Data Detectors

Here’s a cool step-saver, something no other operating system offers—a little something Apple likes to call data detectors.

In short, Mac programs like Mail and TextEdit can recognize commonly used bits of information that may appear in your text: a physical address, a phone number, a date and time, and so on. With one quick click, you can send that information into the appropriate program, like Calendar, Contacts, or your Web browser (for looking up an address on a map).

Here’s how it works: When you spot a name, address, date, or time, point to it without clicking. A dotted rectangle appears around it. Right-click (or two-finger click) inside the rectangle, or click the at the right side.

A shortcut menu appears. Its contents vary depending on what you’re pointing to:

• A mailing address. You can choose Show Address in Google Maps from the shortcut menu; your Web browser opens automatically and shows you that address on a Google map.

  GEM IN THE ROUGH: Draw Those Chinese Characters

  Apple has made a huge push to appeal to Chinese Mac fans. There’s a Chinese dictionary and text input; over a dozen Chinese fonts; compatibility with popular Chinese mail services like QQ, 163, and 126; built-in Safari searching using Baidu (like a Chinese Google); and Share button posting directly to Youku Tudou (like YouTube) and Weibo (a microblogging service).

  If you want to write in Chinese, you can draw the characters you want, right on your laptop’s trackpad.

  To set this up, open the System Preferences→Keyboard→Input Sources pane. Turn on Chinese–Simplified (or Chinese–Traditional), choose the Chinese writing system you prefer, and then turn on Trackpad Handwriting.

  Then, when you’re actually writing, use the flag (Input) menulet to choose Show Trackpad Handwriting (or press Shift-Control-space bar) to make the writing panel appear, as shown here.

  

  The trick is to understand that the panel is a full map of your trackpad. Draw your character by dragging across the trackpad; white lines appear as you go.

  On both sides of the onscreen panel, you see the Mac’s interpretations of your character; to choose one, tap the corresponding spot on the outside edges of your actual trackpad. (Or, to backspace—delete your most recent line—tap the upper-left corner of your trackpad.) The Mac drops the character into your document.

  Press Shift-Control-space bar again to hide the panel, or press Esc to exit it momentarily, and shake your head in wonder.

  Alternatively, you can choose Create New Contact (to add a Contacts entry for this address) or Add to Existing Contact (if the person is in your address book—just not the address). Like magic, a little editing box sprouts out of the data-detected rectangle, prefilled with the information from the message, so that you can approve it.

• A date and time. When you click the , you get the amazing pop-up menu shown in Figure 6-11. It shows you the actual Calendar day view where Yosemite is proposing adding the appointment. The logic of this feature is overwhelming; after all, when someone emails you to ask if you’re free for drinks next Thursday at 10, what’s the first thing you usually want to do? Check your calendar, of course.

  Tip

  If, while working in Calendar, you ever forget where this event came from, double-click it. In the Info balloon, you’ll see a link that takes you right back to the original Mail message that started it all.

  

  Figure 6-11. When a data detector detects a date and time, it can suggest an appointment on your calendar automatically. It even shows you the proposed new Calendar entry (in dotted lines), in context with all your existing appointments, so you’ll know whether to accept or decline the new appointment. If everything looks good, click Add to Calendar. Or, if Mail’s parsing of the appointment needs a little tweaking, click Edit; the box expands so that you can edit the details.

• A phone number. As with mailing addresses, the shortcut menu here offers you things like Create New Contact and Add to Existing Contact. The third one, Large Type, is great when you want to call this person right now—it displays the phone number in huge type, filling your screen, so you can see it from across your mansion.

• A flight number. When you highlight flight information (for example, “AA 152”), the data detector offers a Show Flight Information command. It opens the Flights widget of Dashboard so you can see the flight’s departure time, arrival time, and other details. It works only if the airline is represented as a two-letter code.

• A Web address. When you click the next to a URL (like www.nytimes.com), you get a pop-up balloon that contains the actual Web page! You get a quick look, without even having to leave your email message.

• A package tracking number. When you send a package using a service like FedEx, UPS, or the U.S. Postal Service, you usually get a confirmation email. A data detector can recognize such numbers and, when you click the , offer you a Track Shipment command. Choosing it displays a pop-up window right there at your cursor, showing the courier company’s tracking page for that package, and thereby letting you know exactly where your package is right now.

Tip

In the unlikely event that you don’t actually care for data detectors and would rather not see those dotted lines and buttons, you can shut down the whole feature. To do that, open Terminal (Terminal). Carefully type this command, and then press Return:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

You can always turn them back on again by repeating that step—and substituting NO for the final word.