the os x close button
These are the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on a typical Mac OS X application window. The close button, which is the most frequently used of these buttons, is in red. Note the two variations of the button. The variant with the additional filled circle indicates that the current document has unsaved changes. Did you guys know about this? I didn’t know about this. Handy.
I’ve known about it since 10.2. You get a little slack for this being your first Mac, but still … I guess that’s what I get for reading product documentation. :P
One of the things I just delved into was removing specific programs from the Open With context menu entry. (It got annoying having three versions of Opera in the list for JPEGs.) It’s a little arcane, but still hugely useful:
1. Right-click the offending application > Show Package Contents
2. Open the x.app\Contents\Info.plist file in a text editor, or double-click to open it in the Property List Editor if configuration text files are scary for you.
3. Look under Root/CFBundleDocumentTypes/#. There will be several numbers, starting at 0; look beneath each # for a key named CFBundleTypeExtensions.
4. Highlight the # and hit Delete, or delete the entire entry in the text entry for each file type you don’t want associated with the program.
5. When you’re done, run this Terminal command:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
This rebuilds the LaunchServices database, which is what OS X stores file type associations in.
Results:
1. Your Open With context menu is much less cluttered.
2. You can’t drag files of that file type to the dock icon anymore, unless you hold down Option while dragging.
It’s hard to miss when you’re working on multi-layer 16×20 300 ppi TIFFs. The combination of the additional filled circle with the spinning beach ball of death could (and often does) mean certain doom.