Improve your workspace
MOst of us sit at our Macs and start working without giving much thought to the way we actually do it. Too often, the result is a desktop cluttered with files and folders, windows all over the place, and a rather disorganized working environment. Thankfully, there’s a great deal you can do to improve things by using built-in features and third-party tools.
First, make use of fullscreen apps and Spaces. Many modern apps can operate in fullscreen mode, introduced in Yosemite: click the green button at the top-left corner of a window to have it take over the whole screen. You can swipe three fingers left or right on a trackpad, or two on a Magic Mouse, to easily move between apps, or swipe up with three fingers on a trackpad, or tap two on a Magic Mouse’s surface, to open Mission Control and see all your Spaces. Get BetterTouchTool ($3.99 minimum, boastr.
net) and you can create your own MultiTouch and Force Touch gestures to control your Mac. You can even use it to map gestures to keyboard shortcuts.
Move the pointer to the top of Mission Control to display thumbnails of all your Spaces. To add a new Space, click the + at the right of the Spaces bar. You can drag Spaces into the order you want. In Mission Control’s pane in System Preferences, uncheck “Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use” to maintain your arrangement.
Place the pointer over a Space and click the “x” that appears at its top-left corner. Any windows there will be pulled into the current Space, or into the first one if you were looking at the Space you just closed. Spaces for fullscreen apps show two inward-pointing arrows instead, which take the app out of fullscreen mode and put it in the first Space.
You can free up screen space by hiding the Dock until the pointer reaches its screen edge. Do so in the Dock’s pane in System Preferences. If your Mac’s screen is small but you want the Dock to stay visible, you might want to move the Dock to the side so it doesn’t eat into the vertical height available to windows.
If you’ve just switched from Windows to OS X, you’ll love Ubar ($20, brawersoftware.
com). It replaces the Dock with something like Windows’ taskbar. Ubar can have up to five rows, and it has a Favorites area for your most-used apps. Click an app to show thumbnails of its windows above the bar. Hidden apps are grayed out and unresponsive ones have a hatched red background. Press ≈ and you’ll see each one’s CPU and memory usage.