Three more tips for you

Macworld April 2013 has another 100 things every Mac owner should know. This article expands on their April 2011 article on the same theme. If you don’t own the April 2011 issue, you can get the article as a Kindle single for $0.99 at Amazon.com

Anyway, lots of handy stuff. I noticed it didn’t contain a couple of tips, plus an extra, that I will give you now.

First, how to get to the desktop when you’ve covered it in windows. Press the F11 key on your keyboard. I tried this on a client’s iBook running 10.4.11 and I tried it on my Mac Mini running 10.8.2. Worked like a charm. So, when you need to get to the desktop in a hurry, press F11.

To restore the mess on your desktop, press F11 again.

Second, how to take a picture from Safari and put it on your desktop. You don’t need to do a screenshot. You can go directly from Safari to Desktop in two clicks.

The first click is a right-click on the picture. I have chosen these adorable puppies from Google Images. I have right-clicked on the image. This brings up a menu at your cursor:

Now notice Use Image as Desktop Picture, which is third from the bottom. Click on that and the picture in Safari appear on your desktop.

If you want to copy and paste the puppies into an image editing program, you use Copy Image at the bottom of the menu.

You can right-click on images in other Web browsers, too, to see these choices. Firefox has a similar menu and so does Internet Explorer.

Finally, wouldn’t be great if you could store all these tips in a convenient database program? Done.

Apple includes the Stickies program with every version of OS X. Before that, it came with Classic OS. Stickies places virtual sticky notes on your screen. You can arrange them as you please. You can choose different background colors to represent different categories of information.

If you see something in Safari that you want to save, highlight it with your mouse cursor and press Shift+Command+Y. That places the selected text in a new sticky note.

Those are the tips for today.

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog