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!

Today’s QuickTip is short and easy, and it could save you some time in the long run:

When you see a pop-up dialog window like the one above, instead of mousing over and clicking on Cancel, you can just press the Escape key on your keyboard! You can use the Return key to choose the blue option, too.

Today’s QuickTip will show you how to access the URLs in your Safari bookmarks bar with lightning speed.

For each of the first nine bookmarks in your bookmarks bar, Safari has assigned it a keyboard shortcut. What is it? That’s easy! For the first bookmark (not folder), it’s Command + 1, for the second, it’s Command + 2, and so on.

In this example, Command + 1 would open the ‘Weather’ bookmark, and Command + 2 would open the ‘Analytics’ bookmark. It’s that easy! If you use Command + T to open a new tab in Safari, and then use the bookmarks bar shortcuts, you’ll be able to open multiple bookmarked pages very quickly, each in a new tab. Try it out!

To load your first bookmark bar item, press "Command + 1", for your second, "Command + 2", and so on

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

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.