Tricks |
One sad day, I realized that a lot of people underuse their Macs. I'm on my computer a lot, so it's important for me to use it well. Here's a trick a day for people to pick up better habits. They include dead simple/obvious ones and some less common. btw, my name is Ankit. I tweet, I have my primary tumblr, I travel, and I'm creating Alternote. |
This isn’t going to be useful for everyone, but for the people that use Google Reader, Gmail, twitter, tumblr, or any social media platform that you scroll through, this might be nice.
Don’t ask me why, but about 4-5 years ago, Google introduced the use of j and k to navigate down and up pages, respectively.
If you’re reading through your RSS feed, this allows you to jump from article to article easily.
It allows you to navigate through emails easily.
It allows you to scroll through your twitter feed and actually pay some attention to the individual tweets you’re reading.
It allows you to scroll post-by-post in tumblr instead of using your mouse.
Note: If you’re using this for Gmail, you’ve got to go to Mail Settings > Activate Keyboard Shortcuts to make this work. It’ll reveal a little arrow to the left of your email list that will move as you hit the j and k keys.
Thinking about doing a Gmail series next week. I think that could be useful for a lot of people. I’m big on clean and organized inboxes, and I know too many people who, well, don’t know how to take care of their email efficiently. More on that soon.
I don’t know what you’ve been doing on a Mac if you haven’t been using these yet.
OS X Lion: System Preferences > Mission Control > Hot Corners
OS X Not Lion: System Preferences > Dashboard and Expose > Hot Corners
For anyone that isn’t you using your computer, hot corners are the bane of your computer’s existence. They’ll move your mouse around and random shit will happen and it’ll trip them up.
For anyone that is you using your computer (and really, you should be the only one. Personalize the shit out of your computer so it works for you), these will transform your world.
Things you can do with hot corners (pick any four):
My settings —
One of the most underrated utilities here is putting your display to sleep. It’s not putting your computer to sleep. Just the display, which is also the biggest power-sucker of your computer.
That said, when you’re using your computer for music but nothing else, put the display to sleep.
When you’re watching a movie on an external display but not using the main laptop display, put your display to sleep.
When you’re trying to focus on your books or the paper in front of you but you need the laptop as a quick ref, put your display to sleep. It’ll wake up the second you move your mouse.
This is a huge battery saver in the short- and long-term. More on how that works tomorrow.
Some of these tricks will be obvious. I promise you that.
Despite that, I’ve found a TON of people who don’t use some of the simplest ones. So I’m going to start there. I’ll throw in cooler tricks here and there for people who know the basics.
Command + ~ allows you to switch between open (non-minimized) windows of the same app. It’s incredibly helpful when you have a zillion browser windows open or if you’re working on a Photoshop project but you don’t like tabbed browsing.
Command + Shift + ~ allows you to do the same but in reverse order of windows. That’s only helpful once you go forward. Otherwise the order makes no difference, really.
The Command + [whatever] is often paired with a Command + Shift + [whatever] for backwards navigation. Keep that in mind.
More tomorrow (aka I’ll creating like 10 of these posts now just to build a queue because I know I’ll forgot to post on this tomorrow).
Much love,
Ankit
