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Tips & Tricks
Dragging & dropping using Exposé
Dragging a text link straight from an email
Using a right mouse button to zoom in & out
Preventing a bookmarked location from showing in a slideshow
The chapter illustrates some of the more advanced ways of interacting with CubicNavigator.
Dragging & dropping using Exposé
CubicNavigator can accept a bookmark dragged straight from Safari and dropped into the viewer window. (See the Opening Locations chapter.) If you have a lot of overlapping windows open, a more advanced way of doing this is: you can drag Safari's location bar icon "into" Exposé (assuming you have configured Exposé to use a hot corner), move onto the miniaturized CubicNavigator window, pause for a second to bring it to the front, then drop.
Dragging a text link straight from an email
CubicNavigator's viewer window accepts plain text as a location source. If you're familiar with dragging hilighted text blocks, this can be a quicker method of opening a location than, say, cut & pasting it, pasting it into the location bar, and finally pressing return.
To use this method, highlight a link in an email or similar text source. Then drag from a spot directly over the highlighted text so that the text lifts off the document. You can now drag the text onto CubicNavigator's viewer area.
Using a right mouse button to zoom in & out
Although like all Mac OS X programs CubicNavigator can be used completely with a single-button mouse, and the SHIFT/CONTROL keys can be pressed to zoom in & out, if you do have a mouse with a right button you can also use it.
Simply hold down the right mouse button over the viewer area and move the mouse right to zoom in and left to zoom out.
It may be an unfamiliar motion at first, but when you get used to it you may find it faster to move closer to study the detail or move out to get a wider view of a panorama.
Preventing a bookmarked location from showing in a slideshow
Sometimes you may want to store a bookmark that won't ever be used in a slideshow. To do this, include the term "index page" in the keywords field of the bookmark entry. When the slideshow sees this, it will ignore the bookmark.
Most of the folders in the default bookmarks installed with CubicNavigator have as their first bookmark a link to the main entry page of the site listed. As these usually don't have any VR content in them and would be inappropriate for slideshows, they are indicated with an "index page" in the keywords entry.
You can also use the "index page" as a search term to locate web pages with useful information and links that their creators have included. (See Searching Bookmarks.)
CubicNavigator can be used to show a VR on one screen while another application is being used on the other screen. This may take the form of a presentation on a large screen, while a smaller laptop screen is used to refer to information.
The screen that CubicNavigator will go fullscreen on is the monitor which contains the top left corner of the viewer window, that is, where the red close button is positioned.
Both the interactive fullscreen mode and slideshow mode can be used with multiple monitors. Mouse clicks over the CubicNavigator window space will work as normal and will pan a fullscreen VR or exit a slideshow, while mouse clicks over other applications will only affect them as normal. In this way it is possible to, say, view a page on one monitor while a slideshow takes place on the other.
Watch Movie of Tutorial Being Performed [0:19]