20 Cool Tiger Features You Might Not Have Heard About
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11. Preview's New Display Options
Preview dresses up its PDF display with a few new options and features. You can take advantage of your giant display (if you're lucky enough to have one) and see pages side by side with the Facing Pages setting in the View -> PDF Display menu. And you can use the Page Breaks setting to draw nice page gutters when you're looking at the document in Continuous mode.
12. Annotations in Preview
Tiger adds two ways to annotate your PDFs in Preview. The Text Annotation tool lets you attach notes to your document, and you can use the Oval Annotation tool to draw big red marks on the page.
13. TextEdit Rich Text Tools
New in Tiger: TextEdit comes with tools for creating hyperlinks, lists, and tables. You can now save documents in HTML format, and TextEdit knows how to open web archive documents created by the new version of Safari.
14. TextEdit Author Properties
Spotlight will seek and find any text buried in TextEdit documents, but the new TextEdit makes documents even more Spotlight-friendly. TextEdit documents (rich text only) now have a Properties panel that lets you specify the author, title, subject, keywords, and comments for every document, and all that info is findable by Spotlight.
15. Fast Dictionary Lookups
Apple's new Dictionary is available as an application and a Dashboard widget. You can also summon the Dictionary by highlighting text, Ctrl-clicking, and choosing Look Up in Dictionary. For super-power users, there's an even quicker shortcut: hover over text and press Ctrl-Command-D to see the Dictionary panel, a tiny box that defines the word and includes buttons to switch between dictionary and thesaurus and to start the full Dictionary application. (You can use Keyboard & Mouse Preferences to change Ctrl-Command-D to something else if you want.)
16. iChat and iTunes
In Tiger, iChat and iTunes are now on speaking terms. You can set your iChat status to reflect the name of the track you're currently listening to in iTunes, a feature that has long been available as a third-party addition. If anyone in your buddy list is using this status setting, you'll see a little right-arrow next to the song name. Click the arrow and iTunes takes you to that song in the iTunes Music Store.
17. iChat Fast Switch
Do you have more than one iChat account--maybe .Mac and AIM? If so, you can use the handy iChat -> Switch To menu to swiftly log out of one account and into another.
18. Subtly Smarter Find Panel
In Mac OS X, applications share a system-wide memory of the last Find term. If you're in TextEdit and you do a Find for "fish," then switch to Safari and bring up the Find panel again, you'll see that "fish" is still in there. And if you type text into the Google search field in Safari, that text appears the next time you use a Find panel.
This feature is a little smarter in Tiger in two ways. First, if you use Spotlight, the search term you entered in Spotlight appears the next time you bring up a Find panel. Second, the Find panel is now clever enough to use only the first term following a Google search. So, for example, if you're looking for song lyrics and you click the Google search field in Safari and type "Ranking Full Stop" "The Beat", click one of the search results, then choose Edit -> Find, the Find panel will contain Ranking Full Stop, which is just what you want for searching on the page.
19. Scalable Cursor
The newly expanded Universal Access preference panel has added a setting that will please folks with aging eyes or a big screen. You can use the Mouse & Trackpad settings to make your pointer bigger--anywhere from standard size to really ginormous.
20. Migration Assistant
When Apple started shipping Mac OS X 10.3.5 last year, it included a nifty upgrade to the setup process that automatically moved your stuff from an old Mac to a new one. In Tiger, this feature has become a standalone application, called Migration Assistant, in /Applications/Utilities. Now you can run Migration Assistant any time you want.
Migration Assistant will copy your data, applications, and settings from one Mac (or external disk, or partition) to another. You can also choose to migrate entire Home directories. It's a very cool program, and it certainly beats copying all that stuff over manually and reinstalling all your applications. Apple loves to make it easier for you to buy a new Mac.
Final Thoughts
So there you go: a list of cool Tiger things to start you out. Kids, try this at home.
Scott Knaster is a technical writer on the Mac team at Google.
Return to MacDevCenter.com.
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Showing messages 1 through 8 of 8.
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Various updates
2005-05-20 16:55:32 sknaster [Reply | View]
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Various updates
2005-05-22 10:26:17 sknaster [Reply | View]
One more note -- several readers have asked how to find the JavaScript console in Safari. It's in the Debug menu, which is disabled by default. To enable the menu, quit Safari, then type this into Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu YES
-S.
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Where is the Safari JavaScript console then?
2005-05-19 15:02:06 lstryder [Reply | View]
I have looked all over Safari for the Javascript console and can't find it. Go on, put me out of my misery, where is it?
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Migration app
2005-05-19 14:12:46 finchna [Reply | View]
Does anyone know if you can use this app with an external hard drive to create a dupe of your home directory, then do a clean install of Tiger on your computer, and use the Migration app to copy all your settings back to the clean Tiger installation? Basically, you don't need 2 "machines" to use it, but rather, two hard drives, each with a system on it, right? Thanks,
Nathan
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Tab through dialog box buttons
2005-05-18 08:28:24 riderd [Reply | View]
One feature I just found (running 10.4.1) that I really appreciate is the ability to tab through your choices in a dialog (like Windoze), never having to use your mouse.
When presented with several choices in a dialog box, you can hit the RETURN key (as before Tiger) to choose the default button that is pulsing. But in addition, there is a light blue outline around the second button choice which you can select with the SPACE bar. Hit TAB and it will take you to the next button choice. As far as I'm concerned, anything that keeps my hands on the keyboard is welcome.
I believe this works across Mac OS X Tiger dialogs. I've seen it in Mail, TextEdit and when I select Restart on the Apple Menu. I just tried it in Microsoft Word and although there was no blue outline around the second choice, when I hit TAB a couple times, the blue outline started hopping around and selecting the SPACE bar worked. You can still TAB around (as before Tiger) to other dialog elements but now the buttons are included standardly, I believe.
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Spotlight password search in Keychain Access
2005-05-14 11:22:12 baltwo [Reply | View]
Under Spotlight, you state:
"If you've ever used Keychain Access to search for a forgotten password, you know you can go nuts trying to find the one you want: websites and services use all kinds of formats for naming their passwords. Spotlight in Keychain Access fixes that. Just type and you'll see the passwords and other items whose names contain the text you typed."
Maybe I'm missing something here, but there's no way that a Spotlight search in Keychain Access will bring up entries related to a password. What it'll do is bring up websites and services whose name or username contains the search term, but not their passwords. That requires selecting the site's entry, clicking on the Get Info icon, checking the Show Password box in the dialog box that pops up, and authenticating, if necessary. Once you do that, you can see the password for that site or service, but not how that site or service formats their password naming. -
Spotlight password search in Keychain Access
2005-05-14 12:09:36 sknaster [Reply | View]
You're right -- I didn't mean to imply you could actually search on the text of the passwords themselves. But, for example, if you've forgotten your eBay password, you can now simply type "eBay" into the search box and find all the eBay entries at once. In Panther & previous, you had to dig through "ebay.com", "www.ebay.com", "someotherthing.ebay.com", and every other URL scheme eBay might choose to use.
Thanks,
Scott
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Thanks a lot!
2005-05-14 08:42:46 macFanDave [Reply | View]
I haven't seen most of those hints before. I really like the PDF stuff.
I'm a little disappointed that the Spotlight search in an Open dialog is not a full-featured Spotlight search. For example, you can't put in a word or two of the CONTENT and find the document (Spotlight eats that one right up!) Also, when you find a document, I didn't see any way of finding out where it came from. That's particularly troublesome for people with multiple copies or those who aren't creative with generating new names.
- Several readers wrote to ask how to get rid of Dashboard widgets once they're migrated to the main window layer. The easiest way is to use the same technique as in Dashboard: hold down Option and point at the widget, and the close box will appear.
- As some readers pointed out, various apps, such as Keychain Access, Character Palette, and Safari, don't really use Safari to implement their new search features.
- TextEdit's new tools for hyperlinks, lists, and tables can be found in the Format --> Text menu.
If you have any more questions or comments, go ahead and post them here.
Thanks,
Scott