September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
576 pages
16h 1m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Power Hound, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Program Launchers and Switchers
The Dock is Mac OS X’s combined program launcher and switcher. It’s also a spot for storing often-used documents and folders, as well as minimized windows (Chapter 3). But that’s a lot of tasks for one lonely program. Luckily, a number of highly effective third-party launchers and switchers can take some of the strain off your Dock.
Many competent launcher programs exist, including DragThing (Section 13.3), LaunchBar ( Section 14.2.1), PocketDock (http://www.pocketsw.com/PocketSoftware/pocket_dock.php), Butler ( Section 14.2.2), QuickSilver (http://blacktree.com/apps/quicksilver/), and DropDrawers ( Section 14.2.3). Most of these programs are “try before you buy” shareware, so experiment and find one you really like before emptying your pockets.
Once you’ve found a launcher you’re comfortable with, remove all your stored programs from the Dock (except, perhaps, for the new launcher itself), and use the replacement launcher instead. Most launcher programs also provide a keyboard shortcut to bring them forward, which means you can use them from any application.
Keyboard Launching
If you’re a keyboard power user, you’ll love LaunchBar (www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html) for its sheer economy of effort. This program launcher lets you open any program or document with only a few keystrokes.
Once installed, LaunchBar places an icon in your Dock, and then hides itself until needed. You can open LaunchBar by clicking its icon in the Dock, but of course ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.