Your semester is fully into swing, you’re frittering away your free time and study time on Facebook, IM, and the local bar scene, and you’re probably ready for the next installment of the series designed to help you collegiates take full advantage of your Mac. Below are some intermediate tips and tricks for you Mac users that might come in handy.

First, I want to begin by noting a new app I stumbled across the other day. Personally, I am a minimalist when it comes to my desktop; the less icons the better, so as to get the best view of a nice high res flower image or something similar.

Aside from spending way too much time dragging folders back and forth from your documents to your desktop, a really easy way to virtually clean it up is with Camouflage. A free application, camouflage rests in your menu bar, completely “camouflaging” all your desktop icons.

Now onto the real gem. For those of you who don’t like the mouse, and would rather become much more friendly with your keyboard for all those mundane tasks, Quicksilver is the only way of life.

What Quicksilver is, simply, is an application that has all the functionality of Spotlight with added functionality that can completely control your OS with minimal keystrokes.

I admit I am a fledgling user to the program, but I don’t know what I would do without it. Here’s how it works:

You hit a couple keystrokes to immediately pull up the Quicksilver application box (I would highly recommend adding it to your start up processes). From there, your options are essentially unlimited.

Say you want to open your recent term paper; begin typing the title or a part of the title, and whilest you type, Quicksilver will display both the most pertinent result as well as a side bar of possible results. When you see Quicksilver has cued the correct paper, hit enter to open it.

The same applies to files; I cannot say how many times during the day I type “app” to bring up the applications folder. However, you need not even waste time browsing through your program list. Simply begin typing the name of the program, hit enter, and the program will launch.

So how is it different than Spotlight, you ask? Added functionality, I say. Today, I was really not wanting to use the mouse to pause my iTunes; out of curiosity, I pulled up Quicksilver and typed, “pause.” Sure enough, an iTunes command came up, I hit enter, and the music stopped.

These are just examples of simple Quicksilver functionality; if you want to really delve deeper into the program, you can start utilizing the action box. If you want to craft a new email, type Entourage, scroll to the application, and hit tab. That will take you to the action box, and scroll down to “email to.” This will bring up a third box in which scrolling down will scroll through your contacts, and voila, you just started composing an email without a single keystroke.

Believe me, there is much more functionality I haven’t scratched the surface of; at a later time I’ll post a Quicksilver user guide, but for now, trust me and download it. After a little experience you will learn that the mouse is almost completly obsolete.

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Related:

College: A Mac survival guide (Pt 1)

College: A Mac survival guide (Pt 3)

College: A Mac survival guide (Pt 2)

DIY: Build a Leopard Mac for $350

Apple handily shuts down popular rumor site Think Secret

Stumble It!

Entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 2:01 pm under Apple, Mac, Updates, opinion.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Triston McIntyre.