10 Mac Secrets You Didn’t Know About

[caption id="attachment_5149" align="alignleft" width="401" caption="Secrets Of The Mac OS X Lion"][/caption]

I'm constantly learning about new programs and tricks that my Mac could do. For those who do have Macs, or are thinking of getting one as a gift, take a look at some of these secrets the Mac OS X Lion could do, courtesy of LifeHacker:

10. Add New, High-Quality Text-to-Speech Voices

Over the years, Apple's been working incrementally to improve the quality of the text-to-speech voices offered with its operating system. For awhile we just had Alex, the only somewhat natural-sounding computer voice in the collection. While that hasn't changed much, as far as the defaults go, you can add a bunch of new voices directly from OS X's VoiceOver Utility (in Hard Drive -> Applications -> Utilities). Just click the Speech pane and then select "Customize" from the voice selection menu. This will let you choose from all the options—including a lot of the fun novelty voices you might have thought went missing.

9. Look Up a Word in the Dictionary with Two Taps

Lion comes with a lot of new multitouch gestures, and hidden in the new set is the ability to look up a word with two taps. All you have to do is place your cursor over a word you want to look up, then tap the word twice with three fingers. This will highlight it in yellow and show you a heads up display with the word's definition. Of course, you'll need to turn this on in System Preferences -> Trackpad -> Point & Click first.

8. Create Search Tokens When Searching for Files

You'll find this functionality throughout applications in Lion, but it's especially useful when looking for files in the Finder. Basically, when searching you type in something like "Text" and are given some options in a drop-down menu. You might be looking for a file with "Text" in the file name or just a file that is made up of text. You can choose which one from this menu and it'll create a search token. Once a token is created, you'll start to get results. You can keep creating more and more tokens this way to refine your search, however, making it really easy to quickly locate the file (or files) you're looking for.

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