1. Capture your signature in Preview. In Lion “Preview” has the ability to capture your signature using your iSight camera. Simply write your signature with black ink on a white piece of paper, then go to Preview/Preferences and click on Signature. Hold your signature up to the camera and it will save the image so you can easily sign PDFs electronically.

2. Change your iCal and Address Book skin. The updates to Address Book and iCal take a realistic approach that some people don’t seem to be particularly fond of. If you aren’t a fan of the new leather skins, Codeus over at Macnix created a clean aluminum skin for both applications that you can download and install yourself, following his simple installation instructions.

3. Three finger/double tap dictionary look up. Snow Leopard already had the ability to look up a word in the dictionary by highlighting the text and pressing Command + Control + D, which was a useful feature but difficult to remember. In Lion you can now double tap on a word with three fingers to look up the word in the built-in dictionary as well as Wikipedia. You can find this feature in System Preferences/Trackpad.

4. Hold down a key to bring up accented characters. Ever wonder how to type a ñ or è quickly without having to open up the character map? Accessing accented characters in OS X Lion is a breeze. Just hold down the letter and a dialog box will appear that lists all alternative and accented characters.

5. Hold Shift when launching Launchpad. This little trick is an oldie but a goodie. Hold down the Shift key and click on Launchpad from your dock. The apps will slowly fade in from the background. This trick shows off the OS X aqua effects and also works when minimizing windows. Although it may not be the most useful feature, it’s a fun way to open up Launchpad.

By Vivian Kim.