OJBs Web Site: Tip

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Launch Programs

One area where Mac OS X is a bit deficient is in a quick and easy way to launch (start, run, open) programs. Its possible to click the Applications button on a Finder window, then open the folder containing the program, then double-click the program, but this means you are no longer viewing the original folder which probably contains your work documents.

I have two solutions I use for this issue. First, for users who use few programs (say less than 20) I just drag the icon for each of their programs to the dock and they click there to launch. On wide screens (which are common on new laptops and flat panels) I usually put the dock on the right and have it always shown.

For power users who have many programs (I currently have about 300) the dock isn't big enough so I use a third party shareware program instead. My favourite was DragThing. I created pop-up windows with the applications I used and associated keyboard shortcuts with the programs I used most, for example command-option-control-S to launch Safari. Now I use iKey instead, with keyboard shortcuts to launch programs.

Note that some of these solutions make it easy to drag files to an application's icon to force that program to launch it - something I do quite often. An alternative is to use the Open With contextual menu.

The keyboard shortcuts are also useful to switch between running programs. For example to copy the contents of a web page from Safari to BBEdit I would use these keyboard shortcuts: command-option-control-S (bring Safari to front), command-A (select all), command-C (copy), command-option-control-B (bring BBEdit to front), command-N (new document), command-V (paste). Sounds complicated, only takes 2 seconds!

By the way, the reasons I use the seemingly complicated command-option-control combination are: the keys are right next to each other on my keyboard and are easy to press together, and other programs don't use that combination so it doesn't conflict with existing keyboard commands.