Filed under: Video, How-tos, Found Footage, Snow Leopard
Found Footage: Snow Leopard hidden features, great video by a 16 year-old
Matt Fisher is a 16 year old high school junior and Apple enthusiast who has been putting up tutorial videos on all things Macintosh since December of 2008. I just saw one that is so good I wanted to bring it to your attention.
Matt has created a video on hidden features in Snow Leopard and although we have covered some of these before, this you have to see. In four minutes and twenty-nine seconds Matt covers more content than most people can cover in an hour, and he does it with grace and total clarity.
Matt found hidden features in:
- Coverflow
- Spotlight
- Resizing of icons
- Preview viewing modes
- Hiding windows in dock icons
- More organized keyboard shortcuts
- Location based setting of time and date
- Showing the date in the menubar
- Stacks
- Text and symbol substitution
- The re-emergence of the trash 'put back' feature.
Thanks go out to Mustafa Histoni for sending in this tip.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
orangeguy81 said 5:16PM on 9-05-2009
Good job matt. I have always liked your vids.
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waiownsyou said 5:21PM on 9-05-2009
Wow. Thanks for wasting 3+ minutes of my life, TUAW. Those were NOT "hidden" features. They're improvements on a new revision of the OS. You had me thinking there were utilitarian Easter eggs. GTFO
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Mark said 6:31PM on 9-05-2009
I must agree with you. These are the same features that we've been hearing about for months. Nothing new, nothing magical, nothing hidden.
Can I join you and Desterado's little gang of malcontents?
oakie said 7:44PM on 9-05-2009
glad i saw this before wasting 4:30 of my life.
007baf said 6:44PM on 9-07-2009
I disagree. It was well-done and the young man should be congratulated for his work. It may not have all been new information for you, but I think you should be glad a teen is taking time to do things like this vs running around getting in trouble.
Desterado said 5:27PM on 9-05-2009
Hi, I'm Waiownsyou and I complain about EVERYTHING on TUAW!
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shrocket said 5:44PM on 9-05-2009
I don't know if this has been mentioned yet or not (I follow, but perhaps not closely enough): Another change to Preview is how annotation behaves:
1) If you want to annotate something, you (obviously) select some (let's say) text. In Snow Leopard, when you click on the "annotate" button, instead of there being a drop-down menu, there is now a toolbar which appears at the bottom of the window, giving you several annotation options.
2) If you highlight across several lines of text, that annotation is saved as one instance, whereas in Leopard it would have been saved as one highlight per line.
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Josh said 5:51PM on 9-05-2009
Preview also has the ability to export as an ICNS now. Very handy feature, eliminated the need for apps like IMG2ICNS
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David said 6:10PM on 9-05-2009
Nice find but unfortunately it does not act the same way as IMG2ICNS. It doesn't make all the other sizes like (256,128,etc)
David said 6:16PM on 9-05-2009
I find http://iconverticons.com/ very useful for converting images into all kinds of icons.
Josh said 6:59PM on 9-05-2009
@David: This is a quick fix. Apple already provides Icon-specific software in Icon Composer. Sometimes I have needed just one image turned into an ICNS and figured Preview would get the job done but it didn't. Now it does.
Ben King said 6:56PM on 9-05-2009
Thank you for showing us those improvements!
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Marc Tatossian said 6:49PM on 9-05-2009
Good Job. I do Mac vids on YouTube aswell. Nice and informative
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Todd Sieling said 8:05PM on 9-05-2009
Great video. I learned more than a couple new things. Nice work, Matt.
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thatsexytoddguy said 8:10PM on 9-05-2009
Nothing real special. Just give us screen shots next time. We don't need to see your face.
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iGlad said 8:44PM on 9-05-2009
Give the kid a break hey I didn't know some of what he showed so I am ok with him. Thats the problem with Mac being more popular you just don't know the kind of mealy mouthed naysayers who frequent this blog.
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rmanke said 9:17PM on 9-05-2009
This is good, but my favorite tutorials, by a kid is MacintoshMacTutorials on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZa772Hd1Fg&feature=channel_page
This young kid has dozens of actually very interesting videos and they give me a chuckle how smart he is.
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Kevin said 10:03PM on 9-05-2009
@iGlad "mealy mouthed naysayers" - well said!
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Shumanfu said 10:59PM on 9-05-2009
Ok.. vid
But missed my fav feature.. the popping of expose from dock by clicking on dock icons for a few secs
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Wheels said 12:55AM on 9-06-2009
Or...My new favorite:
For an example, if you have multiple finder windows open, and you need to move/copy a file from the current window to a buried window, all you have to do is drag the file to the finder icon in the dock, hold it there until a simulated double click pops up expose, then drag the file to the window where you want to move it to, hold it there until another simulated double click brings the window to the front, and drop the file into the window.
That's just slick!