One of the crucial necessities of being efficient on a new machine for me is to know a few often-used shortcut keys. It’s a nerdy programmer/analyst thing, but I love being able to navigate through the operating system without hardly touching the mouse. Some people think this is actually a sign of some sort of bizarre elitism — that geeks relish in the ability to memorize arcane shortcut keys as a sign of an implicit geek hierarchy (not too unlike the “Rock Snob”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767918738/103-8439184-2867862?v=glance, for example). I think I have enough sense not to fall into that camp, though. 
Mousing over to an icon takes just enough context-switching to be distracting:
# You’re doing something interesting which requires lots of keyboarding (like blogging)
# You hear a crappy song on iTunes that you want to skip past
# You Command + Tab over to that window but…you had minimized it^*^
# At this point your brain goes “What? Where’s the window? Oh…” and your blogging (or whatever) slams to a halt
# You wave the mouse around a few times to figure out where it is
# You drag it down to the Dock
# Meanwhile, you’re brain is asking these subconscious questions:
## Is your aim accurate?
## What’s that other icon doing there?
## Is this the one I want?
# You click on the icon and the window maximizes
# You use a shortcut key to advance to the next track
# You Command + Tab back to what you were doing
# Brain: “What was I doing again?”
Anyway, for all my digging around and asking questions of Mac heads, I haven’t been able to figure out how to unminimize a window from the Dock without using the mouse. On Windows, you’d use the Window Key + M to minimize, and then you could use Alt+Tab to cycle back to your minimized window, which would automatically restore it to the previous window size. Not so with the Mac. While there’s a perfectly acceptable analog to Windows Key + M — in fact it’s Apple Key (“Command”) + M — there’s no good way to unminimize without using the mouse: Command+Tab won’t do it automatically.
I did some digging online and a quick Google search turned up these helpful pages:
* “Magical Macintosh Key Sequences”:http://davespicks.com/writing/programming/mackeys.html
* “A (Near)-Complete List of Mac Keyboard Shortcuts”:http://www.macobserver.com/columns/firstmac/2005/20050422.shtml
* “Keyboard Control”:http://homepage.mac.com/frakes/MOSXPT/content/keyboard.html
But, alas, no “unminimize” command.
^*^Actually, there is a way to unminimize iTunes by using Command + 1, but most other applications don’t use this shortcut.
I’m trying to work out a way to post these links faster, in the meantime my link-queue has over 40 links in it. That’s pathetic. So, as they say, all good things come in unordered lists.^*^
* ??NPR??: “Freud’s Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612464. There are levers in your head that can be triggered to make you believe whatever the PR firms want you to believe. This is scary stuff.
* ??RiskGlossary??: “The Enron Debacle”:http://www.riskglossary.com/link/enron.htm. Sarah and I saw the _Smartest Guys in the Room_ documentary when it opened in NYC and Houston. It was good, but light on details about Enron’s crimes. This helped fill in some of those gaps. Also, “here’s more”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/specials/2003/1027/enron.html from ??Fortune Magazine??.
* “Enron commercials”:http://www.rtmark.com/enron/: anyone know how to get these playing on a Mac?
* “What it’s like to work at Pixar”:http://aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=19658#1
* ??Curt Hibbs??: “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html. Rails is a new MVC-based design framework for a programming language called Ruby that’s gaining a lot of ground thanks to brilliant web applications like “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com.
* “Backpack brings Ajax to Rails”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/05/04/backpack-brings-ajax-into-rails/. Speaking of Ruby on Rails, 37signals has come out with an intriguing product called Backpack. No kidding: you need to go get an account to Backpack (takes 2 minutes) and check this application out. At first, it may not immediately be clear how Backpack is useful–this is because it’s actually useful for almost anything. I’ll be writing more extensively on how I’m using my Backpack account, but, if I had to boil it down to a few words, I’d say that Backpack combines linking ability of hypertext with the flexibility and simplicity of a notebook. “Check it out”:http://www.backpackit.com/.
* “Google’s corporate philosophy”:http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html
* “MIT threw a time-travelling convention.”:http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/ Of course, this information would only be relevant to you _now_ if you _were_ a time traveller.
* ??Forbes??: “It’s No Party”:http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2005/05/02/cx_ah_0502aapl.html?partner=yahootix. The recent release of OS X 10.4 Tiger has done little for the stock in the past few months, but why is this analyst looking for the cheap thrill of a price spike? As ??Steve Jobs?? notes in his “recent keynote”:http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/ (which is excellent, by the way), Apple has released a new version of Mac OS X _every year_ for the _last five years_. A much more helpful analysis would look at these releases and stock performance over the long haul. If you want to see how the stock performs relative to these releases, “this chart”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=off&z=m&q=l would be a much more helpful indicator of how investors respond. Apparently, they’re much more interested in the iPod phenonmenon than they are in Apple’s OS innovations.
* ??Slashdot??: “Apple switches to Intel”:http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/06/1752234.shtml?tid=118&tid=179&tid=3. Apple continues to innovate their product line even in high times. Was I bummed to buy a Powerbook just weeks before this announcement? Not really. As ??John Gruber?? “points out”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/bombs_away, anything I would have bought this year would have been obsoleted by next years’ product anyway.
* To wit: “Macrumors Buyers’ Guide”:http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/. See where each Apple product is in its release cycle in order to minimize your buyers’ remorse. Indispensable: this site is almost expressly why we bought my Powerbook when we did and why we haven’t purchased Sarah’s future iBook yet.
* ??John Gruber??: “Together We Can Rule the Galaxy”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/rule_the_galaxy. There is a certain contingent of Mac nerd for whom this is depressing.
That made me laugh out loud in Starbucks.
* ??Apple??: “Dashboard Widget Downloads”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/. I actually find I’m not using Dashboard too often. What are your favorite widgets? Have you found anything really useful out there?
* ??Wikipedia??: “The history of the Pulaski Skyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulaski_Skyway. We take this roadway every time we head into New York City.
* ??Fast Company??: “The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/02/meetings.html. I’ve been conducting a lot of meetings in my new job. Even after having led Bible studies and being in the corporate world for several years now, my meeting-leadership chops could still stand lots of improvement. This article helped. I’ve actually found Fast Company to be a great all-around resource for all things corporate–they really _get_ a lot of what it means to be doing information work in the 21^st^ century.
* “An interview with ??Chris Thile??”:http://www.nickelcreek.co.uk/reading_articles_us_05-02.htm. As a young songwriter, it’s unflattering to try and act like you know something.
Chris came out with a “new album”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002ZDX2K/ref=pd_art_ftr_1/002-1666968-3446454?v=glance&s=music this year that’s very experimental. It took a while, but I’ve been digging it a lot lately.
^*^Okay, nobody actually says that.
