MINIMIZING MULTIPLE WINDOWS AT ONCE

MINIMIZING MULTIPLE WINDOWS AT ONCE

If you have three or four open windows and want to minimize them all to the Dock at once, just hold the Option key and double-click on the title bar of any one of them and all open windows go to the Dock. Be careful when you do this because if you have 50 open windows, they’re all headed to the Dock in a hurry and there’s no real undo for this. Worse yet, you’ll eventually have to pull 50 very tiny icons from the Dock one by one. So make sure that’s really what you want to do before you Option-double-click.

OPENING DOCUMENTS BY DRAGGING THEM TO THE DOCK

Remember how back in Mac OS 9, if you have tore the Application menu off and had it floating around your desktop, you could drag-and-drop documents onto an application listed in the menu, and it would endeavor to open them? You can do the same thing now in Mac OS X with the Dock-just drag documents directly to an application in the Dock and if it thinks it might be able to open the document, the icon highlights, basically telling you to “let ‘er rip!”

STOPPING THE ICONS FROM MOVING

In the above tip (drag-and-drop to the Dock), showed how you can drag a document onto an application’s icon in the Dock. Sometimes, maybe trying to add the document to a folder in the Dock. When you do this, the Dock thinks you’re actually trying to add the document to the Dock itself, rather than dropping it on the folder, so it kindly slides the icons out of the way to make room for your document. If this happens to you, just hold the Command Key as you drag and the icons stay put, which enables you to drop the document into a “non-moving” object.

DRAGGING-AND-DROPPING TO THE APP OF YOUR CHOICE

You can use the Dock to open a document in the application of your choice rather than what OS X would open it in normally by default. Let’s say you make a screen capture using the standard Shift-Command-3 shortcut, and the resulting PDF file then appears on your desktop. If you double-click that file, by default, it’s going to open in Preview. As long as your Photoshop is in your Dock, you can drag the PDF screen capture from your desktop and drop it directly on the Photoshop icon in the Dock, and then Photoshop opens the document.

FORCING A DOCUMENT ON AN APP

Sometimes, docked apps don’t want to open your document, even though they may be able to, so you have to coax them to give it a try. For example, let’s say you created a document in WordPerfect for Mac a few years back. If you drag that document to Microsoft Word’s icon in the Dock, chances are it won’t highlight. If that happens, just hold Option-Command, then drag the document’s icon to the Word icon in the Dock, and you can force it to try open that document.