How to contribute a tip (or start a thread)…

Blogs, of course, are set up to let the author be the main voice and others do the commenting. If you want to contribute a tip, or comment on something Mac-ish that’s not in reply to something already said, do it as a comment on this post. I’ll convert it to its own post (with whatever name you use for it) so it can be a standalone item.

~Sharon Zardetto

TIP: Jump to the Finder from an Open Dialog

I love it when I discover something in the Mac interface that’s probably been lurking there for almost ever, and I just didn’t realize it. I don’t even know what prompted me to try this, but the spirit moved me and now I have another trick in my arsenal.

You’re in an Open dialog and you’ve selected something in the list—but is that the item you really want? You’d rather move to the Finder and peruse the folder the item’s in. It’s in a deeply nested folder, though, and you’ll have to do some digging. Or not: with an item selected, press Command-R (mnemonic: “Reveal”) and you’re moved to the Finder with the item’s folder opened.

TIP: Open Multiple Items from a Docked Folder’s Grid

You click on a folder in the Dock—your Downloads folder, say—and there are two items you want to open. You click on one to open it, and the folder’s grid closes, so you have reopen it in order to click on the other. Or… do you?

Hold down the Option key while clicking an item in a docked folder’s grid and the grid stays open so you can click on another item.

TIP: Close All Font Preview Windows without Quitting Font Book

When you have lots of Font Book Preview windows open for various fonts, either for a pre-install inspection or to compare various faces, it would be nice if you could use Font Book’s Close All command (by holding down Option as you open the File menu for the Close command) to close them. But Close All also closes Font Book’s main window, which, because Font Book is a one-window application, quits the program, too.

So, minimize Font Book’s main window (bring it to the front first, if necessary, with Window > Font Book). Once it’s safely in the Dock, Close All closes all the Preview windows without quitting Font Book, and then you can retrieve its main window from the Dock or with Window > Font Book.

TIP: Extract Embedded Fonts from iDVD

Apple’s iDVD program (part of iLife) comes with embedded fonts that are available only to iDVD, an inexplicably parsimonious approach by Apple. Some of them overlap the short list that comes with iLife, which are installed in your User Fonts folder. Most overlap with those that come with iWork. But maybe you don’t have iWork, and maybe you’d like the few that are exclusive to iDVD. You can un-embed them and put them in a Fonts folder.

TIP: Make a Finder Toolbar Item “Permanent”

When you narrow a Finder window so much that it can’t display everything on the toolbar, the rightmost items get dumped into a menu that dangles off the right edge of the toolbar. If you’d rather keep the items at the right (the Search field, for instance) on the toolbar and let other things be dispatched into the menu, set them to remain visible in a shrinking window (this is a new feature in Snow Leopard).

TIP: New Finder Commands #7: Select Startup Disk

[One of a series regarding Snow Leopard’s new Finder menu commands.]

Another addition to the Go menu, which shows up when you press Shift, is Select Startup Disk on Desktop. At first I was practically thrilled about this—until I realized I had misread its intent: I thought it meant you could select a disk/volume on the Desktop and make it the startup volume—a procedure otherwise necessitating a trip to System Preferences.

But, noooo… All this does is, literally, select the startup disk on your Desktop: if you have more than one volume with an OS on it, and you don’t remember which one is running the show (which one you started up with), choosing this command selects the icon of the startup disk. Big deal. (Did the sarcasm come through?)

TIP: New Finder Commands #6: Go to Desktop

[One of a series regarding Snow Leopard’s new Finder menu commands.]

Snow Leopard has fixed what seemed to some of us a glaring omission in its Go menu—a way to open a window for the Documents folder. Why glaring? Because it’s a folder that gets heavy use—you’re supposed to put all your docs in it, for heaven’s sake!—and because all the other items you can turn on for the sidebar in Finder Preferences have keyboard commands assigned to them.

Of course, Command-Shift-D is already taken by the Go to Desktop option, so, according to a venerable convention of Mac keyboard-command assignments, the second letter of Documents is used for this: Command-Shift-O.

Tip: New Finder Commands #5: Hide/Show Sidebar

[One of a series regarding Snow Leopard’s new Finder menu commands.]

In Leopard, hiding a Finder window toolbar with either View > Hide Toolbar or by clicking the Toolbar button meant the window’s sidebar also disappeared—and hiding the toolbar was the only way to hide the sidebar. Although hiding the toolbar still means the sidebar goes away, too, the opposite isn’t true: you can now hide the sidebar independently, leaving the toolbar available for quick-click commands on its buttons.

TIP: New Finder Commands #4: Arrangements in Column View

[One of a series regarding Snow Leopard’s new Finder menu commands.]

Hallelujah! What were they thinking last time around? In Leopard—for some unknown (if any) reason—choosing an arrangement for a column-view window required a trip to the View Options palette (through the View > Show Options command), while other window views were politely provided with an Arrange By submenu (and concomitant keyboard commands). Column-view windows now get the same courtesy.

TIP: New Finder Commands #3: Open and Close Window

[One of a series regarding Snow Leopard’s new Finder menu commands.]

Press Option, and the File menu’s Open command changes to Open and Close Window (with the expected change of Command-O changing to Command-Option-O). This doesn’t sound like a useful command, does it? After all, opening and then closing the window automatically doesn’t give you much time to do anything, even if you’re a super-speedy reader. It is useful however, because its full name is “Open a new window for the selected folder, and close the one the folder is in.”