There are tons of excellent pieces of Apple software that come with iOS[EDIT macOS, that is] (or are free to download).
Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem.
One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.
Spotlight is also amazing, but like Preview I suppose it doesn't count as a hidden gem.
Finder's column view is also excellent. I think it's the best way to navigate the filesystem through GUI; the way it displays nested directories is just super nice.
It makes me wonder why other OS don't haven't copied this layout in their filesystem explorer.
The built-in screen zoom is pretty neat. Hold `Ctrl` and use the vertical scroller on whatever pointing device you have to zoom in and out. Real nice when you want to take a (much) closer look at a thing without affecting layout: it zooms your viewport without affecting any of the actual content, unlike, say, increasing font size.
Looks like it’s been updated, I don’t remember the different zoom type options. Maybe I just never discovered them.
I agree Preview.app is amazing. It's fast, has a lot of features and not bloated at all. However I think recent built-in apps are so bad almost unusable (like Music.app and TV.app), Preview's elegance seems to be a lost art in Apple.
I might have different use case than most people that I mainly use it to manage local video files and sync with my phone. The bugs are very similar to the bugs on Music.app where there's a lot of desync between app & local folder, duplicate entries, broken thumbnail, clunky UX etc. The quality difference between that and older macOS built-in softwares is pretty obvious imo (the most obvious drop is Music.app rewrite in Big Sur)
“Network Link Conditioner” essentially does the opposite but it’s a really neat tool: it lets you degrade your connection, so you can test how software reacts to degraded network conditions, and don’t need to install and configure third-party proxies and the like.
The biggest drawback is it affects the entire machine, you can’t enable the conditioner on a per-process basis, so it can be a bit rough on the other “normal” usage of the machine.
In the file settings ("Get Info") you can set a "stationary pad" flag means whenever the file gets edited, a copy is created, and the original file doesn't change.
When you're taking a screenshot of a portion of the screen you can hold the spacebar to move the rectangle around.
The stationary feature has existed since the “Classic” days. Probably MacOS 7. So it comes from the HFS era.
It would be more accurate to say when you open a file with the Stationary flag set, a new of copy of the document is open in the default application. I don’t think a file system copy is created until you save.
Stationary pads were already implemented in the Lisa UI, but it took quite some time to show up in classic MacOS - https://www.applefritter.com/node/3198
macOS has had a "hidden" WiFi diagnostic tool for years. It produces real-time-ish graphs of (IIRC) three different signal strength metrics, and it also dumps the data to a file on the desktop as it's doing so. By holding down the "Option" key and clicking the WiFi icon in the menu bar, the dropdown menu will display additional information about the wireless interface, and it will also include an entry that reads "Wireless Diagnostics..." or similar.
I've poked around with Wireless Diagnostics in the past and I've never seen any graphs or signal strength metrics. It's only ever created a diagnostics data file (which takes many minutes and can't be cancelled once it's started) and done nothing else.
The diagnostics data file is annoying to read, too...
Thank you so much for this. I think this is worthy of a separate HN post.
On a related note, these hidden features are really annoying. How hard would it be to have a WiFi diags link in the WiFi dropdown? Why does Apple think that hiding things makes for a better user experience? Is it so that the people in the know get to feel like arcane knowledge masters? As it is, I have started randomly holding down option and command to see if there are hidden options. /rant
Does anyone know of a site that catalogs these hidden macos options?
I think this is a great method for reducing user interface complexity, by taking rarely useful things out of the main flow.
Option-click is pretty much the only trick used for menus, and it's fairly universal across the nearly 80 years of Mac. The incidence of people that would be helped by those graphs, and the people that option-click is pretty high, so this seems like a great combination. It's similar to option-letter for inputting characters not on the keyboard (alt-code on Windows).
Exposing my parents to one more menu item that will never help them, and mostly confuse them and reduce their scanning speed, well, that's really not worth it. Every option has a cost, and different people bear the weight of that cost differently. Some people like having 30 different brands of canned tomatoes to choose from at the grocery store. Others would prefer 2 or even 1, that are more carefully curated. My favorite grocer is like this. It's a tiny store, an eighth the size of a super market or less, but has a better butcher, better basic groceries, and a more extensive selection of rarer ingredients than a Safeway. It just doesn't have an entire aisle of pasta brands. That's not for everyone, but it is for me. The Mac also doesn't have to be for everyone, it for the people it fits, it fits really well.
It's always good when a surprisingly-large measurement of historical distance is just a simple typo.
Far better than when the surprise fades into realization that the measurement is accurate, and that your internal estimate of time acceleration needs updating!
The more I think about your points, the more I understand the whys. As someone who is moderately technical and new to macos, I wish there was a global "power user" setting.
There is also "networksetup", which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with network configuration. Useful if you want to e.g. automate VPN network switching or locations.
I’m not sure if I’d consider it hidden, but there’s so much that can be done with the oascript utility. The idea that most GUI apps can be queried or controlled from the command line is super powerful, even if AppleScript is somewhat obtuse.
As an example, I have shell aliases setup to cd into the folder(s) open in Finder or reference files selected in Finder.
This is much simpler than some of the other utilities mentioned, but I love pbcopy and pbpaste. Being able to pipe from stdout straight to the clipboard, or vice versa, is really useful.
Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem.
One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.