Miscellaneous stupid Mac tricks, cool Mac tricks, and stupid cool Mac tricks Thread

Terminal:

open .
open ~/Documents

Applications:

Command-Click the file name (center top of) to be able to open the file-containing-directory

Finder:

Spacebar gives nice previews of most kinds of files
CMD‑R in any Open File dialogue in any app that uses standard dialogue system calls opens a separate Finder window right in the selected folder path (this one is pretty well known, but pretty damn useful so I am repeating it here).
Now if someone can just tell me how to snap windows next to each other and fix full screen mode (green button)
BetterSnapTool, well worth the (small) price. Or Ventura has "hover over green button to show Tile Window to the Left/Right" and earlier OS versions had long‑press of the green button for the same, but I find BetterSnapTool easier still, as it has drag areas for tiling, customisable per application.
 

Hap

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BetterSnapTool, well worth the (small) price. Or Ventura has "hover over green button to show Tile Window to the Left/Right" and earlier OS versions had long‑press of the green button for the same, but I find BetterSnapTool easier still, as it has drag areas for tiling, customisable per application.
I still use Moom + Stay, I like the arbitrary window size setting and the automatic snap to the correct size/location by Stay on application launch.
 
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xoa

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So here's a little stupid trick I just figured out, which may not be useful going forward, but still saved my bacon (or at least a half hour of driving and $40):
Breaking out of setup flow into normal System Preferences during setup
Situation: in charge of setting up a factory reset/reinstalled used iMac at a client's, they said they had everything including of course the basics of... mouse and keyboard. All I've got with me are phone/MBP. But it turns out the used keyboard was a Logitech wireless one, and like apparently all such keyboards it has zero normal USB functionality. The USB port is only for charging (to my utter fury, how I loathe wireless only keyboards). So system boots into startup flow, I can mouse through it for a bit including skipping connecting it to the network, but then comes the time to make the initial user account and I'm stuck. No dialog for connecting a bluetooth keyboard, and I've got no other keyboard! I'm tooling around when I remembered an old trick for naive kiosks, the good fun of trying to get out of the locked flow they want you in and back out into the full OS. Sure enough once I get to the account page, the field to enter a name is a normal OS native entry widget. That means full right click options are there, including hoorah! Text Substitutions.

Which some Apple dev wanted a way for people to get to directly. So right-click: Substitutions -> Show Substitutions brings up a dialog box, and one of the buttons below is Text Preferences... which sure enough opens up System Preferences to text prefs, and then in turn every other system preference. Then I can connect the bluetooth keyboard and I'm set!

Dunno if this one will ever come up again in my life. Obviously one could just try to ensure always having some old cheap keyboard around, certainly have a half dozen at my office. But being able to break out into full system preferences before actually completing system setup might be handy once in awhile.
 

Jonathon

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Most of these I knew about, but there are a couple that I didn't-- particularly sips, which can do some light image manipulation (no need to break out Imagemagick for basic resize and crop operations at the command line):

https://saurabhs.org/advanced-macos-commands
(I also always forget about pbpaste and pbcopy-- those would be useful in my workflow fairly often if I could remember that they exist.)
 

stevenkan

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I learned this iOS feature pretty recently:

Use Visual Look Up to identify plants, dog breeds, and more from images.
  1. Select a photo. In apps like Notes, Mail, or Messages, touch and hold an image to select it.
  2. Tap the Info button The Detected Item Info button. Or in Safari, tap Look Up in the options menu.
  3. Tap the icon that appears in the photo or below the photo. For example, you might see a paw print icon for pets and animals, or a leaf icon for plants and flowers.
  4. Tap to learn more after Visual Look Up provides results from Siri Knowledge and the web.

Thus far I've used it to ID plants, bugs, dog breeds, cat breeds, and bird species. I'm not sure what else it will ID.
 

leet

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I learned this iOS feature pretty recently:



Thus far I've used it to ID plants, bugs, dog breeds, cat breeds, and bird species. I'm not sure what else it will ID.
It is very useful for determining your penguin type!
Penguin!.jpg












I do use it all of the time to identify plants, having no green thumb. It works pretty well if you take in to consideration that the fewer identifying features (flowers, colors, etc.) a given picture has, the less likely it is to be right.
 

jeanlain

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xoa

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Is this available outside the US?
In terms of languages they only support 6 languages at the time I write this, which presumably will slowly expand. As far as just running the model on photos at all, IIRC it's all done locally and I don't remember hearing about (nor is there any clear reason for) any locale restrictions on that aspect since there is no cloud aspect either. The feature can work for me (just tested on an MBP and iPhone 12) even when fully offline in terms of just recognizing something is a "plant" or the like, and I do not use any sort of iCloud storage stuff. However having said that:
Because it doesn't find any animal or plant in my photos. I'm using the latest macOS. Apple says Monterey supports the feature.
It's super hit&miss IME. I just went through a pile of photos I've taken in the last few months, and it won't identify anything in the majority of them, even in ones like of just my cats, sitting on a fallen dead center of the picture in the woods standing out like sore thumbs on a forest background. Or it'll notice one cat and not another side by side. Or conversely have really weird model hallucinations like leet posted above and a metaphysical penguin is found in a oak tree.

Dunno if they have any specific criteria or the model is just really undeveloped right now but while occasionally it's a neat party trick and might be vaguely useful in search for me right now it's something I don't really use ever too beta. If I want photo identification for now I still exclusively use dedicated apps.
 
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eas

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^ I don't know WTF Apple are doing WRT pattern/face recognition because it doesn't seem to have improved since they first introduced the feature about 10 years ago in iPhoto.
That's not my experience, at all. After every release it finds more people in photos (and accurately classifies them) that have been in my albums all along. At this point it's reached the point of diminishing returns.
 
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Jonathon

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It happened during the Boot Camp time period for the transitioning Windows and Boot Camp users.
The "alt" label has been present on-and-off since the first Apple Extended Keyboard. Its presence (or absence) had nothing to do with Boot Camp.

I think it went away for good on the desktop keyboards with the Magic Keyboard; it's harder to tell when exactly it stopped being printed on the laptop keyboards.
 
I never used a windows keyboard. Some old Mac keyboards had an "alt" key, which may be an AZERTY keyboard specificity.
A1243 (the aluminium wired full‑size keyboard) still has the dual markings with option symbol and 'alt' – I wouldn't count that as that "old" (being one of their best keyboards IMHO). No idea if the ANSI version has it as well, but the EU QWERTY ones do...
 

JimCampbell

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The "alt" label has been present on-and-off since the first Apple Extended Keyboard. Its presence (or absence) had nothing to do with Boot Camp.

I think it went away for good on the desktop keyboards with the Magic Keyboard; it's harder to tell when exactly it stopped being printed on the laptop keyboards.
I remember, back in the mid-90s, you could tell the difference between a 'power user' (remember them?) and a 'casual' by the way they would describe a keyboard shortcut. "CMD-ALT-SHIFT" = power user, "APPLE-OPTION-SHIFT"=casual. :)
 
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grahamb

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The experienced users call it "open-apple" to distinguish it from the "closed apple" key on the other side of the keyboard. This mattered in the Apple // days, but I don't think Macs ever distinguished between the two command keys.
You just unlocked a core memory of the Apple IIGS lab in my elementary school.
 

xoa

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Something I'd missed until now for iOS: apparently a good 8 years ago Apple added a built-in background noise generator. They have balanced white noise, "bright noise", "dark noise", "ocean", "rain", and "stream" options. It's in the highly obvious and easy to notice Settings > Accessibility > Disused Lavatory > Beware of Leopard Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds but then you can have it in Control Center via "Hearing" so easy to turn on and off. Also settings for turning off while other media is playing for example. I can see using this on flights when trying to sleep. I know a lot of people just have MP3s or apps or the like for this but still kind of a neat little thing to have available built-in.
 

xoa

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New dad here - iPhone can now be made to listen for a variety of sounds and alert you. Particularly handy is you are having to focus on work related things and want to make sure you can respond even if you're in a meeting or something:View attachment 61387

Settings >> Accessibility >> Sound Recognition
Oh, very neat, understated but quite useful feature. And honestly wow is a TON of cool/useful stuff that I wouldn't really think of as "accessibility" buried in Accessibility. Like the Auto-Brightness is buried in Display & Text Size, not Display & Brightness top level where I'd expect it, and nothing I can find in CC either. 99% of the time I leave it on auto and am fine with that, but sometimes the phone gets it wrong and I need to manually adjust. Then the only way to get it back is to dig on into settings, very strange, kind of irritating. There was a jailbreak tweak for that but I still don't think anything official?
(also big congratulations new dad!)
 

Jonathon

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Auto-brightness used to be right underneath the brightness slider on the Display settings page (or Brightness, depending on just how far you go back)... not sure exactly when it was taken out, or why.

There's a lot of stuff in Accessibility on both iOS and Mac; worth digging through there to see if there's anything that might be useful to you. (Just be warned that there are a couple settings in there, like Voiceover, that dramatically change how your device works when turned on-- pay attention before flipping switches and don't blindly click through confirmation dialogs.)
 
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cateye

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Something I'd missed until now for iOS: apparently a good 8 years ago Apple added a built-in background noise generator.

I love this feature, especially when traveling. I have some pretty profound issues with insomnia and waking up too easily, and use a white noise generator at home to help. I used to have to either pack it in my luggage or do without when traveling. Now I can just use my iPad. I wish there were more ways to customize the sound output, but as a free feature, i'm not complaining.
 

Jonathon

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I love this feature, especially when traveling. I have some pretty profound issues with insomnia and waking up too easily, and use a white noise generator at home to help. I used to have to either pack it in my luggage or do without when traveling. Now I can just use my iPad. I wish there were more ways to customize the sound output, but as a free feature, i'm not complaining.
If you’re looking for something with more options, the MyNoise app is pretty nice. Has a bunch more sound choices than just simple white noise, but the white noise generator itself is free and works well.

I’ve gotten better about remembering to pack my white noise generator when I travel (I find white noise more effective when the source is further away from me than I’d prefer to keep my phone), but it’s my go-to backup if I forget it.
 
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VirtualWolf

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If you’re looking for something with more options, the MyNoise app is pretty nice. Has a bunch more sound choices than just simple white noise, but the white noise generator itself is free and works well.
Seconding MyNoise, it's got an incredible range of background noise generators. I haven't used it pretty much since the pandemic hit, but it's delightful being able to queue up a nice rainstorm or the sound of an autumn in the forest and just tweak the soundscape to exactly how you like it.