Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

General Productivity

Once you’ve tweaked your machine to suit your style, you can use these hints to increase your efficiency.

Open and Save Dialog Boxes

The Open and Save dialog boxes offer an ingenious column-view look at your entire hard drive, making it easy for you to choose a folder for opening or saving a document. Trouble is, the dialog box appears with all the majesty of a peanut floating in the middle of your screen. It’s just too small—and there’s no reason it should be that way.

Fortunately, Mac OS X lets you expand these dialog boxes and even remembers the size you like. Now the next time you open or save something in that program—even if you restart the program—the dialog box remains your preferred size.

Simply follow the directions in Figure 4-8.

Shortcuts in Open and Save Dialog Boxes

When you bring up an Open or Save dialog box in Mac OS X, you can click various columns, folders, and pop-up menus to navigate your system.

It’s often much faster, though, if you tell the dialog box, “Look here!” and shove the icon you want under its nose, by dragging a file or folder directly into the dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-9.

Tip

To navigate directly to your desktop folder from an Open or Save dialog box, the Hide All Windows Exposé trick ( Section 4.2.2) can be a handy timesaver. Once you reveal the desktop, just begin dragging the icon you want, press the keyboard shortcut to turn off Exposé, and drop the icon right into the dialog box.

Figure 4-8. Top: To make a program’s ...