Tips and tricks to help you get up-to-speed on your Mac

Today’s QuickTip is extremely useful when you have to get to your Desktop quickly and easily.

There are two ways to move all of your open folders and applications out of the way temporarily (see the photo above) to show your Desktop:

/Users/john/Desktop/quicktip_showdesktop.png
1. Press Command + F3 or
2. Swipe up on your trackpad with four fingers (should work for MacBooks MacBook Pros running Leopard or later)

On older Macs, the F11 key should do this for you (thanks to Ansel for the tip!).

This is really helpful for going to your Desktop and dragging an image file into an open document window. All you have to do is do the four-finger swipe up or the Option + F3 keystroke, start dragging an item, do the swipe or keystroke again, and you have your Desktop item right where you want it!

Do you ever have to quit more than one application at once? Who doesn’t! Today’s QuickTip will show you how to do it with speed and style:

Hit Command + Tab until you get to the application you’d like to quit, keep holding down Command and press Q to quit that application. Keep holding down Command and you can keep moving to applications and keep quitting them.

Have you ever wondered if there’s a faster way to move files and folders to the trash without dragging it there? Sure, you could right-click on them once they’re selected and choose “Move to trash”, but our QuickTip of the day should come in handy:

To move files directly to the trash, simply press Command + Delete, and that’s it!

Want more QuickTips? See the QuickTips item in the menu, or just click on QuickTips.