14 DAY TRIAL // How many times a day do you end up using a PC although you also own and use a Mac? This happens to me quite often when I have to wake one of my friends’ PCs from the dead or even the one that I keep at home mainly for testing Windows applications and playing games that are not yet available on the Mac platform. When this happens, I always miss some of the features that I use on the Mac without even thinking about it.
Call it a second nature, but when I’m using Windows I always push the scroll-wheel to get to choose one of the active programs running in the background (clicking on their minimized window in the taskbar is just a thing that seems to consume too much time now that I’m used to the way Macs work).
Also, about three-four times during a PC-using session I find myself dragging the mouse to the bottom-left corner of the screen to get a quick view of the desktop. These are just two examples of actions that I keep performing while expecting the same outcome as the one I am used to experience on the Mac.
The two examples above are probably the main reasons that made me write this article about the things that Mac users take for granted and PC users would want to have built in their OSes. The fours features that I will present here are, perhaps, some of the things that will make Mac users always feel at home when using Mac OS X.
The first feature that I consider very important for any Mac user out there is Expose. This little gem will provide one with quick and easy access to any open window on a Mac, hide all the windows, and even scale down all the available windows into thumbnails and display them on the screen so you can quickly choose the one that you need.
Expose is the first tool that you should learn how to use after switching to the Mac, because it will definitely make your life easier by allowing you to switch to the window you need and avoid hunting it down through the whole pile.
The second feature that eases up the life of Mac users consists of the active corners. Using this feature, one will be able to quickly view the desktop by hiding all the active windows, activate the screensaver, disable the screensaver, sleep the Mac’s display, view all windows, get a quick view and choose one of the available Spaces, open the Dashboard, and the list goes on.
I consider active corners to be the most important feature (besides Expose) when you want to increase your productivity, because it will help you assign a desktop corner to view the desktop, one to show all windows and one to get a list of all Spaces to quickly go through all levels of windows, without having to use any time-consuming keyboard shortcuts.
Quicklook is the third feature that most Mac users will miss when using a PC, and most PC users will want to have when seeing a Mac user running Mac OS X on his/her machine. Why do I consider it to be so important? Because, just like the other two features above it, Quicklook will shrink the time consumption for each of the tasks you have to accomplish each day.
Consider this scenario: you have a bunch of InDesign and/or Illustrator files or Photoshop PSDs and you want to find a specific one that you need for the project you are working on. However, because you forgot exactly which one it is, you will have to find it someway. On a PC, you would have to open each separate file until you stumble upon the one you need. But, if you are the lucky user of a Mac, all you have to do is open a Finder window, select one of the files you want to preview, push SPACE, and use the arrows to browse through the files.
As Apple best says it, Quicklook will help you “instantly preview the contents of your documents without ever opening them. Flip through multipage PDFs, watch full-screen videos, view photo slideshows, and more. With a single click.”
The fourth and last feature of the list is your Mac’s awesome built-in ability that allows you to quickly make screenshots of your screen directly to your desktop. And this without having to install any other software, just by using OS global-available keyboard shortcuts.
Sure, when using Windows, for example, you can make a screenshot just as easy, but, after making it, you will also have to launch an image editor (e.g. the Windows built-in Paint program), paste it and save it to a location of your choice. That is about three steps too many, when compared with the Mac way of making a screen snapshot.
Using this feature, you will be able to quickly grab the whole screen (Cmd-Shift-3), only a part of the screen you choose (Cmd-Shift-4), or, if you need to, the active window (Cmd-Shift-4 and then push SPACE). This way, the screenshot will be saved to an PNG image file on your Mac’s desktop. However, if you want to save the screenshot to the clipboard (e.g. for later use in an image-editing application), you will only have to append CTRL to the keyboard shortcuts presented above.
Do you know of any other time-saving features available to Mac OS X users? Do you have an addition to the list of features you miss when using a PC? Share your thoughts on this subject with the other readers in the comments.