59 Tricks in System Preferences

With Snow Leopard installed in your old Mac notebook - just make sure it is running on Intel chips - you can use the newer three- and four-finger multi-touch gestures on the trackpads.

Swipe four fingers from left to right on the track pad and it brings up all the apps you have opened. Swipe upwards to close them.

Automatic time zone setting: Even if you are jet lagged, this big kitty will not be. Core Location technology will seek out Wi-Fi hotspots to set the time zone. You may not know it is Tuesday and you are in Belgium, but your Mac will.

Screensaver: Flag your photos in iPhoto, for example, of your latest holiday in Nepal. Call it "Nepal holiday".

Then go to Systems Preferences and click on Desktop and Screensaver. Under photo albums, Nepal holiday will appear. Click on it and you will have a screensaver that is a slideshow of your Nepal trip.

60 Talking pages

Use the Mac's VoiceOver utility to read a Web page even with your eyes closed. Search for VoiceOver Utility under Spotlight and it will begin reading as soon as a page is loaded. You can speed up or slow down, pause or stop and navigate the page yourself.

The trackpad's surface mirrors the active window. So you can skip to any part of the window or desktop by simply touching the pad, guided by voice prompts.

VoiceOver also lets you navigate HTML-based tables with the same commands you use to navigate other elements on the page.

To access the Spotlight search function, click the Spotlight icon in the upper-right corner of your screen (or use Command Space Bar) and type what you are looking for in the resulting field, or type your search criteria in the search field in any Finder, System Preferences or application window.

61 Chinese via trackpad

Mac OS X Snow Leopard lets you use a multi-touch trackpad to write Chinese characters in your documents.

On screen, the characters show up in a new window that suggests characters based on your input, so you can choose the right one. This input window even suggests subsequent characters based on what you choose.

The Pinyin Chinese input method has been redesigned with such features as an enhanced dictionary and a new data processing engine, so it is easier than ever to construct sentences in Chinese.

62 Microsoft Exchange on Mac OS X

You can use Mail, iCal, and Address Book instead of Outlook to access e-mail, calendar invitations and Global Address Lists on Microsoft Exchange. Set it up with Exchange Autodiscovery.

If your IT department has enabled this feature, simply open the Accounts panel in Mail, enter your Exchange user name and password and check the box to set up other applications automatically.

Mail then grabs the information it needs from the server and configures your settings.

Exchange server settings, remote setup and access to Exchange can also be configured through most VPN connections.

Mail lets you access and manage your Exchange e-mail alongside your personal e-mail.

Compose a message and Mail will auto-complete names from the Global Address List. You can create notes and to-do items and receive and deal with event invitations in e-mail. It also lets you search across all your accounts at once using Spotlight.

Create Smart Folders to sort mail messages by customised criteria such as messages from your boss or those with "To Do" in the subject.

Quick Look lets you preview attachments without opening them. Data detectors pick out important bits of information in e-mail messages, such as dates, phone numbers and addresses, so you can act on them in one click.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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