THE TWO-BUTTON MOUSE EXPOSÉ EXPERIENCE

THE TWO-BUTTON MOUSE EXPOSÉ EXPERIENCE

If you’re using a two-button mouse, you can access a new world of Exposé functionality that dare not speak its name. For  now my friends, you can use the second mouse button to invoke your favorite Exposé mode. Have you got more than two buttons? Four perhaps? The, go under the Apple menu, under System Preferences, and click on Exposé. If your “rich-socialite multi-button mouse” is connected, you’ll see a new Mouse section has been added to your Exposé preferences that enables you to assign various Exposé functions to your various buttons.

ACCESSING ONCE-HIDDEN WINDOW FEATURES

One of the many little tricks Mac OS X “power users” had up their sleeve was that they used contextual pop-up menus to access features and functions that many users didn’t even know existed. One reason for its obscurity was that it employed the very least-used of all Macintosh keyboard modifier keys—the Control key. To get to these contextual menus, you’d Control-click on a file, a folder, a window, etc., and up would pop this list of things you could do. (You could also right-click a two-button mouse, but of course, Apple hadn’t made a two-button mouse.) Well, Apple must have realized that only a privileged few were taking advantage of these contextual menus, so they added an Action button in the default toolbar of Finder windows. Click on a file, click on this Action button, and you get a contextual menu of “hidded” commands. Feel the power!

MOVING THAT WINDOW FROM ANY SIDE

If you’ve used a previous version of Mac OS X (a non-Panther version), you probably got used to the fact that you could only move a Finder window by clicking on the title bar—there was no place to click and move a window on the sides or bottom. In Panther, one of the advantages of the new brushed metal interface is that it has thin metal sides, so now you can grab a window by the top sides, or bottom to move it where you want it.

SWITCHING APPS WHITHIN EXPOSÉ

Once you have Exposé invoked (you pressed either F9 or F10), you can toggle through your open applications and Finder windows by pressing the Tab key. Press the Tab key once, and the next open application, and its miniaturized windows, comes to front. Press Tab again, it goes to the next open app. Want the previous app? Press Shift-Tab.

QUICKLY CYCLE AMONG WINDOW VIEWS

You can quickly cycle among the three window views (Icon, List, or Column) by pressing Command-1, Command-2, and Command-3, respectively (which means, press them with respect).

NARROWING YOUR TOOLBAR SEARCHES

If you use the Search field that appears in the top-right corner of the Finder window’s toolbar, you have a little more control over your search than you might think. For example, if you click-and-hold on the little Magnifying Glass icon that appears at the left of the field, a pop-up menu appears, enabling you to choose exactly where you want to search, potentially speeding up your search by letting you narrow (or expand) where you want the Search field to search.

ONE-CLICK LONG-FILE NAME FIX

If you’re working in a window set to Column view, you’re going to run into this all the time—files with long names have the end of their names cut off from view, because the column isn’t wide enough. That doesn’t sound like that big of a problem, until you start working with more descriptive file names. Luckily, there’s a quick fix: Just double-click on the little tab at the bottom of the vertical column divider bar, and the column expands just enough so you can see even the longest file name of any file in that column.

EXPOSÉ BUTTON TIPS

In an earlier tip, you can invoke the cool Exposé feature by pressing F9, F10, or F11. For example, if you press and release the F9 key, Exposé freezes the thumbnails in place, and continues to freeze them until you either click on a window or press F9 again. This is ideal for when you’re not sure which window you want so you need time to look around. However, if you press and hold F9, Exposé only stays active as long as you hold the button down (or until you click a window, whichever comes first), which is perfect for when you just want to look at something quickly, or you know exactly which window you want to jump to.

EXPOSÉ MOUSE TIPS

If you have a multi-button mouse, it opens a new world of Exposé functionality, and that Exposé responds to how you press the keys that invoke it. Here’s a cool Exposé tip that lets you switch from one application to another with just one click (rather than two). Click whichever mouse button you assigned to the F9 function (all windows), then keep holding down the mouse button and release it over the window of the application you want to switch to—it’s super fast, because it’s just one click.