “password” with the word “text”, and press Enter. Now the tag should like this:
<input type=”text” name=”something”>

You should now be able to see the password in the password field. You can close the web inspector if you wish.
If this seems like a lot of work, an altenative is to install and use a browser extension that will reveal passwords when you do something like move the mouse over them or click inside them. For Safari, one such extension is ShowPass; similar extensions exist for Firefox and Google Chrome.

Avoiding Application Exits on iPad
~MacWorld
Sometimes, you notice something you’d like to check out more closely in an app—at the same instant you press the Home button. Instead of letting the app close, then finding its icon and waiting while the app relaunches, you can tell your iPad to abort your now-unwanted Home button press. Doing so is hilariously simple: don’t let go. If you hold down the Home button extra long—just a few seconds needed—your iPad will abandon its plans to close the current app, and you tap on that enticing link instead.

Track Down Music Playback Controls on iPad
~MacWorld
With the introduction of that multitasking bar, Apple made it a smidgen trickier to find music playback controls. When you double-tap the Home button, swipe the whole shebang towards the right. Doing so will reveal several controls: playback buttons (Reverse, Play/Pause, and Skip, along with sliders for brightness and volume.

Stash More Apps in the Dock on iPad
~MacWorld
Brand new iPads feature just four apps in the Dock. Because of that, many iPad owners keep just four apps in their docks. But it turns out that the dock actually holds six apps, if you’d like it to. All you need to do to keep more frequently-accessed apps in your dock is move them there: press and hold on any app icon until the apps start to jiggle, and then drag the app you’d like to move right into the Dock. You can stash even more apps by dragging a folder full to the Dock.

Go To URL Faster on iPad
~MacOSXHints
The process of loading a URL in a new tab on iPad can be rather cumbersome and slow. First, one launches Safari from the home screen, waits for the app to open and the old webpage to re-render, then one hits the tab switch button, presses the new tab space, waits for that tab to open, waits for it to switch to the search panel (this is the most irritating part of the process, since it seems to take even longer when what one really wants is the URL bar), and finally, one clicks on the URL bar to enter in a new URL.

To simplify this process considerably, just add a new icon to your Springboard that goes directly to about:blank.
To add the new icon to your home screen, first open a new page in Safari according to the usual method, and direct it to the url, about:blank. Then tap the more options icon (iOS 4.2) or the + icon (iOS 3.2) and select, ‘Add to home’. Give your icon a name like ‘Safari’ or whatever you like then tap add.

In the future when you want to switch to Safari and open a URL in a new tab, just tap the new ‘Safari’ icon you created, then tap the URL and X out the existing about:blank before entering in your own URL. Actually, you don’t even have to X out the existing “about:blank” in the location field. Just click in there and start typing.

How to restore a hard drive using Time Machine
~MacWorld
When Apple introduced Time Machine with OS X 10.5 Leopard, it became easier than ever to prepare for a data disaster—the only serious effort Mac owners running Leopard or Snow Leopard need to make is to plug in a hard drive. While we hope your hard drive never goes south, if it does actually fail, you’ll thank Time Machine for backing up your data. Time Machine backs up your system settings, documents, and applications, making it easy to not only recover from a failed hard disk, but also to migrate these files to a new computer, or to a hard drive that’s faster or has more capacity. Here’s how to restore your data from Time Machine.

Step one: Prepare your driveUnlike some utilities that simply make a bootable clone of your hard drive, Time Machine saves your files, applications, and system settings in a format that can be used to restore this data to a formatted hard drive with OS X already installed.

If you have a new hard drive, or had to erase and repair your old drive, you first need to install Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 on the drive, using the discs that came with your computer or a retail version of Mac OS X that supports different types of Macs. When the OS installation is done, the system restarts and you’re treated to a little tune.

If instead, you’ve purchased a new Mac and want to transfer your data from an old Mac to the new one, it’s a piece of cake. Since the new Mac has a fresh installation of Mac OS X, simply start up the system and the music will start playing.

Step two: Select Time Machine restoreWhen you’ve booted off your new installation of Mac OS X (whether on the new computer, new hard drive, or an erased and repaired old hard drive), you’ll be guided through the steps to set up your Mac. You’ll see a screen titled,” Do You Already Own A Mac?” asking if you’d like to transfer your information.
Choose the third option, From a Time Machine Backup. Click Continue.

Step three: Specify a Time Machine backupConnect the hard drive containing your Time Machine backup via USB or FireWire. The Time Machine backup will show up in a list called Select a Backup Volume. You can also find and restore from a Time Machine backup on your local AirPort network. Select your backup and click Continue.

Step four: Select the information you want to transferThis screen asks you to choose what data you’d like to restore. It calculates the size of your User folders, Applications, Documents and other files, which can take quite a bit of time, depending on how much data you have. All of the choices are selected by default. Uncheck the boxes of any file types you’d rather not bring over. Click Transfer when you are ready.

Step five: WaitThat’s it. Your files will transfer over and when finished, your computer will restart. If you chose to copy over all file types, your desktop picture, dock settings and everything else will appear just as they did on your old hard drive.

10.6: Using the Purchases Tab in Mac App Store
~MacOSXHints.com
While looking through the App Store, I stumbled upon something useful about the Purchases tab. If you use the same Apple ID across two or more computers, you may logically want apps purchased with the same Apple IDs installed on those computers as well. You can do this.

Select the Purchases tab in the App Store. You have a complete list of every app you have purchased using the current account. If there are apps you’ve downloaded on one computer that you’d like on another computer, simply click Install and it will download on that computer.

Simple, yes, but it took me a while to discover this. It comes in handy often.