Friday’s Killer Tips And Tricks For Mac OS X Tiger.

Have you ever wondered why there’s no manual included with Mac OS X Tiger? Sure, there’s that little bitty booklet (I’m being kind), but no manual.

Not a real manual. We need a book that tells you everything you need to know about your Mac.

Why? Because I’ve been using Macs for years, Mac OS X from the early cats to Jaguar to Panther to Tiger and I keep finding new things I didn’t know.

Someone must know all these things. In the meantime, I’m forced to pick up tips and tricks from other sources.

Among the best places to find tips and tricks are sites like Mac OS X Hints and Dan Knight’s great site for low end Mac tricks and tips and deals, LowEndMac. Duh.

For me, Tiger tips and tricks come wherever I can find them.

Today brings you a couple that, once used, become what you’d expect in Tiger. Coolness.

First, Get Info. If you’re in the Finder, Command-key+“I” gets you a pop up window and loads of information about a file. If it’s a movie file, you’ll even be able to play it in the window. You can also set permissions, and change icon.

That’s not a killer tip, though.

There’s also a ‘get info’ when using Spotlight, Tiger’s fast new search utility.

Enter a word into the Spotlight search field in the Finder tool bar. The results get listed in a larger Finder window and sorted by Folders, Images, Presentations, Code, PDF documents, other Documents, and so on.

That’s all fine and dandy but hardly a killer tip.

Funny how I never noticed this before, but to the right of each of the files in a Spotlight search results list is a little circle icon with the letter ‘i’ inside. Click it.

What you get is Get Info. Well, a button to Get Info.

That quick tip now replaces the ‘find file in Spotlight listing, click to find file in Finder, click to get Get Info. What’s cool is you don’t have to leave the Spotlight search results list.

That little ‘i” isn’t too big. So, just control-key click on the file name and get the dialog box to do the rest.

I wrote about setting up a Mac mini as a little, and very inexpensive Mac server for development. It doesn’t even have a keyboard, mouse or display. I use Chicken of the VNC to login.

However, I don’t want my little Mac mini to run Dashboard Widgets. It just takes up extra memory and a spot on the Dock. Can you kill Dashboard?

Click and hold on the Dock’s Dashboard icon, then drag it off the Dock. It’s gone, but Dashboard still works using your keyboard shortcut. That saves Dock space.

Hmmmm. Am I the only one who thinks that the Mac mini might get replaced by a smaller Intel-based Mac called the ‘Mac nano?’