MAC TREAT #169: Accent or Exaggerate?

ByMike Moffit

This week’s Mac Treat is a two-parter. A while back, I wrote about how to type accent characters on your iOS device. Well, for those of you using Lion, the same steps you take on your iPhone (or the like) are now applicable.

To produce an accent on your Mac using 10.7, press and (briefly) hold the letter that needs the accent mark. Your accent character choices will then appear, and you can navigate to the one you need.

However, I must admit, it took me a little while to get used to this on my Mac. Why? Well, let’s just say that sometimes I can be a little dramatic in my correspondence…I mean, sometimes “noooooooooooooooo!” just gets the point across better than a simple “no.”

If you want to preserve your right to exaggeration, you can turn this feature off by doing the following:

Open Terminal and type:
defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Then restart your computer. Your letter repetition will be reactivated for your melodramatic pleasure.

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    Thanks to Kibbles & Bytes reader Perry, who let me know that there’s another way to grab your iTunes account password:

    He writes:

    “Go to Applications/Utilities and open Keychain; then type in iTunes in the search field and you will see if there is an iTunes account there (or not, if you don’t have one). Click on it and you see the username. You then can click on Show Password and type in your Admin/User password and you will see the Password as well.”

    I’ve gotten some other interesting questions regarding this that I’m doing a little research on, so I’ll update you in a later issue!

    Thanks for reading!