This is the first of a series of posts about pimping your mac. By the time im done all of your friends are gonna be envying your superior operating system, wishing that they had gesture support, and the coolness that only comes with a Mac.
Im gonna start with the basics, and describe the some of the useful features that come with Mac OS X by default and WHY YOU SHOULD BE USING THEM !
Common Themes to all of my Tips/Tricks:
- I prefer using my mouse instead of keyboard shortcuts
- Extra clicks and movements waste time
- Many of my tips/tricks evolved out of the need to manage lots of applications and windows
Expose:
If you don't know what Expose is, go to this Wikipedia page to refresh yourself. It is an ingenious window management tool. I find myself using it ALOT. I like to use hot corners instead of a keyboard shortcut to access Expose. My settings are in the picture below. NOTE: I used to have the "Upper Left" corner Expose only application windows, but I found that I didn't use it very often, so I just made both the upper corners expose all open windows.
Dashboard:
Ill be honest, I don't use Dashboards all that much, but there are quite a few instances when I find it useful. As you can see in the picture above, I have dashboards set to the lower right hot corner. Some examples of useful widgets are: Stickies, Weather App, Clock, Calculator, Sports Updates, and Package Tracking.
I usually have a few stickies open with some quick notes jotted down, and if I need to see them I just slide my mouse over to the hot corner, and bam it's all right there, no need to open any applications, or searching for files.
Spaces:
Ok this is by far my FAVORITE Mac OS X feature ! I like to have a lot of windows open, and Expose can only do so much to help me be productive. Spaces is a great way to organize your applications and windows. You can setup applications to automatically load in a certain space. Or just drag it to whichever one you want. Spaces get really useful not just in organizing lots of open windows, but also getting things done. For example if your writing a paper, and are constantly switching between references and your office application, then position your reference in an adjacent space.
Below is a settings screen for spaces. Neither the above or below images are from my computer (Im writing this at work and didn't bring my mac today). The one thing I would change in the settings is to use the 'Option' key instead of the control key for moving between spaces. The primary reason to do this is because on most mac keyboards, the control key is only on the left side, whereas the option key resides on both sides. (If your not sure what ^ means, or what the option symbol looks like, check out this handy guide to mac keyboard symbols - http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html)
Dock:
One of the standout features of Mac OS X. For starters I like my dock on the left hand side. This is just personal preference, but I find it to be more convenient. Also I like to set it to auto-hide, although that is again personal preference. I know that most people just have their dock filled with every application installed. If your like me and have a lot of apps, this can start getting ridiculous pretty quickly. In my next post I will show you how to tidy up your dock by organizing all your applications in Stacks, so only the running applications show up in your dock.
Next Post will include:
MultiClutch Utility
Dock Optimization
Comments