I consider myself a Macintosh power user and, by my own estimate, I probably only take advantage of 50 to 60 percent of the features, shortcuts and helpers that are available on OS X.  I’m guessing the typical user only knows about and accesses 5 to 10 percent of the computers abilities.  Since I always seem to be offering up suggestions to friends and family the tricks I’ve picked up, it seemed like a good idea to document the little things that make using a computer that much more enjoyable (or, to some, bearable).

The plan is to offer up a hint five days a week (skipping weekends) with each week based on a common theme.  These tips are aimed mostly at the beginner but many of them will be new to the typical long time (non-power) user as well.  If you’d like, you can also email me questions or suggestions for tips.

A couple of entry convention notes:  I’ll Bold key words and providing descriptions of them in the Glossary and I’ll Bold and Italics Software and provide descriptions under Software.  Occasionally I’ll use Italics to accent something that I don’t feel I need to define like menus or common keys on the keyboard.  (These don’t appear to show up on the front page summary but they will appear on the pages for the individual entries.  Hopefully this will be fixed in iWeb v.2.0.)

It should also be noted that all of these suggestions work with Apple’s software and should work with most third party software.  When it doesn’t, it’s because the developer isn’t following Apple’s recommended User Interface Guidelines and being a bad Mac citizen (I’m looking at you Microsoft).  There’s really no excuse for this as most everything I mention that isn’t application specific is provided to the programmers as freely available preprogrammed features.