When using the dock to switch applications, the modifier keys change how the desktop view of running applications behave:

• cmd+option+click: Switch to selected application and hide all others.
  
• option+click: Switch to selected application and hide the current application.
  
• cmd+click: Open and switch to a new finder window containing the selected application (I just found this one this morning; I can't believe I hadn't tried that in over three months of using the PB!).

As far as I can tell, no other combinations (shift or control) do anything useful.

This weekend, I set up a second OS X 'experimental' partition on my hard drive. I'm using the new partition for mySQL and PHP work (for this site), as well as anything that I feel is too risky for my main OS X partition. One of those things is Apple's Developer Tools.

I've held off on this 70mb download for quite a while, as I have no real need for the development tools, and I was a bit short on drive space on my main OS X partition. Today I finally downloaded and installed the tools on the new experimental partition. It was definitely worth it, just to see some of the nicer demo apps they included. One of them, EnjoyEffectMovie was used to create the fire QuickTime movie from which the screenshot at right was taken. If you have some interest in the tools, and you have a fast connetion and some drive space, I'd recommend the download. Read the rest of this article for instructions on obtaining and installing the tools,and a brief description of some of the more interesting (to a non-programmer!) included programs.

DISCLAIMER: You can probably do Very Bad Things to your system with the developer tools! Any damage you cause is not my responsibility.

Pixits has put up a page with a brief explanation of the defaults system and a nice listing of all those cool defaults commands that are circulating around all the mac boards on the net. You can view their list here:

Defaults command page

I keep only one thing (the screensaver module) in the dock when nothing else is running. I was somewhat surprised to find a Eudora icon there today, even though Eudora wasn't running.

Experimenting a bit, I discovered that if you simply move (or even just pick up and drop) the icon of a running application, it turns into a permanent dock icon when you quit that application.

I'm not sure whether this should be called a feature or a bug...

To make the names of your desktop icons appear in black enter this in a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.finder Desktop.HasDarkBackground 0

The names will look appear like this.

To return to the default (this) enter:

defaults write com.apple.finder Desktop.HasDarkBackground 1

(Of course you need to logout or kill the Desktop to see the changes)

If you open a new Finder window at its (hopefully changeable in the final!) default size, you'll see a xxx MB available message on the left side, just below the Computer icon. If you expand the width of the window, the display will change to read xxx MB available, y items.

If you leave the window at its default size, however, and click on the xxx MB available message, it changes to read y items. Click on it again to change it back. Not sure how useful this is, but I thought it showed some ingenuity to think to program it that way. Who knows, maybe OS 9 does this too, but I've certainly never noticed it.

I found this little nugget on about.com's Mac OS X Tips page.

Spotted this one over in this MacNN forum. If you want to move a window (call it Window2) which is behind the foreground window (Window1) without bringing it to the foreground, there are a few options, depending on the applications involved. For example:

• If Window1 and Window2 belong to the same Carbon app (IE 5), use command-drag
• If Window1 and Window2 belong to the same Cocoa app (RBrowser), use command-drag
• If Window1 belongs to a Carbon app and Window2 belongs to a Cocoa app, use command-drag
• if Window1 belongs to a Cocoa app and Window2 belongs to a Carbon app, drag with the right mouse button. What's strange is that control-drag will not work, even though a right mouse button is supposed to be a control-click. Strange.
• If Window1 or Window2 belongs to a Classic app, there does not appear to be a way to do this - any click combination brings the Classic window forward.

These tricks are quite useful for managing your desktop real estate; use them wisely and you'll do a lot less application switching!

This was written into another tip a few days back, but it's worth repeating. If you have an application with multiple open windows (such as Explorer), there's an easy way to bring all of the windows into the foreground -- simply click on the application in the dock.

If you just click on one of the application's open windows, only that one will be brought forward, possibly leaving the rest obscured behind other windows. A quick click in the dock, however, will force all the open windows to the foreground.

This is a basic functionality of the dock, but it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can find.

[Editor's note: I've revised the below hint to reflect the really easy way to place URL's in the dock (as described in the comments), but I've left the contributed hint in the body for context and the truly adventurous!]

Ever wonder how to put a URL in the dock, like Apple's Mac OS X Feedback URL? Here's the easy way - drag them to the right side of the dock from any of the OS X browsers. Read the rest of the message for a method of creating them with an editor.

If you drag a file from the OSX Finder to the various icon on the Dock, you'll notice that only certain apps will highlight to show that they will accept that type of file. However, sometimes you want to force an application to open a type of file, even if it doesn't "know" about it. To do this. hold down command and option when you drag the file. You should be able to drop the file on any application.