My Apple Knows What It Means
I love my Mac. I regularly subject all of my PC using friends to diatribes about why Apple produces a superior product. I impress coworkers with the miracle of Exposé and Dashboard. Even when I am away from my desk, visitors to my office are greeted with the super cool RSS screen-saver.
One of the most bad-ass and least talked about features of Tiger is the dynamic dictionary and thesaurus.
If you want to look up a word the most primitive way to do so is to open the Dictionary application. Nothing sexy here but it works and it works well.
One step up the Apple coolness ladder is the Dictionary widget for your Dashboard. For those of you unfamiliar with the wonders of Tiger, the Dashboard is a screen of mini applications that you access by pressing F12. Using the Dashboard you can see real-time weather, stock, package tracking, flight status, and other information. You can also perform searches in Wikipedia, Amazon, or the Dictionary application. Though really sexy we are still talking about an application that you have to invoke separately from your workflow, nothing too special so far.
Say you are writing or reading something and you want to check the thesaurus or dictionary for a word right in front of you. Who wants to type that word into another program? You want the answer now without any effort.You can access a dictionary lookup from almost any application by right clicking on a word and choosing to Lookup in Dictionary. You can also search using Spotlight or Google but if you want the definition this option opens of the Dictionary app and displays the definition. This is cool but not quite as cool as you would expect from the folks at Apple.
Here is the punch-line. In any Cocoa application you can simple place the cursor over any word, hold down Command-Control-D and up pops the definition right over the word.
Although Apple didn't promote this heavily in the lead-up to Tiger this is exactly the kind of app that almost everyone could benefit from. It is, however, a giant step forward. The dictionary isn't relegated to some productivity suite, it is a core function that is integrated with everything.
Brilliant, useful, subtle, and gorgeous.
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Who is this guy?
Just don't forget the "original" Mac convert who subjected you to countless pro-Mac tirades. (In case you forgot, that was me.)