Club Mac of Monterey Presentation January 13, 2012
Tools and Techniques, #3 in a Series
Frank Murphy

Frank’s presentation demonstrated two mysterious but useful Mac OS X features and took a look at several 3rd party utilities.

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●	Stacks						Included in OS X

Store files and/or references to files on the right side of the Dock

Drag moves the actual file to the Stack
Option-Command drag moves the alias to the Stack
(safer to create the alias first, then drag it )
 
Click to open Stack
Shift-Click to open Stack in slow motion
Option-Click to open more than one entry
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●	Terminal					Included in OS X
Located in /Applications/Utilities
Displays a Unix command prompt in a window

User can enter Unix commands like cal (calendar) or ls (list contents of current directory)

User can enter complex commands to perform useful OS functions as seen in the following example. Note: for more possibilities Google Mac Terminal Commands 

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Example #1: Add spacers to your Dock to organize your icons

Type (copy/paste) the following at the command prompt (note, case sensitive). Press Return after each line. 
IMPORTANT: both of the following 2 lines are part of the same command! Select text from the beginning of the first line to the end of the second line.

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' 
killall Dock  In the new Dock, you’ll see the spacers to the right of your applications. Drag spacers around to create groups of applications in your Dock. To remove a spacer, simply drag it off the Dock.
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Example #2: Highlight Stack target on mouseover.
Type (copy/paste) the following at the command prompt.  Press Return after each line.
 
defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean TRUE

killall Dock

Result: If you click on a Stack and move the mouse around, the Stack item/folder is highlighted.

To return to the default behavior, type (copy/paste). Press Return after each line.

defaults delete com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack

killall Dock

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Example #3

When you summon Help in almost any Mac app, the Help Viewer window floats on top of every other open window. Even if you switch from the Help Viewer to another app, the Viewer window stays on top.
To make the Help window behave like any other window in OS X, i.e., if you switch to another app, the Help Viewer will recede into the background
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer DevMode -bool true

To return to the default behavior ...
defaults write com.apple.helpviewer DevMode -bool false
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●	Caffeine v1.1.1				Free
	http://lightheadsw.com/

Prevents the computer from going to sleep. Prevents the computer from dsplaying the screen saver.

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●	Isolator v4.76 beta			Free / Donations accepted
	http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/

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●	Yoink v1.01					$2.99 Mac App Store
	www.eternalstorms.at/yoink/

Drag files into Yoink’s window. Then navigate to the destination. Once at the destination, drag the files out of Yoink’s  window and drop them into the destination window. (Option-drag will copy instead of move)

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