Whether you’re a new or experienced Mac user, it’s likely you’re not familiar with all the secret features and tricks OS X has to offer. To further help you master your Yosemite skills, Popular Mechanics has a guide of 10 tips that can turn your Mac into an even more powerful beast.
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One neat trick that can be performed at work is putting yourself at the top of the print queue — that’s assuming your colleagues aren’t familiar with this same Mac feature. To pull it off, all you need to do is go to System Preferences, then Printer & Scanners and create a printer pool. The next time you press Print, select the pool, and the document will be printed on the first one available.
Also at work, you can hide all your Facebook action with a simple shortcut (Command and H), whenever you’re in serious danger of being spotted for procrastinating. If what you’re doing aside from actually working on your tasks expands on multiple apps and windows, you can quickly hide them all with a different shortcut (Command and M). More importantly, you can set up your own shortcuts for various other actions.
The publication lists several other tips, including having the Mac read text out loud to you, digitally sign documents, perform “super-quick” calculations, shop online faster, go into stealth mode to kill pesky notifications, conserve battery power and set up Parental Controls to protect your children from the scary Internet.
All these tips, complete with instructions, are available at this link and will work on all Macs running Yosemite, but also on some older OS X versions, even though it was put together a few months before the official OS X 10.10 launch.
