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: 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: Cycle through Finder-window toolbar display options

The Finder’s Customize Toolbar dialog sheet (that’s what it’s called when it slides out of the title bar!) – open it with View > Customize Toolbar – provides two adjustments for how your toolbar icons look.

TIP: Spacebar Scrolling

In Safari and Preview, you can scroll the window simply by pressing the spacebar; Shift-spacebar scrolls in the opposite direction.

TIP: Change the Duplicate Shortcut

You’re looking at a Finder window and want to view the Desktop level (because your Desktop’s a mess and it’s easier to view a list in the window than those icons scattered all over). Out of long-ingrained habit, you press Command-D to look at the Desktop-and find you’ve triggered the Duplicate command, coping whatever was selected in your window (your entire hard drive?).

DISCUSS: What’s the worst Mac dialog/alert box?

When it come to dialog boxes asking for information, or alerts that tell you something but brook no discussion, there are many candidates for the best… that is, the worst, one around.

What’s your candidate?

TIP: Put the date in the menu bar

Since the dawn of OS X, I’ve been annoyed that, while the time still shows in the menu bar, the date does not. I suppose there’s some utility out there that takes care of that, but I’m all about the built-in OS capabilities, especially when it come to writing about techniques for others to use.

TIP: Modify smart folder criteria

 

Once you’ve done a Finder search and saved it as a smart folder, opening the smart folder (usually from the Saved Searches section of a window’s sidebar) displays only the “hit list,” and not the criteria you defined for the search. There’s no obvious way to edit the criteria,

TIP: Make Get Info changes on multiple files

If you have multiple files that need the same thing changed in their Get Info windows—privileges, color label, the Open With setting—you can do them all at the same time, in a single window.

TIP: Alter the sidebar in Open/Save dialogs

You can customize the sidebar in an Open/Save Dialog the same way you can in a Finder window: reorder the position of items, drag them off into puff-of-smoke oblivion, and even drag a folder from the dialog’s list into the sidebar.