Here are 10 tips that are slightly more advanced than the usual. These tips are specially written for those who want to become more of an expert on Mac- and also for those who believe they already are. These tips will greatly help you save effort and time in carrying out your everyday tasks and hopefully introduce some concepts and applications you may not have encountered before.
Download Quicksilver
This is basically the most important pro application for Mac OS X. The principle of this application is really simple: just hit a hotkey, then start typing what you want to do. You can send an email to a certain contact, or open an application, pause iTunes and a lot more. What makes this application amzing is that it learns quickly over time which makes you get what you want faster and more efficiently with less effort.
Change Hidden Settings with Terminal Commands
Developers often and choose not to include some settings in the Preferences of an application just to keep things simpler and nice. They often leave this setting accessible via the Terminal though. Being comfortable with the Terminal is really an advantage and it’s the perfect way to get a higher level of customization and allows hidden features in your Mac. Modifying preference files is one of the easiest things you can do in the Terminal – just paste in a line of code and hit return.
Download VLC
This is a multipurpose media player that will play almost any movie file. While QuickTime will serve you for most needs, VLC will handle anything that QuickTime struggles with.
Get to grips with your keyboard shortcuts
This may look like a very simple tip, but some experienced users take a really long time doing simple tasks like copying and pasting. Keyboard shortcuts really make everything easier but you have to get into the habit of knowing them and not just learning them. Nothing will save you more than getting into the habit of using shortcuts like closing windows,copying, pasting, quitting and switching applications.
You can even create your own keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard and mouse section of System Preferences if you want to be more adventurous.
Drag and drop everywhere
This problem is often encountered from working with Windows a lot, where drag and drop does not have the same power as Mac. In Mac OS X, you can drag and drop almost anywhere. Dragging a folder onto open/save dialogs will make it display that folder. Dragging text selections into the icons in the dock does a lot of really useful things. You can also just drag files onto ‘’Choose File ‘buttons in the web pages.
Understand the concept of packages
In Mac OS X packages are just folders hidden to look like single files. In fact, almost every application is a package. To view what is inside the packages, right-click on one and choose Show Package contents.. Inside application packages are all the files that it needs to run. Once you are inside the folder, you can fidget about and change things.
Quickly Kill Accidentally Opened Applications
If you accidentally clicked the wrong icon, you can just right-click or control-click on the icon and choose force quit. If you are too late, pressing the Option key will change quit to Force Quit so that you can close the unwanted application faster.
Get comfortable using the Command Line
Even if you are okay with pasting a single line into the terminal to change some hidden settings, you might find it a hassle working from the command line. Learning about the command line requires a different tutorial in itself which will be discussed in a whole different article.
Make rectangular selections (for Cocoa Apps only)
This application is one of the great tricks that you can do when you are moving large chunks of texts. If you want to move the numbers from the start of each line in a list or you want to select a column in a table, you would have to go through every line individually. This can be very time consuming especially if you have a long list. To avoid this, just hold the option key while making the selection. Now you can draw a box around the stuff you want to delete or copy and not worry about having to select entire lines.
Learn some AppleScript
Don’t be deferred by the thought of a programming language. AppleScript is about as close to normal as you can get to the English language. AppleScript’s real power is it’s ability to automate repetitive tasks – in fact Automator is basically just an illustrative way to create AppleScripts. The best way to become familiar with AppleScript is to download some example scripts, study how they work and try to customize them according to what you need.
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nice post, nice tips, I’m not very expert using my mac osx
now I can do better with this os x. thanks anyway mate