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

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.

This morning when I woke my MacBook Air from sleep I found a nice prompt asking me to upgrade from .Mac to MobileMe, being a good Apple fan I followed its instructions (well not really instructions, just a software update). The update included iTunes 7.7 as well as a MobileMe preference pane.

The MobileMe update added a new preferences pane to System Preferences, the new icon is titled MobileMe and replaces the .Mac icon. Most of the settings are identical inside of the preference pane except it cannot communicate with the MobileMe servers as of 8:40 eastern on the 10th of July 2008. The iDisk is still titled iDisk unless Apple updates it to a new name sometime soon and the same sync-able items are still listed under Sync (no new ones yet).

Check software update for your copy of MobileMe today.

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.