Due to the popularity of last month’s tip section, “10 tips that don’t warrant an article each” we thought we would do another one. However,the majority of these tips focus on Apple’s most recent addition to the OSX family, Mountain Lion. Users on earlier operation systems check out the end of the document for some tips that work on all systems.
Read the previous months tips here: http://www.macaid.com.au/july-2012-tip-of-the-month/
Here are some of our Mountain Lion tips:
-You can click on new notifications to take you to the new event eg new email.
– To view all your notifications click the Notification Icon (or swipe left on a trackpad on the desktop) to display the full list (much like iOS5). You can clear notifications by clicking the “x” to the right of an application’s name. To use Dictation, open any application that accepts text input, position the cursor, and press the Function (Fn) key twice—then begin speaking. Dictation will learn your voice characteristics as you use it, so results should improve over time.
– You can turn off the Notification Centre by alt-clicking on the Notification Centre icon in the top right hand corner of the screen.
– Scrolling up in Notifications will display an option to pause all Alerts until the next day.
– To customise your Notification Centre alerts, head to System Preferences, and then Notifications. You can choose between no alert at all, a banner (which fades away), or an alert that stays on the screen until you dismiss it.
– Mountain Lion now has Dictation which will allow to you to capture your speech and paste them into a text document, mail message or anywhere you can type. Enable Dictation within System Preferences > Dictation & Speech.
– To print straight from quicklook, hit the ‘command’ and ‘P’ keys whilst in quicklook. One copy of your document will be printed to the default printer.
– To share your chosen document from quicklook, just press the arrow button (as per the below image). You can then choose where you wish to share it.
Tips for Mac OSX in general:
– ‘Tab’ will switch between dialogue boxes but did you know that if you hold down the ‘Shift’ key and press the ‘Tab’ key it will step through in reverse order.
– To quicklook documents (to see what’s in them without having to open them), highlight the document, and then hit the spacebar. It works in most places, even in email attachments.
– By dragging and dropping a file (eg. a pdf) into the mail icon, a new mail message will be created with that particular document attached.
– If using Apple’s ‘Spaces’, by default, pressing the ‘control’ key and an arrow key will move along to the next space in that direction. For example, ‘Control’ and the right arrow will move you one space to the right. If there isn’t a space to the right, you’ll end up shifting rows and enter the first space on that row (rows and columns are set up when enabling Spaces in System Preferences).
