Hit ESC in any OS X Cocoa application to access a pull down menu with hints.

I spend a lot of time talking with people about OS X and Mac’s. Most often people ask “Why do you love it so much?” to which I usually can’t come up with a good reason. Well here’s one little gem I’m going to have to remember next time someone poses me with the question.

In any Cocoa application (think: Apple made) and some select other application you can hit the ESC key to bring up an autocomplete field from OS X built in dictionary. Pretty cool!

Another little trick I used has to do with the image for this post. If you buy a Mac and you don’t have Photoshop or Pixelmator or GIMP or anything and you want to resize a photo for your blog don’t worry. Preview will do it.

Preview is a built in application that ships as part of OS X and allows you to view images, documents and PDFs. But it does much more. It also allows you to resize images, adjust color, annotate photos and PDFs, take screen shots and much, much more. Call it the “Swiss Army Knife of OS X”.

Speaking of screenshots if you buy a Mac and you want to take a screenshot like I did simply hit Command Shift and 4. Your cursor will change to crosshairs allowing you to draw a selection marquee across the area you want to screenshot. When you’re done drawing the marquee you’ll find your screenshot on your desktop simply labeled Picture and whatever number it is. Pretty sweet! You just got a threefer in one post. Way to go!