14 DAY TRIAL // Secrets of Safari's Downloads Window.
You can do more with Safari's Downloads window (Window: Downloads) than just monitor your downloads. For instance, consider this relatively common situation: You download an app, try it out, and decide you don't like it. You send it to the Trash along with the downloaded disk image, but a bit later on you want to give it another look. You might think you have to start over again at the developer's Web site. As long as you haven't cleared Safari's Downloads window (by clicking on the Clear button), that's not the case. Instead, you can find the entry for the program, press Command-C to copy it, then press Command-V to paste it right back into the Downloads window. Presto - the file starts downloading again.
Ah, but what if you have accidentally cleared the Downloads window? It's an easy mistake to make: you highlight one entry and then click on the Clear button to erase it. Unfortunately, that's not what the Clear button does; it erases all entries in the Downloads window. Thankfully, there's a way to recover from this scenario, and it's amazingly easy. Just press Command-Z (Edit: Undo) while the Downloads window is active, and your list will magically reappear. You can even do this after you've switched to the standard browsing window and done some surfing. The only things that will destroy your chances of recovery are quitting Safari or downloading another file. Once you've done either, your entries are gone for good.
Reclaim RAM by Disabling Dashboard
Whenever you press F12, Tiger's Dashboard offers a wealth of information on everything from airline flights to currency conversions or stock prices. But this power comes at a price: open widgets eat up RAM, even if the Dashboard layer is inactive. To see how much RAM your widgets use, open them and then launch Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities). In the search box, type dashboard. Look at the Real Memory column to see how much RAM each widget uses. A typical one consumes about 10MB. Open ten at once, and there goes 100MB of memory.
Consider disabling Dashboard if you're short on RAM or if you run a regulated environment, such as a school lab. To do so, take a trip to Terminal (/Applications/Utilities) and type this command:
d e f a u l t s w r i t e com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
Press the return key. To make your changes take effect, you must restart the Dock. Since Terminal is already open, the easiest way to do that is to type this command and then press return:
killall Dock
After the Dock restarts, press F12 and you'll see - nothing. To make Dashboard return, open Terminal again, type this command, and press return:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcxdisabled -boolean NO
Once again, you'll have to use the killall Dock command to make the changes take effect. When you do, Dashboard will return and any widgets you had open will be active.