Month: November 2019

Searching for porn at work

Searching for porn at work

This is one of my favorite stories from doing internal support for Mail. If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember when macOS had a system-wide Find dialog for text. I couldn’t find exactly the right image, but it looked something like this:

Unless an application implemented their own UI for searching text, Command-F would bring up a dialog like this.

The twist is that whatever was in the Find field would be remembered between applications. So, if you search for something in TextEdit and then bring up Mail, it would display that same search term, but it would be highlighted so you could easily type over it.

So, I was in this unnamed engineer’s office. You probably know where this is going. In the course of troubleshooting Mail, I believe I was wanting to search the raw source of an email message.

I hit Command-F and up came …

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macOS tips: Old Dock tips that are still useful

macOS tips: Old Dock tips that are still useful

I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.

  1. Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).
    • If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.
    • If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.
    • If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.
    • The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to
…

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