Tagged: window

Control window position with Spectacle

Spectacle

If you’re looking for a little more control over your Mac’s window placement but don’t want to waste time mousing around, Spectacle is the answer to your wish.

Spectacle allows you to move windows to full screen, top half, bottom half, left and right half position with a simple keyboard shortcut.

Add tabbed windows to Mac OS X’s Finder

TotalFinder iconWhen tabs finally found their way into Web browsers some years ago, people immediately fell in love with them. In fact, most people wonder how someone could live without them. With Apple’s love for a minimalist interface, you have to wonder why we still don’t have them on the desktop. Whatever the reason, we’ve been left to wait for a third-party solution.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.
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Reverting to old-style window interface in Photoshop CS4

Photoshop document tabs

Photoshop document tabs

If you’re a long-time Mac user and don’t care for Adobe Photoshop CS4’s new Tabbed document interface, you can revert back to the old-style single image windows by going to Photoshop>Preferences>Interface and unchecking the Open Documents as Tabs button in the Panels & Document section.

Using multiple windows with one image in Photoshop

Having multiple windows with the same image open in Photoshop can be quite handy. Here are a few ways I use the feature. First, open an image you wish to edit. Next, go to the menubar and select Window>Arrange>New Window for [filename]. A new window will open containing the same image. Now switch back to the first window (if you’re using CS4, you may have to drag the new image window tab out to create a full window). Because many filters require an image to be in RGB in order to work, I always color correct images in RGB mode. But I still want to see the image as it will appear in CMYK. So I click on the second window and hit Command + Y to set the preview of the image to CMYK. Now when I switch back to the first window, I can edit away in RGB and see the edits updated instantly in CMYK in the second window. Another way I use the multiple window feature of Photoshop is when I’m editing a zoomed-in area of a large image and I want to see the overall results of my editing on the entire image. I can zoom way in on image window one to do my edits, and keep image window two zoomed out to view the entire image.

How to switch between Photoshop windows

OK, so you’ve known for a long time that Command + Tab switches applications. And you’ve long since figured out that Command + ` (backtick, also known as the ~ key next the number 1 key) will switch between windows of the active application. But have you noticed that it doesn’t work in Photoshop? To switch between open windows in Photoshop, simply use Control + ` (backtick) to switch between windows.