The most useful pieces of advice about using your Mac are often short, focused tips that solve a particular problem or make a specific program work just the way you want. That's what you'll find in the Macworld Mac OS X Hints Superguide, Snow Leopard Edition, the latest ebook from our friends at Macworld.

Compiled by the undisputed king of tips, Rob Griffiths, the ebook presents a cornucopia of over 200 tips to help you get the most out of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. You'll find basic tips for any Mac user as well as power-user tweaks that use incantations in Terminal - and sometimes AppleScript - to go way beyond the basics.

Among many other useful lessons, this ebook will teach you to:

• Get around more efficiently with the Dock, Spaces, and Expose.
• Type a keyboard shortcut to show hidden files in the Open dialog.
• Monitor Spotlight's progress while it indexes your drive.
• Show the path bar on the top of your Finder windows.
• See what you've added to the Mac OS X spelling dictionary.
• Turn your Mac's volume down without the loud volume-change beep.
• Use Snow Leopard's new text expansion feature.
• Set up system-wide keyboard shortcuts.

And, you'll get application-specific tips, including how to:

• Disable in-browser PDF viewing in Safari.
• Remove the RSS folder from Mail's sidebar.
• Turn off the flash in Photo Booth.
• Change the default duration for new iCal events.
• Show the weather forecast right in iCal.
• Print non-contiguous pages from Preview.
• Delete a message in Mail without automatically opening the next one.
• Control iTunes with iChat messages. Really!
• Send an SMS message from iChat.

The 152-page ebook is now available for $12.95, and a print version is also available for $19.95.

(If you have the Leopard edition of this particular Superguide, check your email for upgrade information!)

—Posted by Adam Engst on March 4, 2010