Reader Simon sent in a cool tip that I’ll definitely be using in the future. Spotlight can be used to perform simple calculations, such as 190*42. Just type it in, and it spits out the answer. For those who may be unfamiliar with keyboard mathematical symbols, here’s a quick rundown:
* is multiplication, / is division, [...]

Here are two handy tips for working in text editors, guaranteed to increase your productivity.
Lewis writes:
Holding alt whilst dragging in the mouse in a cocoa text editor will change the cursor to a crosshair and allow you to ‘block’ select text in a square. This is particularly useful when working with tabular data.

As Lewis notes, [...]

An easy way to change the default application for a file is to right click (Control+Click) a file and hold option while selecting an application from the “Always Open With” menu.

Please note this only changes the default application for that one file–not every file with this type. See our other post for assigning default applications.
I [...]

The Dock is the primary method for launching applications in OS X. For me, Quicksilver replaces a lot of what I would normally do with the Dock, but I still find it to be an essential tool for my application needs.
By default, the Dock appears at the bottom of the screen. However, it can be [...]

Below are 5 user submitted Mac Tips. Submit your own tip and get some traffic to your blog.
5. More Custom Icons
Alex Writes:

I’ve always liked the new Finder, Dashboard and Trash icons float has, but http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1420 has some great Finder icons to spiff up my dock, http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1408 has some gorgeous trash icons, and http://interfacelift.com/icons-mac/details.php?id=1886 has some [...]

The System Preferences panel has many overlooked settings. Here are my favorite 5.
5. Smooth Scrolling
One small but important feature I found inside System Preferences -> Appearance is called Use smooth scrolling.
Enabling smooth scrolling makes the page glide up and down the screen without any rigidness.

This only applies when using the page up/down, spacebar and home/end [...]

Dashboard is one of the best tools available in OS X. With a single click of the keyboard, or a flick of the mouse, you can bring up a whole screen covered in miniature applications providing everything from statistics to new Mac tips. But because Dashboard is just so useful, sometimes you end up with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]