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Rob Griffiths over at Macworld.com has put together an article and video outlining some great tips and tricks for being slightly more productive in OS X. These tips include some basic QuickTime and Quicklook video functions, Printing selected pages in Preview, and even some more ‘hardcore’ Terminal commands to help with Time Machine.

The three tips that I found the most useful have to be the ability to turn off the Time Machine nags about which disk you prefer to backup to - especially a problem if you have multiple drives connected to your Mac. It can easily be shut off using the following command typed into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

The second is actually not an OS X-specific tip, but definitely a useful one. It is a bookmarklet that you can keep in your bookmarks folder that lets you do site-specific Google searches while on a page. It’s very easy to get set up and extremely useful. Drag me into your bookmark bar (don’t click on the link, add it to your bookmarks), or save the following code in the address field of a bookmark:

javascript:Qr=prompt(‘Search%20Site%20for’,’‘);if(Qr)location.href=‘http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:’+encodeURIComponent(window.location.hostname)+’+’+escape(Qr)

The third is the ability to go from Terminal to Finder or Finder to Terminal very easily while keeping the structure you were in. i.e. If you are in Finder and in the Applications folder, you can run this app and will end up in the Terminal in the Applications directory - ready to run a command. To do so you will need to create a script, in AppleScript, using the following code:

tell application “Finder”
  set myWin to window 1
  set theWin to (quoted form of POSIX path of (target of myWin as alias))
  tell application “Terminal”
  activate
  tell window 1
    do script “cd ” & theWin
  end tell
  end tell
end tell

To get a better understanding of the methods I posted here, and to view the full list, check out the article and video at Macworld.com.

Read [MacWorld]