Like most applications in OS X with a toolbar, Finder will let you rearrange, add and remove items from its toolbar (pictured below). This is a great timesaver for those who don’t have the keyboard shortcuts memorized for deleting or want to have access to a button.

Like most other OS X applications, customize Finder’s toolbar by choosing the Customize Toolbar… from the View menu (pictured below).

Just like previously mentioned, Finder acts just as most other OS X applications. Below is a screenshot of the toolbar items available for Finder’s toolbar; it includes options like New Folder, Delete, Get Info, Quick Look, Eject and multiple view/navigation items.

This can be looked at as a tip or just a reminder, a reminder that you can always customize your Toolbars and to use that feature to its fullest.

I like to add a little something to each of the applications I use, personalize them if you will. Even though I use keyboard shortcuts the majority of the time to delete, view file info or for Quick Look, I find myself using them occasionally when its not convenient to use the keyboard (other people who use my Mac use them as well).

First off, this tip does not work with all menu bar items, only Apple-provided menu bar items (like the clock, WiFi status, iChat, etc.) and select third-party application menu bar addons. This reason behind this how to do with how developers add an item to the menu bar: only items through OS X’s SystemUIServer will work with this tip. 

Back when I first switched to the Mac, I couldn’t for figure out a way to move the items on my Mac’s menu bar around. The only way I could figure a way to do it was to manually enable/disable them in the order I wanted them to be displayed. This tip is a simple solution to that problem.

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Exposé, the application window switching and hiding feature built into OS X  is something you either love or hate. But this article on Exposé is not about its flaws, but instead a cool hidden feature that easily lets you cycle through the open windows of applications open on your Mac.

How to use it: Start Exposé (All Applications or Application Windows) and while its displaying all your open windows hit Tab. Each time you hit Tab, Exposé will cycle from one open application to another, basically switching which application’s windows it’s displaying. If you’re in All Applications mode this will switch Exposé to Application Windows mode, and each subsequent press of Tab will move you to the next application (Shift + Tab to go backwards). Even if there are no applications open with more than one window, this will still cycle through highlighting one window at a time. Pressing Enter will exit Exposé and bring the the selected window/application to the front (Escape also works). A screen shot of this Exposé feature in action can be seen below as well as two videos at the end of this post.

There is no mention of this feature in System Preferences, it seems like one of those things that you’ve got to find for yourself. By default you can enter the Application Windows mode with F10, but this allows easy access to Application Windows from All Applications as well as another nice way to switch applications from Exposé.

I’ve got two videos of this in action, the first shows this trick with single-window applications only while the second shows multi-windowed applications mixed in with single-window applications.

• Expose Tab Trick (Single-Window) 1.1MB
• Exposé Tab Trick (Multi-Window) 3.6MB

I’ve noticed most people drag an external disk to the Trash in order to unmount/eject a drive from their Mac. Thats not the only way to safely eject a disk from your system though… I can’t claim this tip saves any time, but its one I use quite often when I’ve got several application windows open, this tip is how to eject a disk through the Finder window (instead of the Desktop and the Trash located on the Dock).

Each ejectable disk has a small eject icon next to it in the left sidebar of Finder, this is highlighted in the image above (click on it to enlarge). A simple click on this eject icon will unmount the disk from your system and allow for removal without data loss (providing it ejected without an error). You’ll know its been ejected from your Mac when the disk disappears.

There are other ways of ejecting a drive from your system, using Disk Utility is one, and another method is by selecting a disk in Finder and using Command + E (while a drive is selected).

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking your Mac’s Dock is to large or to small this tip will help you change the size as well as a few other Dock options quickly and easily without opening System Preferences.

 

To do this trick, locate the “cross walk” looking area between your Applications and your Stacks and the Trash area. Once you hover over it you’ll notice the cursor changes to a resize looking pointer, drag up or down to set a new size or right click (Control + Click) to bring up a menu like the one pictured below.

 

The popup menu provides quick access to options like enabling or disabling Dock Hiding and Magnification in addition to the location (left, bottom or right) of the dock and the minimize effect used when minimizing an application window. At the very bottom of the menu is an option to launch the Dock preference pane in System Preferences.

By default Finder does not list the sizes of all items on your hard drive when viewing folders and files. If you’re curious about the size of an item and Finder simply places an -- in the Size column give this a try.

Bring up the View Options for the current folder you’re looking at, do this by either using Cmd+J, View > Show View Options or by right-clicking in a blank part of the Finder window and choosing Show View Options from the menu. Once there you’ll see a window like the one below, check the Calculate all sizes checkbox and close the window.

For an additional bonus, click the Use as Defaults button to apply this change to all subfolders. For one reason or another Finder does not remember this setting after logging out and back in, I would assume thats to minimize the work the CPU and hard drives need to do while browsing your files to make the OS snappier. If you only care about the size of a single file or folder, Quick Look will give this info to you with less effort, additionally the Get Info option under the File menu (also available by right-clicking the file/folder) will tell you a little more.

Some backgrounds look best with Mac OS X’s menu bar transparent, while others look terrible. I suppose this is why Apple allows you to toggle the transparency of the menu bar in the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane in System Preferences (as seen in the image above).

The ability to disable the transparency of the original translucent menu bar came in the 10.5.2 update released by Apple, since then users have had the ability to toggle the setting. What this comes down to is individual preference, I encourage you to try your menu bar both with and without transparency enabled to find what suits you best. Although this may be a well known feature for long-time mac users (or just Leopard early adopters), tips like this help newcomers to the mac feel at home, look for more tips like this one in our Mac Basics category. 

The Finder Path Bar is a nice addition to Finder, but it doesn’t come enabled by default. The Path Bar is located at the bottom of the Finder window and shows the path to the file currently selected in Finder. The image above is an example of the Path Bar displaying Photo Booth.app in the Applications folder.

To enable the Path Bar in Finder open a finder window and select Show Path Bar from the View menu. It’s that simple.

If you enjoyed this how-to, check out OS X 411’s other news, tips, tricks and how-tos.

While I was writing another post for OS X 411, I mistakenly added the word Cyrsis to Leopard’s built-in spell checker, I wasn’t paying attention, but after looking at the word more carefully (after it was added) I noticed it was misspelled. The proper spelling is Crysis, which I assumed Leopard didn’t know anyway, thats how this started… 

Most applications in Leopard that use the built-in spell checker allow you to add words to the dictionary, but not all of them allow you to remove or “unlearn” the learned words. Pages is a perfect example, it will allow you to add words to the spell checker but not remove them. Below I have an example of where I’ve added “Robetr” to the spell checker.

I’ve found two ways to remove a “learned” word from the Leopard spell checker, the first is to open TextEdit and type the word, right-click the word and select “Unlearn Spelling” from the popup (thats it, you’re done). 

If you used the TextEdit method above this is not needed (just an alternate way of removing learned words for the more curious). The second way I’ve found is to edit a file located at ~/Library/Spelling/en (en is the file name (for English I assume), and the Library folder located in your home folder). Open this file in any text editor (TextEdit even works) and remove the word from the list. Once the file is saved logout and you have just unlearned a word. This would also be a practical way to unlearn all the words known by Leopard. Note: The Spelling directory is only created if you have learned words, on a fresh install of OS X the Spelling directory doesn’t exist. It also seems that this file is not synced with the spell checker live, if you delete a name it will still show up as correct until you logout.

Having the ability to change the text on Mac OS X’s Login window is not an explicit feature of Apple’s operating system, it is however possible. Some of the reasons you may want to add text to your Mac’s login window are: security, lost/found and identification. Adding text to the login window is easy, simply add a key and value to a .plist file and logout. 

First you’ll want to navigate in Finder to the following location: /Library/Preferences/ (the Library folder in your hard drive’s root, not your home folder).

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Once there, find and open the file com.apple.loginwindow.plist in a text editor like TextWrangler.

Because this file, com.apple.loginwindow.plist is outside of your home folder and effects all users on your system, you must have administrator access on the computer you wish to modify.

Make a backup copy of your original com.apple.loginwindow.plist incase something goes wrong in any of the following steps.

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Insert into com.apple.loginwindow.plist somewhere after the <dict> and before the </dict> the italic text exactly how it is shown here: <key>LoginwindowText</key> Once that has been added, directly below it on a new line enter <string>Your Custom Text Here</string> Replace the Your Custom Text Here (red) with your message. Image: The text you will be adding is highlighted in yellow (the end of the line was omitted).

Save the file and logout to test your new login window text. TextWrangler or any other text editing program will ask for an administrator password when you attempt to save this file.

To remove the text you just added, simply remove the two lines of text you added.