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Getting Around Mac OSX 

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PCQ Bureau
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Everyone who's ever used Mac OSX Panther will appreciate its speed, stability and user interface. Whilst most of its features are quite popular, some of them are underutilized or not known at all. This article highlights some of these.

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Services



One most underutilized feature of Mac OSX is Services. Services provide an excellent medium of inter-application communication when you are sitting at the application menu. For example, Services allow you to select text in your Mail and put it into your to-do list in Stickies, without ever leaving Mail. 



Services come in very handy when you wish to e-mail text from a Web page. Just select the text in Safari, go to Services>Mail and click on 'Send Selection'. And the advantage is that you could have been in any Cocoa application that supports services (most do, nowadays) instead of Mail or Safari in the examples above. Any Cocoa application can expose Services of its own for other applications to utilize. 

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Expose



If you haven't used Expose, you have probably not seen anything as far as OSX is concerned. Expose is the most convenient way of switching windows. Expose resizes all open application windows so that you can view them all at the same time. Other modes allow you to view open windows of the current application only and provide quick access to the desktop. All this is instantaneous and is only a hot key/hot corner away. In fact, I have become so accustomed to using this feature that I find myself moving my mouse to the bottom left corner (my preferred hot corner) even when I am working in Windows. F11 is the default shortcut for the 'all windows' mode while F12 is that for the 'current app windows' mode. You can change this or enable/disable Expose by going to System Preferences>Expose. 



Note: Try Expose when a movie is playing. It will resize the movie and keep playing it as well, without skipping a beat.

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One of the many useful features of the Mac is Services. You can select text from your mail and directly put it in your to-do list in Stickies

Labels and PDF creation



Two more fabulous features of Mac OSX are labels and the built-in PDF generation support. Labels are a good way of classifying and quickly finding important files in a folder. For example, you can prioritize files within a folder using labels-red for high priority, blue for low priority, etc. You can also allocate your own labels instead of the default ones by making relevant changes in Finder>Preferences.

Another feature that you can use is the anywhere PDF generation. Did you know that any application that can print in Mac OSX can also create PDFs? The 'Save as PDF' option on the Print dialog (File>Print in most applications) is one way of saving Web pages, creating resumes and more. All this can be done easily without involving the hassles of any third-party plug-ins.

Kunal Dua

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