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It’s been almost a month since Leopard was officially released, and in that month we’ve had some time to play with the OS and get to know it. Here are the Top 15 Leopard Hints we’ve come across this past month (in no particular order).

Collect all windows in one Space When you are in the birds-eye view of Spaces (F8 by default) press the ‘C’ button to collect all open windows into a single space with a nice effect. And if you hold down shift when you hit the ‘C’ key, it will happen in slow motion.

Zoom PDFs and Images in Quick Look If you are browsing PDFs or images in Quick look mode, there is a fast and easy way to zoom in. Simply option-click the window and it will zoom in, and shift-option click and it will zoom out. Alternatively, you can hit Cmd = to zoom in, or Cmd - to zoom out.

Enable the Path Bar in the Finder Go to the view menu in the Finder and click View Path Bar to see the hierarchy of where your file is. You can also control-click or right-click on any of the folders in the path bar, and perform actions on them.

Quickly send a window to a Space Leopard supports “bumping” your windows to other Spaces. Simply drag your window to the edge of your screen, and wait a second. The window will fly over to the adjacent space.

Address Book Effects Now Address Book has the ability to add effects much like Photobooth. Simply click the edit button for one of your contacts, click the pictures, and then click the little “swirl” style button. This allows you to apply many different effects to your photos.

Quickly access System Profiler When diagnosing someone’s mac, you want to get to System Profiler as fast as you can. A little shortcut is to hold down the “option” key on the keyboard while pressing the Apple in the menu bar. The ‘About This Mac’ will turn to ‘System Profiler…”.

Add a ‘recent things’ stack to the Dock You can add a recent applications or documents stack to your dock very easily. Just pop open terminal and enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

Then simply do a KillAll Dock command to reset your Dock, and your new stack will be there. Right-click it to set what you want it to have recent-things of.

Auto Remove Printer after Print One of my pet peeves with Leopard is that the Printer will not automatically quit after it prints. Well, all you have to do is right click on the printer icon in the dock, and hit the “Auto-Quit” option. This will automatically quit the printer after a print job is complete.

Disable Spotlight from the menu bar If you want to get rid of Spotlight from the menu bar, simply open terminal and run:

sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

To re-enable it you just have to run:

sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

Permanently Delete files from Time Machine Backups While navigating Time Machine, go to the present view, and click the little gear icon in the toolbar of the Finder while you have the file you want to delete selected. Simply click the option to Delete all Time Machine backups of this file, and the file will be gone forever.

Quickly enable or disable sharing for a folder If you want to quickly share a particular folder with someone on your local network, click the folder, and hit Cmd-I to bring up the “Get Info” window. From there, simply checkmark the “Share Folder” button, and others will be able to access it over the network.

Unlearn words from the Dictionary Words that you have added to the system dictionary such as “Yurechko” can be unlearned easily in Leopard. All you have to do is right-click on the word that you want to unlearn, and click the unlearn button. This only works in some applications.

Use Expanded print Dialog by default Leopard comes with a very handy expanded Print View which allows you to see previews of what you are printing (very handy for printing websites), however, you always have to click the little arrow button to view it. It you want this expanded view to be the default, simply open Terminal and run:

defaults write -g PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool TRUE

If you want to set it for all users, run:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool TRUE

Switch to lowercase labels in the Finder’s sidebar Many people don’t like the capital letters in the Finder sidebar. In order to change these to lowercase, navigate to

/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/

Duplicate the LocalizableCore.strings file for backup, and then edit lines 50 to 53 to make them lowercase.

“SD5” = “Devices”; “SD6” = “Shared”; “SD7” = “Search for”; “SD8” = “Places”;

Save the file and the open the Terminal and type: ‘killall Finder’

See detailed Airport information Leopard’s wifi capabilities have been dramatically improved. Now, it is even easier to get more information about the access point you are connected to. By option-clicking on the wifi menu bar item, you can see the MAC address, channel, signal strength (RSSI), and even the transmit rate. very handy for mobile users.

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