Alfred is a productivity app that can do many things. You invoke Alfred with a customizable hot-keys which will bring out the command bar. Enter an app name or search term and Alfred will execute your order. Alfred is an app launcher and a search helper. Alfred can also do basic calculations, check word spellings and helps you issue system commands.
QuickTime Player in OS X Lion has the capability to merge multiple video clips into one movie. Simply drag the clips you want to add into a movie window. QuickTime Player will automatically scales or crops the clips so they match the dimensions of the movie. You can even trim the head or tail of any clips before saving the combined clips as new movie. If your video editing is just trimming and combining clips, instead of the more elaborate iMovie, you can just use QuickTime Player to achieve the same result.
If you find the sidebar icons in Finder and Mail a little too big or small, you can change it from System Preferences.
From System Preferences > General, click on “Sidebar icon size”. A drop-down menu will give the options “Small”, “Medium” and “Large”. The default settings is “Medium”.
If you find the options in System Preferences overwhelming, you can selectively hide those unwanted options from displaying.
Open System Preferences app. Click and hold on the “Show All” button to reveal a drop down menu. Select “Customize…” at the bottom of the menu.
From the customize screen, uncheck those options that you want to hide, and then click the “Done” button to save the changes.
If you use the dock but hate the blue indicator light below open applications, OS X Lion now allows you to turn the lights off. Go to System Preferences > Dock, uncheck “Show indicator lights for open applications”.
OS X Lion comes with a new “iTunes Artwork” screen saver, which displays album covers from your iTunes library as flipping grids of images. When you click on an album cover, the songs from the album will start playing.
The settings for screen saver is under System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver.
AirPrint is the printing module of iOS that enables wireless printing from apps from your iPhone and iPad. However in order to support AirPrint, printers need to have wireless networking feature and specifically enhanced in hardware in order to support AirPrint. You can check out the list of current AirPrint compatible printers from Apple support site. Before you rush out to buy an AirPrint printer specifically, read on.
If your current printer is not AirPrint compatible, you can still enable AirPrint by running an agent software such as AirPrint Activator on your Mac. AirPrint Activator app will broadcast the printers connected on the Mac to your iOS devices via the AirPrint protocol. When you send a print job from iPhone, AirPrint Activator will route the print job to the printer.
The prerequisite for AirPrint Activator is a running Mac in order for the connected printers to be accessible. You also need to enable OS X’s “Printer Sharing” from System Preferences > Sharing.
AirPrint Activator is a third party solution and is not endorsed by Apple. There are other similar apps but AirPrint Activator is recommended as it is simple, it works and it is free (donation is happily welcomed by the developer). Until Apple release similar feature in future OS X, AirPrint Activator is the next best thing without spending the extra for a new printer.
You might be familiar with the File > Duplicate (Command-D) command in Finder. New in OS X Lion is the function “Duplicate Exactly”. You can access Duplicate Exactly by pressing Command-Option-Shift keys while in the File menu. The “Duplicate” menu item will change to “Duplicate Exactly”. Or you can just press the keys Command-Option-Shift-D.
When you choose the normal “Duplicate” command, OS X will create a copy of the file and set the file owner to your login account. “Duplicate Exactly” will create a copy of the file but the ownership of the file follows the source, thus ensuring the exact same file even for file permissions.
New in OS X Lion is the build-in support for Emoji characters. Feeling moody or a little playful? You can now add smiley faces and cute animals to your email, chat or the monthly report. In TextEdit, Pages. iChat or any apps that support this system feature, select from menu File > Special Characters… or press Command-Option-T. A “Characters” window will popup. Select Emoji from the sidebar. Choose the category such as “People” or Nature”, and double-click on a character to place it into your document or chat window.
As you may have discovered by now, OS X Lion has killed the “File > Save As…” command. The change has taken effect in apps such as TextEdit, Preview and Pages. More apps are expected to follow suite when they update to support OS X Lion.
The “File > Save As…” function is now sorted of being replaced by the new “File > Duplicate” command. But there are differences. This is a big deal if you rely heavily on “Save As…” in your document workflow, as the new ”File > Duplicate” command double the steps required.
In the old way using “File > Save As…”, you simply enter a new document name, click the Save button, and you can start working on the new document.
When you issue “File > Duplicate” command, a new document window will appear with a copy of the same document content. You then have to issue “File > Save…” to actually save the new document as file.
This changes might appear more consumer friendly, but it is a pain to adjust to for many who are used to the long time computing “File > Save As…” workflow.
