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Mac OS X Hints
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by Rob Griffiths and David Pogue
Sales Rank: 965211
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List Price: $34.78
$0.01
At Amazon
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Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly; 1 edition February 1, 2003
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596004516
ISBN-13: 978-0596004514
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 7 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
Book Description
Both Mac and Windows fans have spent years collecting bits of lore-a keyboard shortcut here, an undocumented double-click there-and then Mac OS X 10.2 came along. It may be the world's best operating system, but it has a personality all its own.
As it turns out, Mac OS X harbors just as many delicious secrets as any system that came before. You just have to know where to find them. And Mac OS X Hints: Jaguar Edition is the guide you need.
Inside, you'll find 560 high-octane secrets in every conceivable category:- Desktop and Finder. How to shut down using only the keyboard; use an animated screen saver as a desktop picture; and jump to System Preferences with a keystroke.
- iApps. How to burn six hours of iTunes music onto a single CD; merge calendars in iCal; and prevent iMovie 3 from applying the Ken Burns effect.
- Mac OS X programs. How unlock 32,000 secret Unicode symbols in each font; rename the System Preferences panels; add an "Email this page" button to Safari; and make Mail announce, in a cute British accent: "Mail has arrived, O all-wise master."
- Mastering the system. How to share Web bookmarks between Mac OS X and Classic; connect to your Mac from the road; and make your iDisk work ten times faster; and.
- Terminal. Unix fiends have never seen anything like the 105 pages of Terminal brilliance in this book. They explain how to save Terminal commands as Finder icons; put background programs to sleep; wake a sleeping Mac via the Internet; unearth the secret emacs adventure game; set up a message board on your Apache-based Web site; and more.
With authority, humor, and 440 illustrations, Mac OS X Hints: Jaguar Edition brings you insight, surprise, and delight at every turn. And that, after all, is what the Mac is all about.
Customer Reviews & Comments
Addressing the Obvious The most immediate question I had when I heard that O'Reilly would be publishing a book containing hints from macosxhints.com was, of course, why I should get the book when the hints are already on the site for free. Both the author and the publisher also thought of this, understandably enough. Here's how Rob Griffiths answered the question in a post on the site, when the book was first announced: "The book isn't just a "cut and paste" job from the site to print form. Every hint was rewritten and retested from scratch, and hundreds of screenshots were added to help clarify and explain the hints. In addition, many of the scripts and programs posted here are included (the author of each program was contacted for approval to include their original work in the book - thanks to each of you for agreeing!)." So the question then becomes: is this really the case? Are the differences between the hints as posted on the site and as printed in the book really significant enough to merit shelling out [money]? The short answer would be that, in my opinion, the book is worth its price. The long answer is (predictably) a little more complicated. There are, of course, people who are more than willing to do the extra digging on the web to get the relevant content for free - they'd rather do without the little perks (increased readability, revision, testing, screenshots) than spend potential beer money for a glossy O'Reilly book. And that's fine - I'm more than sympathetic with this position, being frequently hard up for beer money, myself. But of course there are also people for whom the convenience is just as important as the cost, and who consider the price of the book well worth it in terms of the time saved. If you fall into the former category, don't bother buying the book - but then, you weren't going to buy it anyway, were you? As for the latter group, rest assured that your investment will not, in this case, be wasted. What I Liked I've read several other books on Mac OS X. The one I believe everyone should start with is still David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. If you've already read this book (and enjoyed it) or didn't read it but are confident you've already got the equivalent experience, then Mac OS X Hints is a good next step. Griffiths assumes you're comfortable using OS X for basic tasks - he doesn't tell you how to log in, or what the Dock is. If you're fuzzy on those kind of basics, you're not quite ready for this book (but you're positively crying out for a copy of the Missing Manual). Additionally, he pushes some not-entirely-obvious processes to the introduction, so you don't have to read the same instructions over and over in the meat of the book itself. After all, once you've been told the first time how to view the contents of a package, you're probably all set in that regard. This is one of the aspects of Mac OS X Hints that I found most appealing, actually - Griffiths just explains in the beginning that he's assuming certain things, and then doesn't bother dumbing anything else down. I've been a fan of macosxhints.com since I first installed OS X, but it seems like Griffiths's style has really improved for the book - this may be a function of Pogue's role as editor, as the writing in Hints displays the same familiar, comfortable tone while not skimping on depth or details. Like other books Pogue has been involved in, this one is highly readable but not oversimplified. What I Didn't Like If I can be nitpicky for a moment, I was bothered by the frequency of purely typographical errors. Little things like "than" being used instead of "then", or the bottom edge of a line in a sidebar getting cut off. It didn't keep me from enjoying the book, and I'm sure it's the sort of thing that will get corrected in future printings, but this sort of error occured often enough that I noticed it, anyway. Another little thing was that I wish URLS had been included whenever a third-party shareware program was mentioned. Of course I know I can Google for DragThing and find it immediately - but if I'm paying for a book, it seems to me that I shouldn't have to. One final note: there's a lot of overlap between this book and Mac OS X Hacks, although each book has a significant amount of unique content. If you own one, you probably don't need to get the other, but it's difficult to say which I'd buy if I had to choose. Hacks contains only 100 articles, but they're more in-depth and the tasks they cover are often trickier or less obvious. Hints contains over 500 tidbits, but they're much shorter and often deal with things like key commands that allow you to increase your efficiency, and things of that ilk.
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Mac OS X Hints
List Price: $34.78
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