This is a neat little tool. I had no idea that was hiding in there. Anyone have any other little hidden gems on MacOS?
Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem.
One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.
Finder's column view is also excellent. I think it's the best way to navigate the filesystem through GUI; the way it displays nested directories is just super nice. It makes me wonder why other OS don't haven't copied this layout in their filesystem explorer.
Grapher.app is also perhaps a hidden gem.
Looks like it’s been updated, I don’t remember the different zoom type options. Maybe I just never discovered them.
The biggest drawback is it affects the entire machine, you can’t enable the conditioner on a per-process basis, so it can be a bit rough on the other “normal” usage of the machine.
There’s also a version on iOS.
When you're taking a screenshot of a portion of the screen you can hold the spacebar to move the rectangle around.
It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.
The diagnostics data file is annoying to read, too...
There's also tool in the AppStore called WiFi Explorer that may be more what you're looking for.
On a related note, these hidden features are really annoying. How hard would it be to have a WiFi diags link in the WiFi dropdown? Why does Apple think that hiding things makes for a better user experience? Is it so that the people in the know get to feel like arcane knowledge masters? As it is, I have started randomly holding down option and command to see if there are hidden options. /rant Does anyone know of a site that catalogs these hidden macos options?
Option-click is pretty much the only trick used for menus, and it's fairly universal across the nearly 80 years of Mac. The incidence of people that would be helped by those graphs, and the people that option-click is pretty high, so this seems like a great combination. It's similar to option-letter for inputting characters not on the keyboard (alt-code on Windows).
Exposing my parents to one more menu item that will never help them, and mostly confuse them and reduce their scanning speed, well, that's really not worth it. Every option has a cost, and different people bear the weight of that cost differently. Some people like having 30 different brands of canned tomatoes to choose from at the grocery store. Others would prefer 2 or even 1, that are more carefully curated. My favorite grocer is like this. It's a tiny store, an eighth the size of a super market or less, but has a better butcher, better basic groceries, and a more extensive selection of rarer ingredients than a Safeway. It just doesn't have an entire aisle of pasta brands. That's not for everyone, but it is for me. The Mac also doesn't have to be for everyone, it for the people it fits, it fits really well.
2021 - 1984 == 37
Far better than when the surprise fades into realization that the measurement is accurate, and that your internal estimate of time acceleration needs updating!
You can get shockingly far just by holding the "Option" key while taking a lot of actions/looking at a lot of menus. Always the first thing I try.
Can you elaborate on that a bit, please?
You don't mean Apple's implemented the Wi-Fi autoconfig functionality Ubuntu failed to deliver in ~2008, do you?
Because if they have... they'll have done it... correctly.
If the binary and/or supporting libraries have any references to FieldAgents in them... we're doomed. That's Skynet, right there.
It's a reference to https://xkcd.com/416/.
:P
As an example, I have shell aliases setup to cd into the folder(s) open in Finder or reference files selected in Finder.