Learning OS X

Your Dock is premium real estate on your Mac OSX Desktop. You should generally keep applications that you use everyday in your Dock for quick access.

The Dock comes configured with a few applications including the Dashboard. The Dashboard is already accessible via a shortcut key so placing it in the Dock might seem wasteful to some people. You can remove the Dashboad from the Dock by either control clicking the icon or by right clicking the icon and selecting remove from dock. This doesn’t disable the Dashboard, it just removes it from the Dock, to free up more space. Check out the demonstration video.

If you spend anytime on this site, you know that I am a Windows XP to Mac OSX convert. I generally espouse how awesome a Mac is because it always just works. Well, a bit of kink in the armor came today when I tried creating a new demo video and could not get drag and drop to work.

I tried to take files from a Finder window and drag them onto the desktop. When I began to drag, I expected to see the green plus icon over the application icon. Didn’t happen. I tried numerous with various destinations and still couldn’t get it to work.

I became more concerned when I tried to copy and paste a file between folders.

Thankfully, things are back to normal now. My solution? Restart the computer. It’s as good advice for a poorly behaving Mac system as it is for Windows. Rebooting the system solved the problem.

I think I was stumped for so long because I rarely need to reboot the system because of a problem. That was usually my goto response for a problem in Windows XP or Vista. So class, the lesson is remember to restart your system if something is behaving poorly. It’s a good first step to solving your Mac problems yourself.

Do you have any goto troubleshooting advice? Please share it here.

The latest Macbooks have a great multi-touch trackpad. Even when I am using an external keyboard and mouse, I often reach for the trackpad.

I knew it was capable of handling multiple gestures. I didn’t know how capable though until I stumbled into the Trackpad System Preferences application. They have video demonstrations inside the app.

You can view the demonstration and setup your Trackpad by clicking the System Preferences and choosing the Trackpad configuration application.

If you are coming from an Windows based operating system. You may know that Microsoft has an application switcher. The application switcher is activated using the ALT + TAB combination. This makes it easy to switch between all the open applications in the system.

Well, Apple has that functionality built into OSX as well. It’s activated using the Command + Tab keys. Press them together once and it activates the Application Switcher.

If you hold down the key and continue to press it, a block highlights the application that becomes active when you release the key combination.

Apple adds another cool feature to the Application Switcher. If you highlight an application and press the Q key, it will quit that application. Also, if you highlight an application and press the H key it will hide that application.

The Application Switcher is a great way to quickly move between your running programs. If you have any other interesting shortcuts, discuss them here.

This tip came by way of OSXHelp, another great site dedicated to helping you get the most out of your Apple Mac.

We’ve discussed Mac keyboard shortcuts before. Here’s one I didn’t know about. Mac OSX has a built in dictionary which you can access by hovering over a word and pressing Cmd+Control+D key. When you do, a pop-up window appears with the definition of the word.