If you want to email someone a link to the Web page you are looking at, just press Command+Shift+I in Safari. This opens a new Mail message with the title of the page in the subject and a link in the body. All you need to do is fill in the “To” and send.
Right click or ctrl+click on an inbox in Mail and you can choose Get Account Info from the menu. The dialog that appears is incredibly useful. The Quota Limits pane will show you how much mail you have stored in an online account like Gmail, MobileMe or an IMAP account. You can also see how close you are to your limit. The Mailbox Behaviors pane allows you to change some settings without having to go to the preferences window.
Need to change the name of an artist or album? To do that, you need to select all of the songs by that artist or in that album. Then choose File, Get Info. The result is a “Multiple Item Information” window. Click the checkbox next to the Artist or Album to indicate that you want to update it for all songs selected. Then enter the new artist or album name. Click OK and you will change that field for all the songs selected.
You can find out how much disk space your Trash folder is using in a variety of ways. One is to open the Trash folder from the Dock, and without selecting any file use Command+I to bring up the Info window. This will show you the size of the Trash, though it may take a minute to calculate it if you have a lot in there.
When trying to open a file in an application you can use Quick Look in the open dialog. Just select a file and press the spacebar to bring up a preview of the image, media or document. You can leave the preview window up and use the arrow keys to navigate between files to find the one you want.
Most Mac users know you can cycle through application using Command+Tab. But you can also cycle through windows in your currently running application without moving your hands from the keyboard. With Command+` (The key to the left of 1 and above Tab) you can bring each window of your application to the front in turn. This is especially useful if you have multiple browser or word processing windows in use.
Some clipart collections and sites now provide images as PDF files. These work fine in Pages and other places, but often you need to convert the image to a JPEG or other format to use on Web sites or to adjust colors. You can perform this conversion with only Preview. Just open the PDF in Preview and select File, Save As. You now have the option to choose a format such as JPEG or the more versatile PNG.
When you download a file in Safari, it is added to the Downloads window where you can see the progress of the download. Use Window, Downloads to open it. To find the location of a file, click on the magnifying glass to the right of the file name. The Finder window with the folder containing the download will open. Even if you move the file from its original location, or rename it, you can use this to find the location of the file.
The default keyboard shortcut for capturing a selection is Shift+Command+4. Then you can select an area. But if you press spacebar after Shift+Command+4, you can simply select a window to capture instead. Shift+Command+Option+4 and then spacebar will capture to the clipboard instead of a file.
You can set which folder appears in a new Finder window by going to Finder, Preferences and then looking in the General tab. You can choose any folder. So if you have a folder you need to access often, you can set it to always open with that folder when you use the Command+N shortcut in the Finder.
If your contacts, events and notes are just the way you want them on your Mac, but a mess on your iPhone, then you can completely overwrite just those pieces of information on your iPhone. Use iTunes, and with your iPhone attached select it on the left and then go to the Info tab. At the bottom is a section marked “Advanced” that will let you replace information on the iPhone for the next sync only.
The new Safari 5 includes the Reader function. A “Reader” button appears next to the URL when you are viewing a text article on a Web site. This is nice for reading the text on the screen, but also nice for printing. At the bottom of the Reader interface is a printer button. Use that to print out a nice clean version of the text without Web site navigation or ads.
You can change the default behavior of your Mac concerning DVDs in the System Preferences, CDs & DVDs pane. The last option there determines what happens when you insert a DVD. You can choose to have the DVD Player application run automatically. You can also choose to have Mac OS X ignore the DVD. You can then run the DVD Player or another application manually.
iPhones get location data from GPS satellites, mobile phone towers and nearby wireless hotspots. Chances are you use your iPhone at home or work most often, and perhaps your own wifi base station isn’t in the database of wireless hotspots. You can fix that by submitting it yourself at http://www.skyhookwireless.com/howitworks/submit_ap.php.
Using the Apple menu at the upper left, you can select Recent Items and launch recently used applications or open recently used documents. But if you hold down the Command key, you can reveal those applications and documents in the Finder, rather than run or open them.
Get a piece of spam in your inbox and wish you could lash out? Sending a response only tells the spammer that your email address is a real one and that you read his email. But you can make it seem like your email never got to you by choosing Message, Bounce in Apple Mail. This sends a message back to the spammer letting them think your email address is wrong. Chances are this won’t stop any future spam, but it sometimes feels good to do it anyway.
Need to quickly and easily crop a photo or image? Just open it up in Preview. Choose the Select tool and select the area. Then choose Tools, Crop or use Command+K. Save the file, or save it using File, Save As to save it as a new image. Handy for quickly making icons for Facebook or Twitter.
By default, Spotlight, the search engine in the Mac Finder, will search by content, giving you all sorts of results you don’t want, even if you know the name of the file you are looking for. To search by file name, you need to switch from Contents to File Name in the Spotlight toolbar. But by using Command+Shift+F instead of just Command+F you can bring up a search window that looks for file names by default.
If you want to quit several applications at once on your Mac, an easy way to do it is to use Command+Tab to switch between the apps. This brings up the switcher interface in the middle of the screen, and you can quickly Command+Tab through applications. But instead of releasing the Command key, press the Q key to quit the application currently selected. You can quickly tell several applications to quit without ever bringing them to the front.
Rather use Photoshop to edit your iPhoto images? You can set an external editor by going to iPhoto, Preferences, General and then changing the setting for “Edit photo.” Then when you click on the Edit button in iPhoto, your application will launch and you can make changes to the photo. Save and close and you’ll find those changes back in iPhoto. You can even choose Photos, Revert to Original just as you could with plain iPhoto editing. Since applications like Photoshop actually allow you to make changes to the photo, not just adjustments, this can be a lot more powerful than editing in iPhoto. ANd it is a lot easier than exporting the photo, opening it up in Photoshop, making changes, and then brining it back into iPhoto or storing it elsewhere.
