Yeah, I have stuff all over my desktop, too. It’s amazing how fast stuff accumulates, the item count just continues to grow and grow. Eventually, it gets so bad I can’t find anything. There are people who diligently maintain a clean desktop, and then there is the other 99% of us. For the record, OS X does provide us with folders already categorized to store our stuff. But it’s kind of like keeping your room clean, you have to make it a point to put stuff away. Let’s discuss a few things to make our computing life a bit simpler….

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Sometimes we’ve all found our way into folders and have lost track of how we got there. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a simple way to view our location? How about a simple way to go back to where we just came from? OS X 10.5 Leopard has a feature that will let us do just that…..

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OS X has a built in screen capture function that can be quite useful. I use it when putting together these tutorials. Perhaps you want to capture a map generated at MapQuest to place in the body of an email or take a snapshot of an error message. There are numerous reason to use this functionality and here’s how……

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Most of us spend more time than we need to looking for files. Apple says “Look Before You Launch” and with OS X 10.5 Leopard, Quick Look allows us to do just that. Quick Look works with nearly every file on your system, including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files. Here’s how to use it……..

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In Finder View Options – Part I we covered using the View Menu to change the way our windows present the items they contain. In Part II, we’ll go into more options available to us in order to further customize the way our data is displayed……

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Here’s a handy little trick:

Hold down the Control Key and then move your mouse’s scroll wheel (two finger scroll on MacBook/MacBook Pro). Your display will zoom in and out as you move the scroll wheel back and forth. Once you have zoomed in, if you release the Control Key and then move your mouse, your screen will move with it.

OS X provides us with numerous ways to customize our individual work environment. Sometimes it takes a helpful nudge and little experimentation to realize what these options are and how to use them. Over the next couple of weeks we will run a series on these View Options……

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Windows users have long been accustomed to using a mouse with right click capability. Mac users have had this functionality available, but it required the purchase of a third party mouse or the use of keyboard commands. With the introduction of Apple’s Mighty Mouse, all of this changed. Now every desktop Mac ships with Apple’s Mighty Mouse giving us “out of the box” multi-button functionality, but you have to set it up. Here’s how….

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A menu extra, menu item, menulet, or status item is a small icon or word that appears in the right of the menu bar. These items often provide quick ways to use applications (e.g. iChat) or display information (Clock), or control system-level variables (Volume). There are also a number of third party applications and utilities that offer menulets which allow you to customize their various functions.

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Sometimes we need to be able to type Accent Codes, Special Characters, Symbols or Foreign Scripts. Located in the International Preference Pane is a Character Palette which I’ll cover in depth at a later time. But for now, here is a listing of a few symbols that may be useful……

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