Buy Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond the Manual
Another one for the Dock. If you hold down the [ctrl]+[shift] keys while you drag your mouse over the dock, the dock will use magnification if it’s turned off in the dock preferences. If Magnification is turned on this trick will prevent magnification. I could see this being useful if you normally keep magnification off and have as extraordinarily large number of open apps that shrink your dock to an uncomfortably small size.
You can access some hidden advanced account options for users (using an account with administrative privileges) by unlocking the the System Preference’s Accounts pane and then “right-clicking” on the user’s name to bring up the contextual menu with only one item: “Advanced Options…”. Many of the options in the resulting “Advanced Options” panel are ones that are best left untouched, but some of these things (Group ID, Login Shell and Aliases) can be particularly useful in some circumstances.
Hold the [shift] key when opening a stack and it will open v e r y s l o w l y.
Actually, holding the shift and selecting “open” from an item contextual menu will cause many Finder items to open in slow motion as well.
With Apple’s note running a Time Machine backup during an Aperture session could lead to “inconsistencies” and suggesting that Aperture uses run Time Machine manually. The big question I hear, is how does one run Time Machine manually?
Option #1 is to select the “Back Up Now” item from Time Machines the contextual menu from the Dock, this of course only works if you have Time Machine on your dock though, but if you are manually managing it, this isn’t a bad idea since the icons presence may remind you to use it every once in a while.
The other option is to simply toggle Time Machine on and off in the Time Machine pane of the System Preferences, when you want to do a backup. This option is not a very useful solution IMO, but it works.
A few things I’d like to see changed…
Currently there is no immediately noticeable way to Automate or Apple Script this to make it a bit easier (Time Machine has no Automator actions or even an AppleScript dictionary attached to it.) I’d really like a way to hook into Time Machine to start backups through the scripting system.
It would also be nice to allow more flexibility in scheduling when Time Machine backs stuff up when it is on. A hint at macosxhints.com shows you how to change the backup interval of Time Machine manually. I’m not sure this is something I’d recommend since I feel it’s a very bad idea to mess around in the System folder. But this does illustrate how easily this feature could be added.
If you’d like to change the dock when located at the bottom of the screen to resemble the dock when it’s at either side you may by running the following commands in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
If you like the style of the dock at the bottom, but want to tweak it’s background or the separator, you can find some hints here for that as well.