Pinch to Zoom in TextEdit, Preview, and
Safari
You can use two finger gestures to zoom in
and out in TextEdit documents and in Preview: spread your fingers apart to zoom
in, and pinch them together to zoom out. This also works in Safari, as long as
you have only one tab open. If you have multiple open tabs, this gesture does
something different.
Text
Edit - On My Mac. When you choose File/Open in a Mountain
Quickly Change Outgoing Email Accounts
Prior to OS X Lion, you could create
keyboard shortcuts for switching outgoing mail accounts. That ability vanished
in Lion, but it’s returned in Mountain Lion.
To implement it, go to the Keyboard pane of
System Preferences, and click on Application Shortcuts. Click on the plus-sign
button (+), and choose Mail from the Application menu. Then enter the name of
your account exactly as it appears in the From pop-up menu when you create a
new message. It will look like this: first_name Last_name Be@my_host. Make sure
to include the angle brackets that enclose the email address, and put a space
before the first bracket. Choose a shortcut, and then click Add.
To use your new shortcut, create a new
message in Mail. If the default account isn’t the one you want to use, press
your shortcut to select another account.
Collect RSS Feed URLs from Mail
OS X Mountain Lion removed RSS
functionality from both Mail and Safari. To transfer your feeds to another RSS
reader, you can collect all the URLs of your subscribed feed by running the
following command in Terminal: pubsub list client com.apple.mail.
This produces a list of your feed names and
their URLs. You can then copy the URLs for those feeds and add them to your
chosen RSS reader app.
Use Quick Look to View Inline Graphics
in Messages
Previously in Chat, you could open the
iChat File Transfers window, select a graphic someone had sent you in a chat
and then press the spacebar to preview it in Quick Look.
In Mountain Lion, this no longer works. You
can, however, click on the graphic in the Messages window, and then press the
spacebar to view the image in Quick Look. You can also double-click the image
to do the same thing; in iChat, this would open the image in Preview.
Previously
in Chat, you could open the iChat File Transfers window, select a graphic
someone had sent you in a chat and then press the spacebar to preview it in
Quick Look.
Add Default Fonts to Notes
Out of the box, Notes offers only three
default fonts (Noteworthy, Marker Felt and Helvetica), and there’s no option in
the app’s preferences or menus to change them or add others. There is, however,
another way to add fonts.
Control-click (or right-click) on the Notes
application, select Show Package Contents, and navigate to Con
tents/Resources/en.Iproj/ DefaultFonts.plist. Open this file in a text editor
and look for three sets of text that each look like this:
<dict>
<key>Font Name</key>
<string>Noteworthy-Light</string>
<key>Size</key>
<integer>15</intege r>
</dict>
Copy one of those sections, paste it below
those three sections, and edit its text to include your preferred font and
size. (You can consult the lists in Font Book to get the names of your fonts.)
Note that you can specify weight as part of the name: -Light, -Bold, and so on.
Save the file (you’ll probably need to provide your administrator credentials),
relaunch Notes, and then choose your new default font from Format > Font>
Default Font.
Any PDF with Lines and Rectangles Acts
Like a Form in Preview
Any PDF file with horizontal lines and
rectangles can be filled in as if it were a PDF form, even if it wasn’t
originally intended to be used that way. Clicking on a line opens a text field
that’s the same width as the line. Clicking on a small rectangle toggles a
checkmark; a rectangle large enough for text entry is treated not as a checkbox
but as a text field the same width as the box. After you enter text on a line
or in a text box, you can move the text elsewhere in the document and retain
its formatting.
If you want to create an actual PDF form
with entry lines and boxes, create a new document in Pages or Word, and add
lines and rectangles. Try different sizes to see how they work. Press X-P,
click on the PDF button at the bottom of the Print dialog box, and choose Save
As PDF. Open the PDF and start typing above horizontal lines and inside
rectangles.
Quick-Edit Reminders Details
You can edit the name of a reminder by
double-clicking on it, as you would any bit of text in a word processor or text
editor. But you can also edit its details by double-clicking somewhere in the
title line other than on the title text; that will open the item’s Inspector
window. You can, of course, also select a reminder and press X-l or click on
the ‘I’ icon to summon the same window.
You
can edit the name of a reminder by double-clicking on it, as you would any bit
of text in a word processor or text editor.
Drag Emails to Create Reminders
Many people use their email inbox as a kind
of to-do list. Using the Reminders app in OS X and its ability to sync with the
iOS version of the app via iCloud you can convert such emails into Reminders
tasks. To do so, you just drag an email to the Reminders app. However, the
process is a bit finicky.
First, if you want to add the email message
to a list that has no reminders in it, you just drag the message from Mail to
the name of the empty list in the Reminders section of Mail’s sidebar. (If
lists aren’t showing, choose View> Show Sidebar.)
If you’re adding the message to a list that
already contains one or more reminders, you can drag the message to the name of
the list in the sidebar, and the item will be added to the bottom of the list.
If you want to place it in a particular position in that task list, drag the message
into the list itself and position it wherever you want. However you choose to
place it, you can click the Show In Mail link in the Reminders app to display
the original message.
X-Drag to Terminal to Change Directory
If you use Terminal, you probably already
know that you can drag a file or folder onto the Terminal window to insert the
item’s path in a command. With Mountain Lion, however, this method has changed
slightly.
If you hold down the X key while dragging
an icon to a Terminal window, that will change the current working directory to
either the one you dragged (if it’s a folder) or the directory containing the
item you dragged (if it’s a file). This means Terminal not only accepts the
path of the item, but also performs a cd command with that file.
As in earlier versions of OS X, you can
also drag a folder onto the Terminal icon in the Dock to change the working
directory for the command line. If you drag a file onto the Terminal icon,
nothing happens.
If
you use Terminal, you probably already know that you can drag a file or folder
onto the Terminal window to insert the item’s path in a command.
