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Apple, for years, has stuffed little features into it’s OS and has then completely forgotten to tell people about them.

Thank Bob for O’Reilly.

MacDevCenter has 20 Cool Tiger Features You Might Not Have Heard About. For my money the coolest one is the Dictionary lookup.

Flip was pretty geeked to find out that OS X Tiger has a dictionary/thesaurus built in because her parents number two catchphrase is “look it up,” right behind “save your pennies.” Being a spawn of the Google era, the idea of laboriously thumbing through a dead tree dictionary is only slightly behind the horror of surviving the upcoming zombie apocalypse for inducing sheer butt clenching terror in my middle child. So being able to get the Mac to do it for her was pretty cool. I can’t really fault her, since I pretty much have my 12 inch G4 with me everywhere (my wife thinks it’s weird that I take it in the bathroom. What can I say? She throws away the magazines) and I can’t recall the last time I didn’t Google or Wikipedia something.

But I digress. Even cooler than being able to use a built-in dictionary is the insanely cool lazy shortcut that Apple never told you about. Put your cursor over any word you want defined and press ctrl-opt-d and a little popup will define that word. I haven’t found an app yet in which this doesn’t work. I’m still geeking out over it.

Man.

Update 10/9/05: fixed the keyboard shortcut. Was cmd-opt-d. It’s actually ctrl-opt-d. Crap.

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