As part of a longer article about hidden features in hardware and software, Mac OS X is mentioned by Katie Hafner for The New York Times:
Some hidden features, though useful, are too obscure to merit space in a manual, printed or otherwise. Consider the summarizing service that is part of Apple Computer’s OS X operating system. The program will take any document and reduce it to a pithy precis. Yet Apple does not advertise the feature and mentions it only briefly in its online manual.
The summarizing feature is only one of many that are left for the consumer to discover. Each new Macintosh comes with what Apple calls an “up and running” manual, a 30-page booklet that points out basics.
“There are so many hidden gems,” said Ken Bereskin, the director of OS X product marketing at Apple. One such nugget resides on the calculator that comes with the Macintosh. Not only is the calculator buried inside the applications folder, but deep within the functions of the calculator is a currency converter that automatically updates conversion rates.
Full article here.
This reminds us of our article (9/25/2002) about “How to use Mac OS X to zoom in and out with ease” which we will repeat here for those who don’t yet know about this “hidden feature.”
Ever want to peer at something a little more closely, but don’t want to stop, change display properties to a lower resolution, look at whatever it is, then change display properties back to your normal resolution? You don’t have to – if you have Jaguar or Panther. Mac OS 10.2 introduced a lovely new Zoom feature designed for people who need the ability to zoom in and out at will, which covers pretty much all of us:
[Command,Option,*] toggles Zoom on and off. That’s “Apple, Option, Asterisk” in English.
[Command,Option,+] zooms in, centering on the cursor position when Zoom is on. “Apple, Option, Plus Sign”
[Command,Option,-] zooms out. “Apple, Option, Minus Sign”
That’s it! And it zooms waaaaaaaaaaaaay in. Try it. It will zoom out to your display’s current resolution, as you would expect. If you move the cursor while “zoomed” in, you will scroll around the screen. By the way, it’s a neat trick to play on a fellow Mac OS X user – just jump on his or her machine when they’re not looking and zoom really far in, leave it that way and watch them try to figure it out. More options for other accessibility capabilities are in the “Universal Access” pane of System Preferences.