Category: Mac & OS X

OS X Mountain Lion to fix full screen support on multiple displays

When Apple releases Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) next month, we’ll be treated to hundreds of new features. But one of the most exciting for me is the ability to take advantage of multiple displays when in full screen mode.

Currently, if you have more than one display and you enter full screen mode, your secondary display is rendered completely useless. With Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to have enter full screen mode on one display and still use the secondary display for other tasks.

When Lion shipped, I wasn’t immediately in love with full screen mode, but it wasn’t long before I wished it worked on both my displays independently. This will be a very welcome feature!

[box type=”note”]It has been brought to my attention that this new functionality will NOT allow full use of the second display. Apparently, you’ll ONLY be able to use the second display for windows of the app that is currently in full screen mode. If true, this will truly suck![/box]

8 handy Safari keyboard shortcuts I use every day

Apple Safari

  • View current page in Reader – Command + Shift + R
  • Scroll down by one screen – Spacebar
  • Scroll up by one screen – Shift + Spacebar
  • Empty browser cache – Command + Option + E
  • View page source – Command + Option + U
  • Show Reading List – Command + Shift + L
  • Open link in a new tab – Command + Click any link
  • Mail current web page link – Command + Shift + I

These are just my favorite shortcuts, but you can view a full searching for ‘shortcuts’ under Safari’s Help menu.

Learn your keyboard shortcuts with CheatSheet for Mac

CheatSheetKnowing and using keyboard shortcuts can save an incredible amount of time over the period of a full work day. Not to mention it doesn’t stop the flow of creativity.

Having used the Mac since the mid 80s, and Adobe Creative Suite apps just as long, my brain is trained to use keyboard shortcuts. I can’t remember the last time I moused up to the menubar for something that has a keyboard shortcut available.

Learning keyboard shortcuts can take a long time, but a clever Swedish developer has created CheatSheet for the Mac OS X 10.7 that displays all the available keyboard shortcuts for the app you’re working in with the click of a button.

CheatSheet

Learning keyboard shortcuts is made easy with CheatSheet

CheatSheet is a faceless application. There is no interface, no preferences to set. You simply hold the Command key down and a large white overlay appears which displays all the keyboard shortcuts. CheatSheet runs on Lion only, and is free.

Ambient sounds from Elsewhere for Mac

I’m the type of person that can’t work without some sort of sound. I mean I absolutely hate quiet – it’s maddening to me. But there are times when I’m trying to concentrate on a project or simply read an article on a website, and a podcast or my favorite iTunes playlist is just too distracting. This is where a little ambient sound comes in handy.

Ambient sounds from ElsewhereElsewhere is a new app from Eltima Software, makers of the popular Folx downloader and Elmedia Player apps. Elsewhere’s purpose is simply to provide ambient sounds on your Mac to help you relax or concentrate.

The app looks absolutely gorgeous, and is simple to use. You invoke Elsewhere’s interface by clicking the icon in the menubar. You simply choose which type of ambient sounds you wish to hear – forest, beach or city, and whether you want to hear day or night sounds. You can also adjust the volume in the window, as well as pause the sounds if you need to.

The preferences are simple, you can set Elsewhere to launch at login time, and switch between day and night ambient sounds automatically.

The beauty of Elsewhere, besides its simple interface, is that you don’t notice any audible looping of the sounds. They appear to go on forever as if you were sitting in the location the sounds are coming from.

I’m not much for one-trick ponies, but this app could only be made better by adding the peaceful sounds of a mountain stream.

Elsewhere is normally $4.99 on the Mac App Store, but is on sale for 99¢ at the time of this review. Because the Mac App Store doesn’t offer demo versions, you can visit the Elsewhere web page for a working preview of the sounds.

How to make navigating between Safari tabs suck less

Safari Browser

Here's how to make Safari's tab navigation not suck!

With the release of Mac OS X Lion, I switched back to Safari as my main browser. Almost all the extensions I want are available for it, and it’s much less buggy than Google Chrome was beginning to be. But there are a few things that bother me about Safari, one of which is the way you navigate between open tabs.

With every other browser, you can navigate between open tabs by hitting Command + the tab number (#2 would open the second tab from the left, #3 the third, etc.). But with Safari, hitting Command + a number opens the link number of whatever is in your bookmark bar. Handy if you actually have bookmarks in your bookmark bar, but I have nothing but folders. Hitting Command + Shift + } four times to reach the fifth tab from the left is a pain because it requires both hands.

Thankfully, Olivier Poitrey offers SafariTabSwitching, a SIMBL plugin that brings the Command + number feature to Safari. I’ve been using it so long that I actually forgot where I got it from. It’s quite a nice add-on, and I’ve never had a problem using it. The only foreseeable issue is that it is a SIMBL plugin, which Apple doesn’t condone, and could cease to function at any OS update in the future if Apple so chooses – such as OS X Mountain Lion, due later this summer.

Apple is missing one killer option with OS X’s Full Screen feature

Full Screen iconWhen Apple announced the Full Screen feature in Lion I was quite skeptical of it. I really didn’t see the value of it from what I read. Of course, once Lion shipped and I gave Full Screen a try, I love it. It’s not just that it provides a distraction-free workspace, but when I use gestures to swipe between apps, I just feel more productive; much more so than using the application switcher, Mission Control or switching apps with the Dock icons.

Unfortunately the one feature that would make Full Screen much more valuable to me, and one that should be painfully obvious to Apple, is missing. The ability to set Full Screen as the preferred viewing method in the preferences would be a killer option.

Apple being Apple, if they were to implement this feature, they would probably put it in the System Settings and it would be an “all-or-nothing” option. But to me, that option would be a different devil in the same hell.

Putting the option in an individual application’s preferences won’t work, because we would be reliant upon the individual app developer to actually code this feature into their apps; and we simply can’t expect every developer to support this feature, at least not yet. But here’s an idea… (more…)

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