Beginner

I don't know whether someone has this idea before or not. But this is what I found. My desktop was such a mess before this. After seeing the Stack feature sported with Leopard, I was like gosh Leopard has addressed my problem but I don't have Leopard on my machine and I won't even after October. That's the problem.

By clicking the oval button in the top right corner of a Finder window in OS X you can change between two main views. If you press and hold the Apple (Cmd) button when clicking you can toggle between 2 additional views and font sizes. Good way to clean up the interface a little and customize it to your liking.

I wanted to change the default application that opens certain types of files in OS X. For example I wanted to open images in Photoshop every time rather than Preview as most of the time I need to edit them, rather than just view them.

The guys at macminute cafe helped me out with an extremely simple solution I had no idea about.

I don't know about you, but I have a pretty crowded dock. So, I tend to get rid of any icons that are not necessary.

To launch Dashbaord I alway use the F12 button and never use the dock icon. Luckily it is extremely easy to get rid of the Dashboard icon from the Dock. Just CTRL-click it and chose the Remove from Dock menupoint. You can put it back at any time by simply dragging the Dashboard icon from the Applications folder to the Dock.

When in Finder you're working with a long list of files organized alphabetically you can add a simple space in front of the first character of the file name to make it jump to the top. This can be a simple file organization method that doesn't affect spotlight's search results.

Here is the issue. By default emails sent from Max OS X's Mail.app show incoming image and pdf attachments inline. This means attachments show up within the email, rather than as small icons. Also, emails received in Outlook will show up in the same way. In general this is a good behavior as it saves a double click to open the files. But in certain cases it can get really annoying.

This is a basic tip that is extremely powerful if you work a lot with long text. All the basic text navigation functions work one character at a time, such as arrow left and right to move the cursor, with shift and arrow to select text and the backspace and delete buttons to delete text left and right to the cursor. If you press the Alt button you will change these behaviors from one character to one full word plus the space behind it. Here is the full list of functions:

One of the things that come in handy when prepping files for print is being able to preview how the printer will separate the artwork to colour plates. This is especially handy when you're working with a combination of spot colours, or a combination of spot and process. Unfortunately Adobe Illustrator does not offer this functionality. Don't give up hope though, help is at hand.

Let's say you are working on an illustration that requires a set of tools that you use consecutively hundreds of times to get the job done. You can either learn all the shortcuts to use the keyboard to switch between them. Or you can simply tear off the required toolbox panels from the main toolbox bar and put them comfortably next to the illustration you're working on.

Emails that were repeatedly replied to and forwarded can become too long and heavy. It becomes a nightmare to sort through such long text to find relevant information. It is polite and useful to edit such emails when replying or forwarding further to make sure only the important part is being sent.

You can achieve this really easily by making a selection in the email you are reading before hitting the reply or forward button. By doing this you will only include the selected text in the newly created email.