Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

I’m fighting through the headaches and brushed the pile of kleenex off of my keyboard to make a post!

I’ve had a few days to play with Tiger, Apple’s newest operating system update, I’ve noticed a few little parlor-tricks. Sure Spotlight is wowing everyone and Dashboard is, well, kinda wowing a few people. But you know what I like? I like the little features, the hidden ones. I also like to share.

I just saw this on the Unofficial Apple Weblog, but I’m going to write it up anyway because I’ve already started typing. Ok, enough already, whats the feature? Screen Rotating. Thats right, its built right in to Tiger.

To do this, just go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled “Rotate”. Select it and you will see your screen rotate. Looks cool huh? Well its not as cool when you try to use the mouse…there I warned you. By the way, TUAW is reporting that this only works with Powerbooks with the 9600 graphics card, but it works fine on my 14″ iBook.

The second feature isn’t really new to Tiger, but it was improved. Lets say you are watching a movie with your girlfriend, and lets say its a boring movie. So you decide to pull out your iBook or Powerbook and do a little web-surfing. However your bright screen is pissing her off immensely. What do you do? Just hold down these keys at the same time: Crtl + Option + Apple + 8. Did you see? Isn’t that cool? For those not currently on a Mac, what that does is it inverts your screens colors. Basically you are looking at a negative image of your screen. You can surf all night and the light radiating off your screen is greatly reduced. Heres how they improved it: Before, with Panther, the negative image was only black and white. In Tiger, they jazzed it up with a bit more color. Note: This is also great when you are war-driving or something of that nature and you don’t want your computer screen’s light giving you away.)

So there you go, two cool little features that you didn’t even know you had when you got Tiger. If anyone knows of any more of these “Easter Egg” type features, please share the wealth in the comments. Or just ask my why anyone would want to flip their screen and then make it have negative colors…either way.