Easter Eggs: About This Computer
You can also double-click the application names in the "About This Computer" list or their icons to switch to that app or, in the case of the Mac OS, open the System folder. The usual variations, such as closing the parent window if the Option key is held while clicking, apply here, too.
Other Tips:
Click and drag the icon that appears at the top of document folders or drive folders (next to the window name) = drags the source icon to new destination. This is, for example, useful for dragging drive icons onto the Toast CD burner application window to back up a drive. If the icon is disabled, then there are unsaved changes to the document. This feature first appeared in Mac OS 8.6, but is worth mentioning again here. Hold the Command key to copy the item, Command+Option to make and drag and alias of the item, or Control to view the Context menu options for the item. There are other, less obvious features, too. Try holding Command+Option and double-clicking a document folder icon, or indeed anywhere in the title area. And, if you haven't seen a new Mac OS release for a *long* time, it's worth noting that holding the Command key while clicking the title of a document window reveals its folder hierarchy, allowing you to easily navigate to other folders in the tree.
Some websites have been reporting that Netscape 4.7's Netscape Talkback feature is incompatible with OS 9. Netscape's Talkback *is* incompatible, but it isn't installed by Netscape 4.7. It is a leftover from the 4.5 era. Delete it, and disable incompatible non-Apple extensions such as Adobe Type Manager 4.0 and Suitcase before installing Mac OS 9. (Acrobat 4.0 works fine, by the way.)
Another feature present in recent Mac OS releases, but worth mentioning here is the tear-off application palette. Did you know that option-clicking the palette's grow box expands the icons from small to full size? Clicking the grow box with no keys held reveals or hides the names of running applications. And, as before, you can drag and drop a document icon (for example, a text file or HTML page) onto a suitable application in this palette to easily open the file. Clicking the embossed bar near the upper right corner of the menu bar toggles the application menu's text on or off.
System Sounds: Pong 2003, Submarine, Laugh, Logjam, Chutoy (sounds like a dog's squeaky toy), Temple, "Uh oh," Voltage, etc. are new.
Control Strip: Did you know you can option+drag control strip modules to different positions in the Control Strip? You can also drag modules out of the bar onto the desktop, although there is, as far as we can tell, no useful reason to do this. Dragging modules onto the closed System folder icon, into the control Strip modules folder, or directly onto the bar installs them.
Sherlock: A (third-party) patch that removes the advertising banners from Sherlock in Mac OS 9 is available at http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~awatters.
Oldies but Goodies: QuickTime and a suitable CD ROM drive can convert audio tracks into a QuickTime movie. To do this, open an audio track from a CD using a QuickTime-aware application such as SimpleText and choose "Convert..."
Command+Tab cycles through open windows, as it does on a PeeCee.
CD-ROM Driver: Although the CD/DVD-ROM driver included with Mac OS 9 doesn't support some third-party drives, Apple's CD-ROM 5.3.3 driver from Mac OS 7.6 does. This older driver supports most third-party CD-ROM drives and works with all recent Mac OS revisions.
Compatibility issues with Mac OS 9 as of Nov. 8, 1999:
For Further Reading:
(external links are beyond our control)
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