Have you ever wanted to remove items in your Finder’s sidebar? Here’s a quick and easy way: Click Finder -> Preferences… -> Sidebar and you’ll see the window below:

Simply uncheck any unwanted items.

Finally you can easily hide search items, shared servers and that pesky iDisk icon.

After our last tip on quickly switching windows in Photoshop, you all suggested I do more. So I recently found three handy tips that saved me time.

Duplicating Slices with Option

Creating slices can be a pain to make over and over again, thankfully there’s a quicker way. Select a slice with Command+Click then Option+Click to duplicate it. Too easy!

Hold Shift and Change Values in Increments of 10

Any field you can change with your keys (up and down) you can also change in increments of 10 by holding shift. So instead of 70…71…72 it would be 70..80..90.

You can also scroll your mouse wheel to change the value.

Organize Windows with Workspaces

One of the most frustrating aspects of using Photoshop is maintaining all of those tiny windows. Workspaces solve this headache by providing the ability to save and load window locations.

They also come with a couple default workspaces (Basic & Legacy) that work nicely

There you have it, 3 tips for improving productivity in Photoshop.

What do you think of multiple smaller tips like this? Good/Bad?

Download Smultron.

I’ve been using Smultron for a few years, but thanks to Alex Hwang for reminding me that not everyone has a great, and free, text editor.

I thought it would be interesting to see everyone else’s desktops.

To take a screenshot of your desktop, press Command+Shift+3.

This saves an image of your active screen straight to your desktop. The filename generally starts with “Picture”.

To upload your screenshot, head on over to http://www.mactips.org/uploader.php.

Copy/Paste the code from the text box into the comment field.

Here’s my desktop, what’s yours?

(Note: The thumbnails link to the full-sized images, which can be very large. Files may take a moment to download.)

A few months ago Travis wrote a great post on installing MacPorts. If you’ve never heard of MacPorts:

The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.

MacPorts makes it extremely easy to find and install tools.

As an example, let’s install wget.

First, we search by typing

port search wget

We can see here there are 3 packages that match wget. We want the one named wget in net/wget.

Let’s find out some more information before we install:

port info wget

We get the following package information:

wget 1.11.2, net/wget (Variants: universal, no_ssl)

http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.

Library Dependencies: openssl, gettext

Platforms: darwin freebsd

Now to install we type:

sudo port install wget

You should see something like the output below. Ports will automatically install every dependency so your install times will vary.

Additional Commands

Update

sudo port update wget

Uninstall

sudo port uninstall wget

Update Packages: Retrieves the latest package information

sudo port selfupdate

Installed Packages: A current list of installed packages

sudo port installed

MacPorts are Great

Note: You should always exercise caution when using the sudo command. You can mess up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing.

MacPorts is a great solution for installing common Mac applications and utilities. It’s much more efficient and works quite well. One downside is MacPorts doesn’t have as extensive collection as say FreeBSD Ports, so there are some holes.

Also, the ports are often a release or two behind (Firefox is at 2.0)–so don’t expect the latest version for many of these packages. For the most part these are known stable releases.

If you’re not comfortable with the terminal, there is a GUI solution Porticus. I haven’t tried it, so I would use at your own risk.

What are your favorite MacPorts packages?

Mine are wget and lynx.

Way back in 2005 I wrote about quick dictionary lookups using the keyboard. This quickly became one of my favorite tips–but I always had trouble remember the key combination. For some reason Command+Control+D was hard to remember.

You probably know you can also access the dictionary by highlighting a word, control+clicking and selecting “Look Up in Dictionary.”

But this by default brings up the dictionary application:

To make the panel the default method, open Dictionary preferences and select “Open Dictionary panel”

Now you can easily look up a word by highlighting it, control+clicking and selecting “Look Up in Dictionary”:

The Associated Press recently launched an iPhone-friendly web application containing all their news articles in an attractive and convenient format. They join many other web sites to create Mobile Safari editions of their services, and offer some excellent features.

To access the Associated Press iPhone view, visit apnews.com from your iPhone or iPod Touch. The site features categorized headlines, a powerful search tool, local news, categories, and intelligent customization settings. The site fits the iPhone user interface excellently and is probably the best implementation I have seen for a news application.

If you find it frustrating you can’t switch between active windows in Photoshop by pressing Command+Tilde (Command+~), you’re not alone.

Thankfully there’s a few quick shortcuts nearby that accomplish the same thing:

• Command+Shift+Tilde
• Control+Tab
• Control+Tilde

Are there many Photoshop users out there? More or less Photoshop tips?

Font Book is a great way to manage system and user fonts. But it’s also great for deciding which fonts to use.

First select Preview -> Custom or hit Command+3 to enable the custom preview.

Then on the far right pane, enter your text:

Now select the a font and press Up/Down on the keyboard arrows to scroll through each of your fonts.

I often find myself copy-pasting out of online resources when I’m typing research papers. The issue with this is that I have to go back and reformat the text in order to achieve a homogenous font style. Nowadays, this problem is no more.

Reader Luke, recently submitted a tip informing me that if instead of just “Command+C” and then “Command+V”, I were to hit “Command+C” then “Command+Shift+Option+V”, then the copied font will be pasted in the same format and style as the rest of the font.