Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Mac tips

Author:Ian Beatty
Posted:3/12/1999; 12:52:46 PM
Topic:buttonRef macro
Msg #:4038 (In response to 4034)
Prev/Next:4037 / 4039

PS I just switched jobs (yea!) from Tech Support to Graphic/Web Design (double yea!) and am now I on a Mac (uhm, yea...). I remember when Dave first got on Windows people gave him a bunch of tips/pointers/links. I'm looking for the same thing.

Big productivity pointer: set up your Apple menu hierarchically. Open the "Apple Menu Items" subfolder of your System Folder. View it as a list, sorted by name. That's what will show up under your Apple menu. Any folders will show up as pop-open hierarchical submenus (recursively). The ordering is alphabetical, so you can control where things show up in the menu by putting one or more leading spaces, option-8 bullets, etc.

I put an alias to each of my hard drive partitions in the folder, with three leading spaces so they show up at the top of the menu. It takes a few seconds during boot-up for the system to set up all the hierarchical menus, but I can navigate to any folder or file without touching an icon: a great time-saver.

I put all my "desk accessories" (Notepad, Stickies, Apple System Profiler, etc.) in a folder called " DAs" (two leading spaces), so they don't clutter up the Apple menu, but are only one submenu away. I used to make another folder called " Apps" (also two spaces) and fill it with aliases to my most commonly-used applications, but now I just use the Launcher. Learn it, it's great.

I keep my Chooser and alias to the Control Panels folder at the main level of the Apple menu (where they are by default) because I use them a lot, but I put a single space befor the names for ordering.

I leave the "Recently used..." folders, etc. as is.

I also put some empty folders in, with names like " ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~" with variable numbers of leading spaces, to form crude separator lines between the three-space and two-space items, two-space and one-space items, etc. I've gone in with a resource editor (try ResEdit... advanced!) to make empty icons, so they look more like separators.

I set Macs up this way for all the users I support, and everybody seems to like it.

Have fun...

// Ian

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