All the cool things your Mac can do

While crawling the web reading all those articles about tips I'm often surprised not to find "Expose" which is an incredible tool. Not only because of the multiple functionnalities it brings (*very* user-friendly), the very nice way it was implemented (affecting the Windowserver and not the running applications !) and full of customizable shortcuts (see under) but also because in its form **it is not present on any other system I'm actually aware of !**

Expose shortcuts : apart from the F9 to F11 keys, you may find a use to this shift-F9 to shift-F11 (If you don't know what it does, try it and mind not only think it's a gadget), but also the TAB ->| and shift TAB ->| keys that while in Expose let us scroll through the open apps.
Otherwise I totally forgot the seamless integration of Expose in drag-and-drop manipulations : pick a file (or an element of any type) from the Finder (or any opened app), activate F9, point with your mouse any window you want the file or the element to be dropped (let's say a SFTP window), but *don't* release the mouse yet, wait for the window to appear or press F9 again and you're there.

"ANFSCD" : gryss and WillGonz, I think neither your proposal are flawless. Reconsider a 95% market-share owning situation. Who's actually getting the remaining 5 ? As you're impliying the attendant is not on the market before but appears, it would result in creating a new situation which development would be hardly determinable. But as WillGonz idea is quite seducing ;) I will submit a new formulation : imagine that Macs are with OS X in favor of gaining more and more popularity (not 5% let's say but 30 to 40), what would you think the reason(s) could be ?
Another idea, OS X has got 95% of the market facing Windows95 that takes the rest, if M$oft release Vista or, let's say any other Windows version (NT4, 2000 or XP for speaking about the least bad ones), would people switch ?

Last and least, as Apple is doing considerable efforts to reduce Mac price, in a 95% etc situation, how much would the price of Macs be cut ???

The link says the account has been suspended.

Anyone have a mirror?

While i do not like the Mac, my brother does and I assume he will like both articles a lot. :)

I can't get this to work in Safari on any of my computers (running Tiger) but it does work with something like TextEdit. Any ideas why?

Actually, you don't have to highlight anything, it's the _selectable_ word under the mouse pointer that will be defined. If you select a word or block of text and move the mouse pointer away, the selection is ignored.

If you keep Cmd+Ctrl pushed and move your pointer, the dictionary applet will move a load the definition for that word. No need to keep the D too.

Note that this will only works with _selectable text_, not with text in the application chrome, like the title of a window or the label of a toolbar button.

Sorry for the slightly off-topic post. I could have sworn the article was asking for suggestions of cool things Macs can do. Then I re-read it and it wasn't!

D'oh!

Cool things Macs can do: I'm a web developer and it's way cool to be able to grab part of the screen (Ctrl-Cmd-Shift-4) and then paste it into an email to send to the developers when I find a layout bug. So much better than a text description of the product.

Sure, you can do that in Windows but you need a third party product.

Now if only I could paste directly into Mantis, our bug-tracking software...


WillGonz: your coment 'If Apple were the 95% market share and Windows came out. Do you think everyone would switch?' has a flaw. Turn it around: If Microsoft were the 95% market share and Macs came out. Do you think everyone would switch? I'd say not or they'd be switching now...

Most people don't want (or can't appreciate) quality, they want what everyone else has.

I can't get this to work. I'm on a G3 (with 10.4.7) and trying to use it on a Safari window. Any guesses as to why? I modified the preferences in Dictionary.app to "Open Dictionary panel", but to no avail.

I just ordered a new 24" imac. I've never owned a Mac so this list is making me really excited for its arrival.

The inverted colors could be a very effective method of dressing your Mac up for Halloween.