Mac OS X Tiger Killertips
Do you ever notice when reading some product manual, there are these little grey boxes in the margin that mentions a tip or trick. You read it and think, “Hey, that’s great.” This is a book all about those kind of tips.
I liked the fact that the book was a series of these short tips. I get interrupted easily, and the tips only take about a minute to read. I could easily start and stop the book without losing my place. I recommend reading it near the computer, because you really need to apply the tip if it’s useful to you, not just read about it.
Kelby walks you through all aspects of Tiger and a majority of iLife. However, this is not a book for novices or people that haven’t used Tiger for awhile. The reader should have a basic understanding of Tiger to understand how his tips will save you time. I wouldn’t quite call the tips “Killer”, but simply very useful. Maybe the author tried to call it very useful, and then marketing hyped it up to call it killer.“Killer tips”sounds better.
Personally, I knew a third of the tips because I use Tiger so much. Another third of the tips had no relevance to me, such tips related to sending and receiving faxes. However, the final third of tips were great and more than worth the price of the book. Often, it was just a simple item that might save a few minutes each day. For example, I never tried dragging the dashboard icon out of the dock. Never really thought about it, but my dock is pretty full, and since I can just press F12 to activate dashboard, it was wasted space on my Dock. Other tips I enjoyed were all the ideas about customizing the Finder or Spotlight searches. Sure I knew them, but didn’t really think about how moving things around would save me a few minutes each day.
Some of the tips were really cool, combining many of tiger’s hidden functions into practical “gee whiz” projects. An example of one of the more interesting tips was how, in a few short mouse clicks and an iSight camera, you can turn your Mac into a home surveillance webcam.
One of Tiger’s most powerful and underutilized features is Automator. While Automator is complex, I would have liked to have seen tips on some easy ways to write workflows.
Pros: Great, time saving and cool tips useful to anyone that works with Tiger. Highly recommend it for someone who uses Tiger on a regular basis, even people who think they are experts.
Cons: I wouldn’t quite call them “killer” tips, falls short on Automator.
5 out of 5 dog cows
