AppFlow

So you’ve cleaned up your dock so that your most frequently used apps are right at your fingertips, you’ve cleaned up your applications stack so that your less frequently used apps can be found by category, but what about the rest of your computer?  Files, contacts, the internet?  How do you access them quickly?  Surely you don’t have to dig through finder or your web browser to get to them?  Surely there’s a better way!

Well I’m glad you asked!  There are numerous ways of accessing all of the suff you want to access quickly and hassle free.  Unfortunately if I were to find, test, and rate them all it would be well into June!  I’ve selected a few of my favourites to go through now.

1. Spotlight

It would be criminal to mention this subject and not mention ‘spotlight’, your Mac’s very own integrated quick search tool.  Spotlight happily sits in the top right of the screen, right out of your way until you summon it with  ⌘-Space .

Spotlight searches all of your files, folders, applications, contacts and many more.  It is extremely quick and easy for accessing applications (it’s primary use on my machine).  For example – to access system preferences I can click through “ > System Preferences”, or open my applications stack and find it, or simply “⌘-Space > ‘s’ > Enter”.  All done through the keyboard, all very easy, all lightning quick!

2. Google QSB (Quick Search Box)

As is becoming common with many computer applications, Search engine and Advertising giant Google do one!  Personally I am a big fan of Google’s apps (both desktop and web based) and was quite excited about this one when I found it. I summon this by “⌥-Space”, although this is very easily customisable.

As with spotlight, QSB easily allows you to search through all of your files, folders, address book contacts and e-mails.  It also links with your google account to let you search through any google docs etc, right from your desktop.

Unlike spotlight, QSB has some fairly neat features.  In addition to searching your files and folders, QSB will search your iTunes library.  You can also perform searches of specific sites, such as appflow.co.uk, by entering the URL, hitting ‘tab’, followed by your search.  All of this makes accessing the web, quick and easy.

3. Dashboard

The disadvantage with using Spotlight or QSB is that they do so much!  If you have someone in your contact list with the same name as an artist in your iTunes library, QSB could get a bit annoying.  Equally, Spotlight seems to return a lot of random results (what has my GCSE Science text book got to do with Jeff Wayne!?).  Sometimes you want to search one specific database.

The good old fashioned Mac Dashboard allows you to do this!  Accessed by pressing F12 (or the ‘dashboard key’ if you have a new keyboard), we’re all used to seeing the screen dim and a disorganised array of widgets cover the screen.  All of them ‘might be useful’, but to be honest, I very rarely use any of mine.

The widgets that do get their fair share of use, however, are the three above.  This is because they perform very specific searches, meaning I don’t need to leaf through a whole list of results from Spotlight or QSB.  If I’m looking for a contact – I can search my address book.  If I’m looking for a definition – I search just the dictionary.  Simple, easy, painless.

Others

This is by no means all of the ways of quickly accessing your files, folders, contacts and web pages.  There are literally hundreds of different ways to do it out there, all of them slightly different and they may work better for you.  If I haven’t mentioned your absolute favorite app for doing this sort of thing, drop me a comment, e-mail or tweet.  Always glad to hear from you.

Conclusion

This pretty much concludes my brief look at how to ‘Keep Mac Awesome’.  You may disagree with some, or even all of the points I’ve raised, but this is good.  Mac OS X is so brilliantly designed that it can fit almost any user style.  Have fun with your Mac and remember to subscribe to us here at AppFlow either by RSS or Twitter!