Getting To Know Your Mac

If you've recently switched from Windows to Mac, you might have noticed that switching applications with cmd+tab doesn't behave like in Windows.

Windows displays all open windows in the taskbar so you could browse through them with hitting alt+tab or clicking the desired taskbar button. Unlike in Windows, Mac swaps applications - not actual windows. If you have for example Mail and few emails opened in separate windows you have to first open up the mail application and then click on the email windows or access them from Window menu. You can also press cmd+shift+´ which is possibly the weirdest key combination ever.

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First time I grabbed my mouse to move the cursor on my recently unwrapped Mac, I noticed that the cursor didn't behave like it used to behave in my previous life. Somehow arrow movement just wasn't so accurate, it didn't feel right.

System preferences, I thought, that would save my day. After searching under mouse preferences for some kind of a slider that could allow me to adjust the mouse settings I realized there's no such thing. "Is this what it's going to be? Do I really have to learn how to use a mouse all over again?"

I dropped the mouse and stopped for a while. As in many cases, I might not be the only one suffering from this issue. After some search engine ramble I found a solution.

iMouseFix allows me to adjust mouse acceleration or even disable it. After some testing I turned the acceleration off and got my mouse back nearly as good as it had been for 15 years. I didn't have to re-wrap my Mac and take it back to the store. Greatness.

Ps. If iMouseFix doesn't suit for you, SteerMouse might.

After I dragged approximately 15 applications to my Dock everything I saw was a line of icons. Horrible line of icons that weren't organized in any way. I would definitely need some separators.

So I clicked my secondary mouse button on the dock and tried to find a way to add separators from the settings menu. No luck. There's no such thing.

After some heavy Googleing around I found a solution:

1. Open up your terminal
2. Paste following text into terminal (in one line)
   defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }'
3. Enter killall Dock

Your Dock closes and re-appears with one separator. You can drag that separator anywhere you want inside the Dock. If you want to delete a separator, just drag it outside the Dock.

Not so simple but now I can find the right icon and not spend half a day looking for it.

Note: This applies to Mac OS X 10.5.4 (Leopard)