Concealed Intent Mac OS

The Mac OS is chock full of hidden areas where data, information, or features have been secreted away from Mac users. One of these clandestine locations is the users library folder, commonly written out as /Library/. What's In Your Library? Although hidden, the users library folder contains quite a lot of useful information. Mac OS X allows you to quickly summarize long pieces of text in just a few seconds. To summarize a text first select it, right click on the selection and click on 'Summarize'. To enable the summary feature, click on the app name in the status bar ('Chrome' for instance) Services Services Preferences scroll down and check.

1. Concealed Intent Mac Os Download
2. Concealed Intent Mac Os X

It works in 10.3.9 as well. Seems to put the most recently-used (clicked) window at the front, with title bars in 'cascade' fashion, but not resizing the windows, just moving the title bar to the cascade position. How long has that been there I wonder. If it had been just 10.4 I'd have thought they were targeting the 'switchers' from Windows, but it's not so obvious.

But the option to kill all other tabs is mega!!!

Other day guy walked into my office.
'What's the exchange rate for the NTD?'
Aha! Dashboard.

Yes. If nobody did, there wouldn't be about a zillion widgets available for it.
I use about 3 or 4 regularly.

While the 'arrange in front' menu option doesn't appear in Omniweb (5.1b), there is an interesting 'option' that appears in the File.. menu - 'Save as PDF'.
Very useful!
(I went and tried holding option down on a load of apps too.. ;-))

I don't know. I've known Windows users who say this has been one of the weaknesses of MacOS. I know there are situations where I wish I could cascade a bunch of Windows. And my experience shows that the current active window is the one that ends up in front. But more testing is required.
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Eric
Ernest Hemingway's writing reminds me of the farting of an old horse. - E.B. White

Also, in the 'Window' menu item, 'Minimize' changes to 'Minimize All' which could be useful.

This doesn't work in Transmit 3.2 on my machine. The rest – fine. Just not in Transmit. Nor do any optional menu commands come to think of it.

It's not just the Window menu that has the option key feature.
Try the other menus in Finder and Safari.
You can empty the trash without the dialog.

This also seems to affect the 'apple'-menu where 'Reboot..' changes to 'Reboot' without the dots, the same goes with 'Shut down..' and 'Log out [username]..'. Also the 'Log out'-option changes it keyboard shortcut when holding down the alt-key.

for those of you not familiar with the ellipsis, in the menu, they mean that there will be a dialog box if you choose that item.
Therefore the choosing these items with the option key down will activate the command chosen with no user feed back.

The 'Arrange Windows in Front' command has been around in most previous versions of Mac OS X. It is not just limited to Tiger. Likewise the other options people are talking about: Reboot, Logout, etc., have also behaved differently with the option key held down. The general behavior of the option-key revealing hidden items in menus has been around since Mac OS 7 (for those programs that used the popular Mercutio MDEF) and the modification of behaviors with the option key held down has been an integral part of the Mac for as long as I can remember.
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| slur was here
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You are right; option key has had the affect of providing an optional action ever since it appeared on the keyboard, but a) I'd never seen window cascade before - may not be new to tiger, but still faily new - and b) lots of people here have now been scurrying around their Mac UIs looking for other uses of it, so that can't be a bad thing.
:-)

Way to go! This hint is falling very short of its potential. :)
You can press and release the option key while a menu is open to see what changes. It works on right-click (context) menus as well, so you can right-click on a file in Finder, and use the option key to select 'Always Open With..' right from the menu.
In the Finder option-context-menu, you can also open the Inspector Window (which I'd never heard of before). This stays open, and always shows the properties of whatever file is currently selected.

Thanks for bringing up the CM aspect of this opt key behavior! I discovered that when ctrl-clicking a Safari link, and hitting opt, 'Download Linked File' becomes 'Download Linked File as..' allowing me to choose where to save each file. VERY USEFUL!! Now if only I could set this as the Safari's default behavior!

You can also hold down option while clicking the green resize button and the same cascading will occur :)

This is kind'a VERY OLD NEWS!
I can remember back to QuickTime Player 3 (or Movie Player 3 as I think it was called then), here you had tons of ALTERNATE OPTIONS becomming available in the menus when you held down the ALT/OPTION-key.
So the recent things that are 'brought to live' in Tiger actually has it's methods from almost a decade ago!!!

In addition to omniweb and transmit mentioned above, it doesn't work in firefox, Microsoft Word (so I'm assuming all of Office), subethaedit, pixadex, superduper, notetaker or iterm. It does work for the window menu of newsfire, iBiz and TextMate but not the file menu. The Adobe and Macromedia suites seem to use a different menu layout for their window menus so there isn't a bring all to front to change. *shrug*

It actually orders the windows alphabetically by title

No, this is very helpful! I use two monitors at work. When I come home, some of my windows are off-screen, and I can't get to them. The Gather Windows option in display preferences is disabled in single monitor mode for some annoying reason, so this option just saved me. In windows, you just hit alt-space and 'm' to move your windows manually, but you can't do anything like that on Mac. Thanks for this posting. I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

When the proverbial manure hits the fan and prevents your Mac from booting as you want, knowing the right startup key combination can save the day, whether you boot into Safe Mode, Recovery, Apple Diagnostics, or from another disk entirely.

Here are fifteen startup key combinations that can save the day when things go wrong. Itinerant mind colony mac os. Not all are useful on today's Macs, but we wanted the list to be complete.

This also seems to affect the 'apple'-menu where 'Reboot..' changes to 'Reboot' without the dots, the same goes with 'Shut down..' and 'Log out [username]..'. Also the 'Log out'-option changes it keyboard shortcut when holding down the alt-key.

for those of you not familiar with the ellipsis, in the menu, they mean that there will be a dialog box if you choose that item.
Therefore the choosing these items with the option key down will activate the command chosen with no user feed back.

The 'Arrange Windows in Front' command has been around in most previous versions of Mac OS X. It is not just limited to Tiger. Likewise the other options people are talking about: Reboot, Logout, etc., have also behaved differently with the option key held down. The general behavior of the option-key revealing hidden items in menus has been around since Mac OS 7 (for those programs that used the popular Mercutio MDEF) and the modification of behaviors with the option key held down has been an integral part of the Mac for as long as I can remember.
---
|
| slur was here
|

You are right; option key has had the affect of providing an optional action ever since it appeared on the keyboard, but a) I'd never seen window cascade before - may not be new to tiger, but still faily new - and b) lots of people here have now been scurrying around their Mac UIs looking for other uses of it, so that can't be a bad thing.
:-)

Way to go! This hint is falling very short of its potential. :)
You can press and release the option key while a menu is open to see what changes. It works on right-click (context) menus as well, so you can right-click on a file in Finder, and use the option key to select 'Always Open With..' right from the menu.
In the Finder option-context-menu, you can also open the Inspector Window (which I'd never heard of before). This stays open, and always shows the properties of whatever file is currently selected.

Thanks for bringing up the CM aspect of this opt key behavior! I discovered that when ctrl-clicking a Safari link, and hitting opt, 'Download Linked File' becomes 'Download Linked File as..' allowing me to choose where to save each file. VERY USEFUL!! Now if only I could set this as the Safari's default behavior!

You can also hold down option while clicking the green resize button and the same cascading will occur :)

This is kind'a VERY OLD NEWS!
I can remember back to QuickTime Player 3 (or Movie Player 3 as I think it was called then), here you had tons of ALTERNATE OPTIONS becomming available in the menus when you held down the ALT/OPTION-key.
So the recent things that are 'brought to live' in Tiger actually has it's methods from almost a decade ago!!!

In addition to omniweb and transmit mentioned above, it doesn't work in firefox, Microsoft Word (so I'm assuming all of Office), subethaedit, pixadex, superduper, notetaker or iterm. It does work for the window menu of newsfire, iBiz and TextMate but not the file menu. The Adobe and Macromedia suites seem to use a different menu layout for their window menus so there isn't a bring all to front to change. *shrug*

It actually orders the windows alphabetically by title

No, this is very helpful! I use two monitors at work. When I come home, some of my windows are off-screen, and I can't get to them. The Gather Windows option in display preferences is disabled in single monitor mode for some annoying reason, so this option just saved me. In windows, you just hit alt-space and 'm' to move your windows manually, but you can't do anything like that on Mac. Thanks for this posting. I wouldn't have found it otherwise.

When the proverbial manure hits the fan and prevents your Mac from booting as you want, knowing the right startup key combination can save the day, whether you boot into Safe Mode, Recovery, Apple Diagnostics, or from another disk entirely.

Here are fifteen startup key combinations that can save the day when things go wrong. Itinerant mind colony mac os. Not all are useful on today's Macs, but we wanted the list to be complete.

Option: Invoke Startup Manager — The first startup key every Mac user should know is the Option key. Press and hold Option as your Mac boots to enter the Startup Manager, which lets you select which disk to boot from.

Startup Manager is primarily useful for booting from an alternative drive, like a system clone, USB thumb drive, or a Boot Camp partition. However, you can also use it to force a boot from your primary drive if your Mac is stubbornly booting from another disk. Startup Manager may also help identify a flaky hard drive; if the drive you're looking for doesn't appear in Startup Manager, you know you have a problem.

If you have a bootable external drive, booting from that drive can also help you isolate problems or provide a different environment, such as a different version of OS X.

T: Target Disk Mode — What if you want to boot from another Mac's drive using Startup Manager? You can connect the Macs via FireWire or Thunderbolt, and then put the other Mac into Target Disk Mode, which lets it serve as an external drive. Hold T during boot to enter this mode. If either Mac lacks a FireWire or Thunderbolt port, you're out of luck.

In addition to troubleshooting, Target Disk Mode can also be useful for quickly transferring many gigabytes of files. And if your main Mac's display fails, you can use Target Disk Mode to turn it into the boot drive for another Mac with a working screen.

Shift-Control-Option: Reset the SMC — When your Mac is exhibiting truly odd behavior, it may be worth resetting the System Management Controller (SMC), which controls all manner of things, such as batteries, keyboard backlight, and cooling fans. Apple lists all the things an SMC reset can fix.

On desktop Macs, you reset the SMC by unplugging the power cable for 15 seconds, plugging it back in, and turning the Mac on after 5 seconds. On older Mac notebooks, you can reset the SMC by removing the battery and power adapter, holding down the power button for 5 seconds to drain the capacitors, reinserting the battery, and turning it back on again.

However, for newer Mac notebooks, where it's impossible to remove the battery, you need to know this key combo: Shift-Control-Option, using the keys on the left side of the keyboard. Shut down your Mac, connect it to power, press Shift-Control-Option, and then press the power button while holding those keys down. Release the keys and press the power button again to fire up the Mac with a fresh set of SMC settings.

Command-Option-P-R: Reset NVRAM — The other quick fix is resetting Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM), which you do by holding Command-Option-P-R during startup. The Mac startup chime should sound a second time. After that, release the keys. (The reason for using P and R in the key combination is that Apple used to call this bit of non-volatile memory 'PRAM,' for Parameter RAM.)

NVRAM controls things like speaker volume, screen resolution, and startup drive selection. Like an SMC reset, an NVRAM reset can fix a host of seemingly random issues.

Shift: Safe Mode — If your Mac gets stuck during the boot process, booting in Safe Mode might help you diagnose what's wrong. To invoke Safe Mode, hold the Shift key while booting. It does a few things:

• Verifies and repairs your startup disk
• Loads only essential kernel extensions
• Ignores startup and login items
• Disables user-installed fonts
• Deletes all system cache files

Simply booting in Safe Mode may solve your problem, if it was related to directory corruption or a messed-up cache file. If a Safe Mode boot works fine, try a regular boot immediately, and if it proceeds normally, you're all set.

However, if your Mac boots fine in Safe Mode, but has problems otherwise, you probably have a software problem related to something that loads at startup. You might guess that a third-party kernel extension was the culprit, but it could also be a corrupt font. Start poking around in the various Library folders on your Mac.

(If all you want to do is disable login items, press Shift when you click the Log In button in the login window, or as soon as you see the progress bar in the startup screen. Release it when you see the Desktop or Dock.)

Command-R: Recovery — Every modern Mac can boot into a special mode called Recovery, which provides tools to resolve a variety of problems. The system disk of most Macs contains a small partition containing a stripped-down version of OS X, which you can boot from by holding Command-R as your Mac boots. If the recovery partition is missing for some reason, you can load the Recovery software from the Internet by holding Command-Option-R at startup. Needless to say, loading Internet Recovery takes quite a bit longer; happily, it does provide a time estimate.

Recovery gives you seven options:

• Restore from a Time Machine Backup: You do have a Time Machine backup, right? Right?
• Reinstall OS X: You don't have to wipe your disk and start from scratch; this option reinstalls the currently installed version of OS X over your existing install, which can fix missing or corrupted system files. If you use Internet Recovery, you get the version of OS X that originally came with your Mac instead.
• Get Help Online: This option opens Safari so you can browse Apple's support site for help.
• Disk Utility: Clicking this item in the list brings up the Disk Utility app, which can check and repair your disks. If absolutely necessary, you can use Disk Utility to erase your system disk, onto which you can then restore your data from Time Machine. (You do have that backup, right?)
• Firmware Password Utility: Choose Utilities > Firmware Password Utility to launch this app, which lets you set and turn off a firmware password. You might want to enable a firmware password to make Find My Mac more secure (see 'Disable Find My Mac by Resetting NVRAM,' 22 July 2016).
• Network Utility: Also available from the Utilities menu, Network Utility lets you test local and Internet connectivity using tools like Netstat, Ping, Traceroute, and more. It's more easily used when the Mac isn't in Recovery mode, but it's here if you need it.
• Terminal: For those who are more comfortable at the command line, you can also launch Terminal from the Utilities menu. It's a stripped-down installation that may lack some of the Unix tools you're accustomed to having, but you can move around, look at files, and delete things. Be careful!

D: Apple Diagnostics — If nothing mentioned so far is solving your problem, your Mac might be suffering from a hardware issue. Hold D at startup to boot into Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics.

Which you get depends on the age of your Mac; Macs produced before June 2013 have Apple Hardware Test, while later Macs have Apple Diagnostics. They do basically the same thing, but Apple Hardware Test is a blast from the past — it looks like the old, pre-OS X Mac OS! Apple Diagnostics is a lot slicker looking and more or less automatic, while you have to click a button to start Apple Hardware Test. Apple Hardware Test also gives the option of an extended test, which takes a lot longer and isn't usually necessary. Apple recommends disconnecting all external devices except the keyboard, mouse, display, and Ethernet adapter before starting either test.

If you can't boot into one of these tests for some reason, try holding Option-D instead to load an Internet-based hardware test.

Command-V: Verbose Mode — Holding Command-V during startup puts your Mac in verbose mode. Instead of a tasteful gray screen, you see every single Unix system message as your Mac boots. Verbose mode could be useful for troubleshooting if you're already a Unix expert; otherwise it's mostly amusing to watch.

Command-S: Single-User Mode — To go one step beyond verbose mode, hold Command-S during boot, which puts your Mac in single-user mode. After the Mac finishes displaying all the Unix messages during its boot sequence, you're given a command-line prompt, just as though you were in Terminal. As with using Terminal from Recovery, single-user mode is useful mostly if you're already comfortable in Unix. Some people use single-user mode to run the Unix fsck utility, although it's easier to boot into Safe Mode or run Disk Utility from Recovery for that purpose.

To leave single-user mode and continue booting, type exit and press Return. Or, to start over, type reboot and press Return.

Neither single-user mode nor verbose mode is accessible if you have a firmware password enabled.

Concealed Intent Mac Os Download

C: Boot from Removable Media — If you hold the C key during boot, the Mac will start up from removable media, such as a CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive. Since Apple has largely done away with optical drives and physical installation discs are a thing of the past, this shortcut isn't as useful as it used to be. Using Option to bring up Startup Manager is a better option because then you know exactly which disk you're going to boot from.

Eject, F12: Eject All Removable Media — Here's a neat trick: if you hold the Eject key (if your Mac has one), F12, or the mouse or trackpad button during boot, the Mac will eject all removable media. Like the C shortcut, this technique isn't as necessary as it used to be when it was the standard way of getting non-bootable floppy disks out of a Mac quickly, but it's worth remembering should you ever end up working on an old Mac.

N: NetBoot — If you hold N at startup, the Mac will boot from an available NetBoot server. Holding Option-N will boot from the default boot image on a NetBoot server. For those who have never even heard of NetBoot, it's an Apple technology in OS X Server that enables a Mac to load the operating system from a network server, rather than from a local drive. Large networked environments sometimes use NetBoot to ensure that every Mac is using a consistent, approved version of the operating system. Dice dice revolution mac os. Chances are, you will never have to worry about booting from NetBoot.

Concealed Intent Mac Os X

X: Force a Boot into OS X, instead of Classic — Finally, there's X, which Apple says causes the Mac to 'Start up from an OS X startup volume when the Mac would otherwise start up from a non-OS X startup volume.' This one threw us for a loop, but Phil Dokas, our shadow editor Chris Pepper, and several commenters reminded us that it's a holdover from the early days of Mac OS X, when it was used to keep the Mac from booting into the Classic environment. Kevin Patfield said there was even a companion option — holding 9 — that forced a boot into Classic. If you know a contemporary use for this key, let us know in the comments!