Veerle's blog

After a week of full-time work and digging around in Apple’s new beast “Panther”, I came across some useful features… Most keyboard shortcuts are already consistent from program to program on the Mac, but there are exceptions; the Hide All Windows command in Photoshop, for example, should be Command-H like most other Mac programs, not Option-Command-H. Fortunately, using the new Keyboard control panel, you can easily change any keystroke in any program. You can also make up a new keyboard shortcut for menu commands that doesn’t have them. I’ve already found this simple feature useful over and over again.

Panther introduces a very handy new key combination: Shift-Option-@cmd-Escape. It force quits the frontmost program, no questions asked. That’s good to know when, for example, the frontmost program has frozen, especially when it’s a full-screen program like Apple’s Keynote slide-show software that covers up the Apple menu (so you can’t get to the usual Force Quit command).

Smooth Scrolling - In the Appearance preference panel, you can enable “smooth scrolling”. As you scroll though documents, websites, lengthy email messages, etc, you’ll notice that the scroll isn’t jarring, instead there’s a subtle acceleration that is… hmmm… “smooth”. The effect is particularly noticeable when you scroll a page at a time.

Preview (Mac OS X’s graphics and PDF reader) has always been good at converting graphics files into other formats. But now it opens raw PostScript or EPS files. The result: you can now use any inkjet printer as, in effect, a PostScript printer at 10 percent of the price of a laser printer and even share it on your office network.

Disk Utility, Mac OS X’s disk-repair and disk-copying program, introduces a useful new feature: Its new Restore tab can make a perfect copy of a disk, and replicate it on another hard drive. You might find this useful when, for example, you want to make an exact copy of your old Mac’s hard drive on your new one. (You can erase the destination disk in the process, if you like, or just add to what’s there.)