David Pogue, author of Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual shares some more of his favorite Leopard Tips
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Consider this radical, timesaving proposal: Never quit the programs you use frequently. Instead, simply hit command-H whenever you're finished working in a program. That way, the next time you need it, the program launches with zero wait time. There's a limit to this principle; if you have only 512 megabytes of memory and you keep 10 programs open, for example, and one of them is Photoshop, you'll incur a speed penalty. In more moderate situations, though, Mac OS X's virtual-memory scheme is so good that there's almost no downside to leaving your programs open all the time.
In Leopard more than ever, Spotlight (keyboard shortcut: command-spacebar) makes a spectacular application launcher. That's because, as you'll notice, Job #1 for Spotlight is to display the names of matching programs in the results menu. Their names appear in the list nearly instantly--long before Spotlight has built the rest of the menu of search results. If some program on your hard drive doesn't have a Dock icon, for example--or even if it does--there's no faster way to open it than to use Spotlight.
You know what's really nice? The keystroke to open the Preferences dialog box in every Apple program is always the same: command-comma. Better yet, that standard is catching on with other software companies, too; Word, Excel, Entourage, and PowerPoint use the same keystroke, for example.
When you use drag and drop to move text within a document, the Mac moves the highlighted text, deleting the highlighted material from its original location. If you press Option as you drag, however, you make a copy of the highlighted text.
When you're writing, ever find yourself searching for that elusive copyright symbol, TM (trademark) sign, or Euro symbol? Summon the character palette. In most programs, to make it appear, choose Edit→Special Characters. If you want permanent access, add the Keyboard menulet to the top of your screen: Open System Preferences, click the International icon, click the Input Menu tab, and turn on the Character Palette checkbox.
The primary purpose of your Mac's Keychain program is, of course, to type in passwords for you automatically. However, it's also an excellent place to record all kinds of private information just for your own reference: credit card numbers, ATM numbers, and so on. Simply choose File→New Password Item (if it's a name and password) or File→New Secure Note (if you just want to type a blob of very, very private text).
Here's one for the technically inclined. Open your Web browser and enter this address: <ulink url="http://127.0.0.1:631"/>. You find yourself at a secret "front end" for CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the underlying printing technology for Mac OS X 10.5. This trick lets your Mac communicate with a huge array of older printers that don't yet have Mac OS X drivers. Using this administration screen, you can print a test page, stop your printer in its tracks, manage your networked printers and print jobs, and more--a very slick trick.
In the Displays pane of System Preferences, you'll find a Color tab. Its Calibrate button is designed to create a profile for your particular monitor in your particular office lighting--all you have to do is answer a few fun questions onscreen and drag a few sliders.
Want to take an instant screenshot? Press Shift-command-3 to create a picture file on your desktop, in the almost-universally recognized PNG format, that depicts the entire screen image. A satisfying camera-shutter sound tells you that you were successful.
