OS X’s Finder makes it easy to collect your favorite stuff for easy access. Give these shortcuts a try:
- ⌘-T will add the currently selected app or file to the sidebar on the left
- ⌘-⇧-T will add apps to the left side of your Dock, and files to the right side
Note: if you don’t see a sidebar or a toolbar at the top of your Finder window, hit ⌘-⌥-T (View > Hide Toolbar) to show them.
You can also drag just about anything to the toolbar at the top of your Finder window, though I haven’t been able to find a keyboard shortcut for that.
Have you recently found yourself asking “boy, won’t someone make a Twitterrific-inspired theme for Alfred?”
A site I only know of as “Dirt” has granted your wish with two Twitterrific-inspired Alfred Themes—one dark, one light.
While playing a Genius Mix, you can’t see or do much with the song currently playing. You can’t even rate it; File > Rating is grayed out.
But if you hit Command-L (Controls > Go to Current Song), iTunes will show you the song in your library where you can add a rating and edit metadata. Hit Command-L again and you’ll be taken back to Genius Mixes.
For App Store apps, Quick Look shows the purchase date instead of Last Modified.
If playlists, artists, albums, and genres just don’t work for your music management and sync style, iTunes lets you manually add individual songs to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. As long as your device is plugged into your computer or you’ve enabled the new WiFi sync feature, you can drag songs from your music library onto your device in the iTunes sidebar.
iTunes will keep track of all manually added songs at the very bottom of your device’s Music info tab, pictured here. This is also where you can remove those songs.
Note that iTunes has long allowed manually adding other media like movies, TV shows, and podcasts from their respective device info tabs.
Moom is a great utility from Many Tricks for managing your windows. It adds a popover to the green “best fit” button in most windows, containing quick-access options for doing things like setting a window to take up the entire left or right half of your display.
It gets much more powerful, though, allowing you to quickly lay out windows to fit your workflow, save a bunch of windows as a “Snapshot” to use over and over, and even specify pixel dimensions and a display edge for a window. As you might expect, Moom also has healthy support for shortcuts. You can specify multiple actions like “Center” and “Move & Zoom,” then set a keyboard shortcut for quickly using that action on every window you want. Snapshots are also invited to the shortcut party.
I’ve used Moom for a couple months, and it quickly became one of the apps I have to install when setting up a fresh Mac. Moom is some of the best $5 you can spend on a utility.
Steve Lyb discovered a handy multi-touch gesture for quickly triggering OS X’s Exposé feature to focus on the open windows of a specific app, instead of all open windows.
iTunes’ rental icon turns red when one of your rentals is about to expire.
