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Command-Tab for switching between open applications.

Creating and customizing floating pallets

By clicking on the icon in the upper right of the monitor you will drop down the Applications menu (which lists the running apps). Everyone knows this one.

However, if you drag your mouse out of the bottom of this menu (assuming you do not let go of the mouse button), the Applications menu tears off to become a floating pallet (in OS8.5 and later). Its initial orientation is vertical with the Apps' icon and name; holding Shift and clicking the resize box (the first one on the right-hand end of the pallet's title bar; looks like a smaller square inside a larger one) will toggle between a wide and narrow orientation. Holding Option when clicking the resize box toggles between large and small icon views; holding Command when clicking it toggles between displaying only the icon or the icon with name; holding Shift and Option toggles between a vertical and horizontal orientation.

Sometimes the horizontal orientation will take up less precious monitor real estate and it appeals more to converted Wintel users.

GoMac's Taskbar

The Mac taskbar provided by the GoMac shareware utility has some nice extra tricks not readily available in the Windows version.

Dragging a document to the button of a running application opens the document in that application. I often use this when modifying HTML files in PageMill. Simply drag the HTML file to the PageMill button and it opens in PageMill. Make changes, save the file, and drag it to the browser's button and the new version opens in the browser. Note that on the Mac, closing the last open window of an application doesn't shutdown the application, so I can open an editor for example, close its window, and then drag files to the button.

Dragging any file to a blank portion of the taskbar places that file's icon in the left hand side of the task bar. A single click on the resulting icon opens the file. Great for launching frequently used programs.

Apple control strip modules can be installed at the right side of the task bar. One very nice module to install here is the Open Transport PPP strip. Once installed, you can select a phone number, dial up your on-line service, see your connection speed, and watch your line activity--all at the bottom of the screen. Another useful module for this is Quit CSM. This one will allow you to shutdown any running program or all programs at once, and shutdown or restart the machine. But the best part of Quit CSM is that it will display your free memory in a little bar graph so you can see at a glance if you have too many applications open.

Creating Aliases

An easy way to create an alias of an entity is to Command-Option-Drag it. Wherever you drop the file/folder/whatever is where the alias will appear (minus that annoying word "alias" that you always need to delete).

Multiple "Start" Menus

Starting with System 8.0 it became possible to make a folder, open it as a window, and then drag that window to the bottom of your screen where it becomes a "pop-up window" with a labeled tab matching the original name of the folder you created. The user can also access the View menu on the menubar to make it a pop up window. The user then makes aliases of his or her favorite applications, which are placed or dragged inside this pop-up window. Finally, the View menu is again used to change the alias icons to buttons. Buttons are larger and require only one mouse click to launch rather than two clicks with standard icons.

The user can also make multiple pop-up windows grouped according to need: "Applications," "Games," "Utilities," "Communications," Current Documents," etc. Each window would be filled with aliases of appropriate applications or documents.

To use these pop-up windows, the user simply clicks on the labeled tab at the bottom of the screen. The window pops up, the user clicks a button (launching something), and the window instantly pops down again.

This is a more elegant solution for quickly finding and launching applications or documents than using the Apple.

Using a "Start Menu"

If you're used to the Start Menu and the task bar in Windows 9x and want to use similar devices in Macintosh, you can add aliases of your applications or folders to your Apple Menu Items folder in your system folder for quick access to your most frequently used items.

You can also download (www.macdownload.com) GoMac, which acts much like the task bar for one-click switching between open apps (of course you can use AppSwitcher, but I personally dislike having it hover awkwardly over open windows), as well as access to the hard drive and its contents in a hierarchical fashion.