Image Credit: "Get a Mac Ads: Better" by silverkeys on Flickr

Mac are cool! Get over it Microsoft! I haven’t heard of people not liking something cool. Even those who pretend not to like cool things are following a popular un-cool trend, which in some circles, is cool! There are some features in OS X that are, for lack of a better word, cool (how many more times can I use this word). They are also very helpful. Throughout the past 24 days I’ve been using these features extensively but haven’t mentioned them at all. Today is all about showing off some of those features I find, cool.

Exposé

Exposé is a simple way to unclutter you screen. By moving four fingers down on the mount pad, all the open application Windows are shrunk and reorganized neatly on your screen. If you move your four fingers up, they slide off the screen and reveal the desktop underneath. These features can also be used with the F9 and F11 keys. F10 highlights each application and their windows, while fading the background windows. This feature is better than Vista’s to Window switching with the ALT and TAB keys.

Spotlight

Vista revamped Windows find, making it easier to find documents and access information. Spotlight is a better version of this. Spotlight, accessed through the upper right hand corner of the screen or by pressing the COMMAND and SPACE keys searches for anything typed into it. It reacts to every letter and categorizes the results by  file types, such as images, documents, applications, etc. In many cases, spotlight replaces going through folders to find a specific file or application.

The Finder

Although the Finder is not “feature”, it’s sidebar, where devices, shared items, places and searches exist, is a very helpful feature. Windows has had a left folder sidebar where additional folder actions and in Vista popular locations were positioned. In OS X, the sidebar helps navigate from one area to another with ease, and helps find recently changed or access files and folders. This has become the best way to explore my network, USB drives and other needed locations on my system.

Mouse Gestures

The track pad on the MacBook Pro makes life easy. It’s huge, acts as a large button, and enhanced by the mouse gestures ability. Mouse gestures are additional ways to operate applications by moving a finger, or several, in a predefined direction. Most PC trackpads have a scroll function on the far right side, where a finger will allow scrolling much like a mouse wheel. On Mac, by placing two fingers and moving down or up, the screen’s content scrolls in that direction. This can be performed in any location on the mouse pad. Mouse gestures is one of the features that has made my Mac life so easy.

Little, but well thought features like these that has made my computing life easier since switching to Mac. It is also what makes Mac stand out.