If you have ever had an Application lock up on you in OS X and had to force quit it you know that normally you would go to the apple in the upper right and select the force quit menu. Here is away to speed up the process. If you hold down the shift key after you hit the apple the option to force quit the active Application will appear and you can force quit from there. You can also …

Contrary to popular belief, in the finder hitting the Enter does not open the file. The Enter key will allow you to change the name of the file though. To open the file or folder hit the Command and down arrow at the same time.

If you are anything like me and my family, you buy all kinds of things online. I use Amazon and eBay as much as I can to save a few bucks. The biggest problem for me is what to do with the receipts? Last month at out Mac User Group meeting we were talking about the “Print Options Menu” and there it was a “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” option, it was sitting right under the .pdf options button …

Here are the winners of the Leopard contest.

iPod Shuffle winners:

10th: Enable data detectors in iChat — Zach S. from New York, NY.
9th: Use Help to select menu items via keyboard — Aaron J. from Beaverton, OR (and no, I don’t know him!).
8th: Link to any specific message in Mail — Adam S. from Sydney, Australia.
7th: Zoom in and out on Quick Looked PDFs — James C. from Milwaukee, WI.
6th: Add a Show Package Contents keyboard shortcut — David G. from …

Did you know that you could flip through open windows in expose? Next time you use F10 to invoke hit the tab key and watch your open windows come right to the for ground.

In Firefox & Safari if you hold down the Option Key and click a link it will automatically be dumped into the Downloads Folder.

tips

I have to agree with the folks over at Mactips.org about how annoying it is to see the crash report right after you have some unknown force close the application you have been working on. In their article they tell us how to use the terminal to turn off this very annoying problem.
From Mactips.org

I hate it when an application crashes, it is far and beyond annoying; the only thing that pisses me …

When using the Spaces hot key (F8), if you hold the key, Spaces will appear, then disappear when you release F8. This great when you just want to get a bird’s eye view of stuff — press and hold, view, release and Spaces vanishes. And, this works as expected with the Spaces plus Exposé tip (Show all windows). Press F9 while holding F8, and you’ll see the All Windows view.

Also, another tip for those with notebook keyboards (or others?). On …

Quartz Composer files can be used as backdrops in iChat and Photo Booth. This means some screen savers can be used as backdrops!

In the Finder, use the Spotlight search box to find files ending with .qtz. Then in either iChat or Photo Booth, open the Video Effects section, navigate to the User Backdrops section, then simply drag a .qtz file into one of the unused backdrops. Finally, click the backdrop you just added to see the effect!

Have you ever wanted your Mac to just hurry up and connect via the Airport? All you need to do is tell your computer in what order it should look for an active connection. It is a real simple fix just open up the Network Pane in System Preferences and select the airport tab. You need to click on the “gear” near the bottom of the pain and select “Set Service Order” then move the airport or others around until …