Mac OS X Hints by Rob Griffiths Published by Pogue Press, O' Reilly Books, $24.95 ($17.46 at Amazon) (Discounts available to MUG members) Reviewed by Avrum Lapin

The author suggests that this book of 561 hints, intended to make your usage easier, faster and better, is the intermediate follow on the Mac OS X The Missing Manual. This begs the issue of when something is obvious, when it is a neat hint, when it is a Killer Tip and when it is a Hack. It also begs the definition of intermediate.

I found that it was easier to come up with a definition of intermediate. 25% of the pages in this book are devoted to Terminal/Unix issues as opposed to may be 7% of the Missing Manual and almost 50% of Mac OS X Unleashed and Mac OS X The Complete Reference. Thus this book is intermediate. Mac OS X Hints is styled similarly to The Missing Manual series.

• Chapters 1-4 cover the basics or personalizing your computer--Starting up, the Finder and Desktop, the Dock, applications in general including Open, Save and Printing
• Chapter 5 covers System Preferences
• Chapter 6 covers Networking
• Chapter 7 covers Mail (the application)
• Chapter 8 -10 covers iTunes and the other iApps
• Chapter 11 covers the other Apple Applications such as Address Book, Disk Copy, Preview , Print center and TextEdit
• Chapter 12 covers most Mac Browsers
• Chapter 13 and 14 covers some common non Apple Applications and Utilities
• Chapter 15 and 16 cover Terminal and Unix

I read the first 5 chapters in great detail. I learned a lot of things that I didn't know (but may never use), changed a few preferences on my iMac and have adopted a few suggested practices. There were a lot of hints and operating suggestions previously discovered elsewhere over the 8 months that I had been using Jaguar. If I had read these chapters months ago I would have saved a lot of time. I found the methods of implementing the hints clear and unambiguous.

I skimmed through Chapters 6 through 10 since I am not networked, use Eudora and haven't had much interest in the iApps (Steve Jobs--forgive me).

Chapters 11-14 proved interesting. The hints covered both Apple and third party applications, utilities and browsers. I concentrated on those that I use. I found a few interesting and useful hints for Word X and Safari that I wasn't aware of but most of the hints presented would probably be familiar to knowledgeable users of these applications. There was one Safari hint that didn't work the way I thought it might but in the process of playing with it I came across a method of dealing with what I consider a Safari pain in the … (I like Safari windows to be at the top left of the screen, they are always offset. Clicking on the zoom button--the green dot with the + on it--solves this problem).

Chapters 15 and 16 dealt with Unix and Terminal (command line stuff). I am not a Terminal user but I could understand the various hints therein. The explanations and directions were clear and easily understandable like the rest of the book. However I still don't have a compelling need to use Terminal.

This is a book for the user who likes to personalize their computer. It is an excellent follow on to OS X: The Missing Manual, especially if you are a keyboard short-cut person. On the other hand if you have read most of the OS X books out there and you are a point and clicker then you may have reached the point of diminishing returns.

You can sample some of Rob Griffiths hints, and his writing style, at the O'Reilly web site. There is a sample of the book, Chapter 3 on the Dock, and two of his O'Reilly articles on hints at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/macxhints/.

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