Brent Kearney

The Apple’s Safari web browser has a few tricks up its sleeve that some people don’t take advantage of. For example, highlight any word (double-click it) and right click on it (or CTRL-click for you one-button mousers) to bring up a simple menu with four useful operations that you can do on that word:

Another nifty feature is the built-in spell checking for web forms — this is actually an OSX “cocoa” feature, so its present in almost all applications. If spell checking is enabled in an application, your misspelled words are underlined in red. Right clicking on those words shows some suggested alternatives that you can choose.

In web text-box areas, you can spell check the entire area, or enable check-as-you-go by right-clicking in the text area, and selecting your desired option from the Spelling menu. This is very handy for doing blog posts!

Today an article in Gizmodo taught me something new: you can look up a word in the dictionary simply by holding the mouse over it and holding down CTRL-Apple-D.

This works in any native (cocoa) Mac OSX application.

Another very useful feature of OSX is the ability to save an image of your desktop — also known as taking a screenshot — at any time by pressing Shift-Apple-3. Perhaps you want just a specific area of the desktop, like a certain image. Thats easy too: press Shift-Apple-4, then use the mouse to select the area of the screen that you’d like a screenshot of. You can save a specific window by pressing Shift-Apple-4-Space – a camera icon appears with which you can select the window to save. Screenshots are saved to PNG files on your desktop, and you can crop them or save them in a different image format using the built-in image viewing program, Preview.

I’m sure there are a lot of other little tricks that are built into OSX as well. If you know of some, I’d love to hear about them.