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

Hold Command while double-clicking a folder to open that folder in a new window.

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!

Today’s QuickTip is very simple and very useful.

To view the path of something on your Mac, all you need to do is right-click (or Control-click) its title, located in the top of its window:

It’s that simple, and it works on the following types of windows (and maybe even more!):

• Folder windows (Finder)
• Webpages (Safari)
• iWork files (Pages, Numbers)
• TextEdit files
• E-mails (Mail)

This little trick is handier than a pair of gloves, and it’s particularly useful when:

• Finder windows are opened from your last session because the back/forward buttons won’t remember how you got to the folder you’ve opened;
• Webpages are reopened when you start Safari (click History -> Reopen All Windows from Last Session), and you want to go to the current page’s parent page;
• You have a file open but forgot where it’s located;
• –and the list goes on!

Leave us a comment and let us know how you like this QuickTip!

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.

Do you ever download a .zip file with Safari, then find it in your downloads folder and double-click on it to extract it? Today’s QuickTip gets Safari to open “safe” files for you once they’re downloaded (e.g., .dmg, .zip).

To turn on this option, click Command + , (or go to Safari -> Preferences) and click the “Open ‘safe’ files after downloaded” checkbox. That’s all there is to it!