As usual, my timing is perfect. Four days after posting Three Things About David Sparks, the guy goes and releases a brand new book in his MacSparky Field Guides series: 60 Mountain Lion Tips.
Unlike his last book Paperless, this one is a collaboration with Internet Mad Scientist Brett Terpstra.
It doesn’t seem possible that I have never written about Brett’s stuff before, but my search of the DocumentSnap archives proves that to be the case. Brett is an absolute machine, and a huge amount of my behind-the-scenes workflow producing the site comes from him.
The Book
Enough about the authors, now on to the book.
As it says on the tin, the book is a list of tips for using OS X effectively. However, it doesn’t stop there. Almost all the tips have an accompanying video built in to the book so that you can see it in action right there.
If you have read the Paperless book, you will know what I am talking about. If not, here is a sample screenshot.
60 Mountain Lion Tips comes in two versions:
- The iBook version which is viewable only on the iPad. You can buy it in the iBooks store here.
- For those without an iPad, there is a PDF version. It is not as seamless as the iPad version, but you will still get the information. You can buy it on 60tips.com.
The Tips
There is a great balance of tips between those that would appeal to normal humans, and those that would appeal to geeks. Being a card-carrying geek, I can tell you that I learned some things from this book that I can’t wait to put into action.
The tips are logically grouped into themes (Spotlight, Mail, Keyboard, Terminal, etc.)
From a going-paperless perspective, there are some great tips that can supercharge your workflow:
- Quick Look Open With
- Resizing a window in every direction (gold for viewing documents!)
- Save dialog keyboard shortcuts
- Quick and easy printing to PDF
- Securely deleting files
- Awesome Spotlight tips
- General keyboard superpowers
60 Mountain Lion Tips is $6.99. David Sparks and Brett Terpstra know their stuff[1], and if you want to become extremely productive on your Mac, it is an excellent resource. I really enjoyed it.
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Understatement of the year. ↩