“Lion’s out and there’s a lot of new stuff to explore,” Adam Dachis writes for Lifehacker. “Apple tells you about most of it on their web site, but there are still some secret features you’ll want to know about.”
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Here’s a look at our top 10 secret features in Apple’s Mac OS X Lion:
10. Add New, High-Quality Text-to-Speech Voices
9. Look Up a Word in the Dictionary with Two Taps
8. Create Search Tokens When Searching for Files
7. Group a Bunch of Items into a Folder
6. Add an Event to iCal by Typing a Phrase
5. Share the Screen of an Inactive User
4. Manage Privacy Settings for Any App
3. Automatically Restart When the Computer Freezes
2. Fully Migrate from Windows to Mac OS X Automatically
1. Easily Add a Signature to a PDF Document in Preview
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Scrolling hint: In OS X Lion, imagine a long sheet of paper; pull it down to see the top, push it up to see the bottom.
Signature is very nice feature ….
Well, learning about one new feature outta 10 isn’t so bad.
I guess this means I spend too much time on Mac sites.
Lemme guess: search tokens?
Nah, the per-app privacy settings.
how about encrypting the time machine backups, found that one yet 🙂
i thought new file vault encrytion meant time machine backup is also encrypted…
Text-to-speech at first appeared to be pretty much the same, with the exception of being able to save the speech in iTunes (and then to anywhere you like). But then I stumbled upon Samantha, and wow. I mean the voice. It is nothing short of amazing. Perfect speech. Pronunciation, inflection, everything, right on the money. Couple of other new voices too but Samantha’s is the best (IMHO). You have to download the good ones. Go to System Prefs:Speech, choose the voices that are greyed out and you’ll be asked if you want to d/l them. They’re big, but well worth it.
I totally missed these when walking through things last night. This was one of the first things I looked at ’cause I figured there’d be a new voice or two. Never noticed the “Customize” choice in the voice drop down before. Cool!
As for the file size…heck, I got rid of Office 2004 and old Dreamweaver since they’re PPC only. Seems like a fine trade to me!
Thanks for mentioning this.
Wait it will reboot everytime it freezes?
For what scenario?
Application freeze or osx freeze?
Cause it would be terrible if the mac would restart everytime flash is loaded !! 🙂
Safari 5 does not crash if Flash crashes. You’ll see a panel appear notifying you Flash crashed. You’ll need to restart Safari to reactivate Flash.
If the entire OS freezes in Lion, then auto restart occurs.
Right-click on the area where the flash media was playing when it blew up, and one of the options should be to reload flash. So you don’t have to restart Safari, although that will also work.
One BIG problem I’m having with Lion is that Apple seems to have made most of the fonts a bit SMALLER. iCal font seems WAY smaller. Some of the fonts in Mail can be changed, some CAN’T and are ridiculously small.
Anybody got any ideas on making fonts bigger system-wide?
In iCal, go to View in the menu bar. Choose Make Text Bigger. At its top range it quite beefy.
Thank you!!
Freeze’s? That must be a made up win 8 feature because since moving to a mac I never have system freeze’s anymore. Lion is blazingly fast and robust.
Can anyone else confirm this!!
If you delete an App from iTunes it will delete the app on your IDEv ice too.
Also if you do not sync apps , it will force delete all apps on your IDEvice.
Common sense.
In what way is it common sense?
If you choose to del an app on your mac due to space constraint but want to keep using it on your Idevice… what then?
The same goes if you do not sync apps… why delete it from your idevice?
Yea, not exactly secret as they were all mentioned in the keynote…
How can one change the color of the scroll bar from grey to blue?
Re; Scrolling…
Eventually, most Mac users are going to be iPad users as well.. Can you imagine if Mac and iPad scrolling was different? It might be an annoying frustrating experience… They may as well call it iOS scrolling, right in the Intro screen.
I just wish they would allow me to drag a file from the desktop to a drive on the USB port.
No, I kid you not. For some reason after i installed Lion I can no longer copy files to external drives by dragging and dropping. Anyone else have the same problem.
BTW…i have three iMacs. On two of the macs that I tested this on I had problems.
The third mac is completely missing the AirDrop feature.
I had that initially after install, the USB drive was listed as readonly. I did another full reboot and that seemed to fix it, since it hasn’t been a problem since.
@Derek Currie
Did you get my comment on your comment-less blog of safety? Seems there is no way to get a hold of you or comment on your comment other then here.
You really need to open up your blog to comments, you only let one or two here or there that suits your blather.
Derek Currie….. TAKE DOWN YOUR WALL!!!!
NOW OS X is the safest commonly used OS AFTER the Lion release.
Professional enterprise penetration testers could walk right into Leopard and Snow Leopard at will. But a Pentester commented on how hard Lion was to pwn, even after 2 months of hacking it in developer form. ( we do now have the battery hack that should be fixed when Charlie gives his talk at Black Hat and he releases his patch. We hope Apple will fix it before.) Seems we NOW can now start to believe your rhetoric.
Love Ted
“3. Automatically Restart When the Computer Freezes”…ummmm..Even though I’m still running my 2.0 GHz Late 2006 Intel iMac with 3GB of RAM and Snow Leopard, I honestly can’t recall the last time it crashed. It’s up for weeks at a time without a restart and if memory serves it was well over a year ago that the machine fully locked up and that was only because of a very buggy alpha app, lol…..
Seriously. I’m wracking my brain, trying to remember the last time I had to restart my Mac because of a freeze, and I’m pretty sure I have to go all the way back to 10.1. Mac just don’t freeze, not the whole system anyway, unless you count kernal panics, and those are generally due to dodgy third-party hardware.
——RM