Command Shift Q

New Contextual Menus in OS X Snow Leopard from Jim Gardner on Vimeo.

How to manipulate addresses and text in OS X 10.6

⌘ – Command ( Key)
⇧ – Shift Key
⌥ – Option Key
CTRL – Control Key

General:

⇧ + ⌘ + U – Open Utilities folder in Finder and Save / Open dialogue
⌘ + ⌥ + T – Opens special text characters float-over box in any Cocoa application
⌥ + ⌘ + T – Hide Toolbar / Show Toolbar in Finder windows
⌘ + T – Add highlighted items to Finder sidebar
⌘ + 4 – View Finder in Cover Flow
⌥ + ⇧ + ⌘ + Delete – Empty Trash without confirmation dialogue
⇧ + Control + ⌘ + 4 – Capture a selection to the Clipboard
⇧ + ⌘ + C – Display the Colours float-over box
CTRL + ⌘ + C – Copy the formatting settings of the selected item and store on the Clipboard
⌥ + ⌘ + F – Move to the search field, i.e., google toolbar in Safari, search field in iTunes or Spotlight in Finder
⌘ + J – Scroll to a selection
⌥ + ⌘ + M – Minimize all windows of the active application to the Dock

iTunes

CTRL + ] (close square bracket) – Go to the next page in the iTunes Store
CTRL + ⌥ + ← or → – Move forward or backward within a song
⇧ + ⌘ + N – Create a new playlist with the selected songs
⌘ + R – Show where a song file is located
⌘ + L – Show the currently playing song in the list

Dock

⇧ + click & drag Dock Separator to move the Dock from the bottom, left and right side of the screen
⌥ + click & drag Dock Separator to ’snap’ between commonly used icon sizes
⌘ + drag & drop an item to the Dock without existing icons ‘dodging’ out of the way. Useful for forcing an application to Open With.

Adding and removing icons to and from Finder windows:

Adding and removing icons to and from OS X Finder windows from Jim Gardner on Vimeo.

In the course of writing this article I will make some of the most horrendous spelling and grammatical mistakes—because, to be honest, I’m just not that good at typing.

Happily, as you can see from the video linked below, holding the Option key and combining it with the Command key, arrow keys and Shift key, makes whole word selection, deletion and dictionary / thesaurus searching process of doing what they used to call word processing all the quicker and easy to do.

⌘ + CTRL + D with mouse-over – Open floating dictionary / wikipedia / dictionary
⌘ + Arrow keys – Paragraph / line skip
⌥ + Arrow keys – Word / line end skip
⌥ + Shift + Arrow keys – Highlight whole word / line
⌘ + Shift + L – Google current selection

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

For those unfamiliar with Mister Rundgren, Todd made his name back in the 1960’s with a group called The Nazz and later fronted the Progressive Rock group Utopia.

In 1977 he began forging a name for himself as a record producer, working on Meatloaf’s ‘Bat out of Hell’ and the Steve Hillage classic ‘L’.

He is also noted for having produced the world’s first interactive CD-ROM, with the Philips Corporation, and is widely credited with having predicted many of the changes coming to the music business, which later came to pass.

Todd is a strong proponent of the music as a subscription service model. In this lecture, given at The Entertainment Gathering, in December of 2008, Rundgren explains how the major record labels in a pre-internet music industry failed to realise the potential of on-demand services as far back as the 1980’s.

He also talks about how this made peer to peer services like Napster all the harder to catch up with, once the internet became ubiquitous and a new generation of music fans lost the habit of owning physical playback media, like discs and tapes.

Everyone who ever wondered how all this stuff actually works, could watch this video and harvest a year’s worth of reading-up material. Brilliant stuff!

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Many of you who enjoyed my earlier article on OS X keyboard shortcuts mentioned that you were either returning to OS X after a period of using Windows, or coming to Mac for the first time, with a new machine as a Christmas gift.

Some of the key combinations used in that original article might have been fairly well known to many long-time OS X users, but one of the great things about the Apple Mac OS X, is finding out something new when you thought you’d already seen it all before.

So in that spirit, here’s a few more tips and tricks which add that sparkle of usability to the OS X experience.
Read more…

 

 Smart Folders: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (404)

In preparation for the launch of this new site’s video podcast channel on iTunes, I’ve created an animated logo for use in lower thirds and title sequences, the audio from which will also top and tail the audio podcasts.

Here’s a quick run down, with screen shots, showing the different stages of production and the final (iPod format) video which was created.
Read more…

 

 Ident: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1)