It’s time again for some Useful Tricks for 0 Money. In episode 2 of this series we’re going to prepare ourselves for Lion, try out some gesture tools, discover a couple of hidden settings and two more tricks to optimize your workflow.
Scroll Reverser is able to reverse the scrolling behavior of attached Trackpads or mouses. This way you can easily prepare for Lion where this scrolling will be enabled by default.
The reason why Apple chose to use an inverted scrolling is that it probably feels more natural. On the iPhone this scrolling is the default, you’re scrolling, e.g., a web page by holding it in your hand.
There are two freeware apps for gesture based controlling of your Mac: BetterTouchTool and MagicPrefs. (Links are German, downloaded apps will be English.)
Both apps allow you to create gestures that execute actions, e.g. keyboard shortcuts, AppleScripts, launch Exposé, etc. With BetterTouchTool you can, in addition, enable “Windows 7 style” snapping of windows, with MagicPrefs you can download additional plugins. The agony of choice!
TinkerTool and Secrets are able to enable “hidden settings”. Most of the time you don’t even know what can be customized on your Mac. Both apps allow easy access to this “hidden world”.
The OS X Help Viewer is usually displayed as a floating window. That’s rather annoying, because those windows “float” on top of other windows. This way trying to get help whilst using an app is complicated. The Help Viewer is always in the way. Someone on Mac OS X Hints found a, hidden, setting to display the Help Viewer as a normal application:
To enable:
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer DevMode -bool true
To disable:
defaults delete com.apple.helpviewer DevMode
Most of the time we need to save PDFs to commonly used folders. Wouldn’t it be nice to create a shortcut to those folders so this process becomes a lot easier? Luckily OS X provides such a feature. Created Aliases in ~/Librar/PDF Services
are listed in each Print dialog. Just create a new Alias there by holdind down ⌘⌥ while dragging a folder/app to create a new shortcut.