[m a d r a]

in the same spirit as this long-running thread over in applications, about people's fave freeware or shareware apps for OSX, has anyone got any hidden gems amongst those various bits'n'bobs apple stashes away in the applications and utilities folders? - i'm not talking abou the obvious ones like quicktime, terminal or xcode. i mean the wee obscure thingummybobs that the rest of us might have seen on our hard drives but never even fired up - but that you use all the time. these'll probably all be old news to the 'old lags' but some of the mac newbies might find them interesting.

i'll start the ball rolling:

1. digital colo[u]r meter - this handy wee app [stashed away in your applications > utilities folder] lets you sample a colour from anywhere on your screen and display it's RGB values in a variety of ways. i use it all the time to get RGB hex values for colours i want to use on the web and it's also great for using with apps like illustrator which won't let you sample colours from anywhere but their own colour palettes.

2. calculator.app - some people might not be aware that the humble calculator [in applications ] has a load of conversion capabilities built in [weights, volumes, measures etc] and if you let it connect to the internet and download exchange rates, it can also convert between currencies for you. ideal for those online shopping expeditions where you're tempted to order from abroad!

3. image capture - you don't need to suffer the bloat of iphoto and its annoying filing system every time you want to download a digital photo from your camera. if you open image capture [in applications ] and look under its preferences, you'll see one which goes "when a camera is connected open ----". set this to image capture and hooray! - no more iphoto bloat. you can download your photos and put them exactly where you want them to go.

[see also my tip http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...751&page=8here about using the shareware datetree and image capture to organise your digital photos instead of iphoto]


4. finder ["go > go to folder..." menu] - [OK -this is more of a tip than an obscure app, but it's handy nonetheless] if you want to edit a file that's hidden in the finder, you can make the finder show it without all the hassle of using some utility to temporarily make all hidden files visible, editing the file and then using the utility to make the hidden files invisible again. provided you know the approximate location of the file, just bring up the finder go > go to folder... menu and type in the start of the path to the file you're after. so for example if you're going to edit your apache server config file [/etc/httpd/httpd.conf] just type in "/etc" and all the hidden files in that directory [and its sub-directories] will become temporarily visible in the finder.

[Tesseract]

• The pop-up dictionary (Cmd-Ctrl-D while hovering over a word)
• Grapher - Apple acquired Curvus Pro X and the made-over app is bundled with the system. It's amazingly powerful.
• TextEdit - perhaps the most underrated of the bundled apps. It's really more of a basic word processor that can edit text too. Try out all the menu items, and also the keyboard shortcuts Esc (for word completion) and Option-Tab (for creating outlines).

If you have the Developer Tools installed, look in /Developer/Applications for:

• Pixie - a magnifier window
• Core Image Fun House - image manipulation with Core Image filters

If you have a PowerBook or PowerMac, these apps (among others) come preinstalled:

• OmniGraffle
• OmniOutliner

If the version on your Mac is older than the current version of the software at the time you purchased your Mac, contact OmniGroup and they will give you an upgrade.

[JKT]

Useful UI things to know:

Control-click an application and Show Package Contents

(Generally) in any application View>Customise Toolbar

Colour Palette - click the magnifying glass to be able to pick any colour from anywhere on your screen. Drag and drop the selected colour from the top colour well to the wells at the bottom for quick selection in any app that uses the Colour Palette.

Applications:

/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor

/Applications/Utilities/Console

/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler

/Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Core Image Fun House

/Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/Quartz Composer

/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor

[Big Mac]

For me, some of the best hidden gems are the GUI-inaccessible preferences hidden in plists and the defaults write command. It's just too bad there isn't a comprehensive list of the coolest ones. I guess the Terminal should also be mentioned directly: I really enjoy having it available for occasional use, and the funniest thing is I thought I would hate its very existence in OS X prior to 10.0 coming out.

[TheIceMan]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

3. image capture - you don't need to suffer the bloat of iphoto and its annoying filing system every time you want to download a digital photo from your camera. if you open image capture [in applications ] and look under its preferences, you'll see one which goes "when a camera is connected open ----". set this to image capture and hooray! - no more iphoto bloat. you can download your photos and put them exactly where you want them to go.

It was driving me insane everytime I connected my digital camera, iPhoto would launch. Thanks to your tip, now it doesn't.

[surfwax95]

One of the coolest things that hardly anyone knows about are all the screenshots:

Command+Shift+3 for screenshot.
Command+Shift+4 for a selection shot. Click and drag.
Command+Shift+4+space for a window selection shot.

Also, the "slow motion" built into OSX.

Hold "shift" while:

...activating Dashboard.
...activating Expose.

Awesome stuff.

[RadarBob2]

slo mo also works with the gene effect when a window is docking.

[rickey939]

Not necessarily "built into OS X"; however, I love the following easy-bake HTML e-mail option...

Safari > File > Mail Contents of This Page

Not many people know about this feature, and are always asking how do make those "fancy, Apple-like" HTML e-mails using Mail.app...this is the answer.

[philm]

People are always surprised to see me drag a file from a Finder window onto the Mail icon in the dock and see a blank message open up with the file set up as an attachment. Maybe not that many people know this wee gem.

[Tesseract]

Originally Posted by surfwax95

Hold "shift" while:

...activating Dashboard.
...activating Expose.

...doing just about anything that animates.

Genie, the Stocks and Weather widgets, viewing RSS in Safari, collapsing/expanding a thread in Mail.app (!), ...

It used to work for switching between System Preferences panes. That was taken out in 10.3. IIRC it worked in 10.3 for Fast User Switching and also when clicking on a user name in the list-view login window, but neither of those work in 10.4.

[bobhenr]

Select some pictures in a folder and command-click them, then select "Slide Show" in contextual menus. This makes it so easy to quickly look at new pictures I've downloaded from my camera. Its easier than using Preview or a third party application. It even has an "Index Sheet", allowing you to look at thumbnails of every picture chosen (well, on my screen I seem to be limited to just under 100). In any case, a nice feature.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Tesseract

...doing just about anything that animates.

Including rearranging tabs in Adium

[esXXI]

Originally Posted by Tesseract

...doing just about anything that animates.

Genie, the Stocks and Weather widgets, viewing RSS in Safari, collapsing/expanding a thread in Mail.app (!), ...

It used to work for switching between System Preferences panes. That was taken out in 10.3. IIRC it worked in 10.3 for Fast User Switching and also when clicking on a user name in the list-view login window, but neither of those work in 10.4.

If you hold shift and control, some things are slowed down even further.