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Leaving the scene of a web page for the scroll function of the mouse can be a waste of effort. Why isn't there a scroll wheel on the keyboard? Well, a very select few come with a built-in scroll wheel, but it's usually just a justification of adding to the price of a relatively high-profit-margin item already. What if I told you there was a scroll wheel already built-in to your keyboard? The humble spacebar is coded to act as a fast scroll in Safari, Firefox, and many other Mac applications. When viewing a page that's longer than the window, just tap the spacebar and it'll jump--useful for scrolling a long window quickly.

As our intrepid Windows users may already know, the full-size keyboard contains many useful keys for quick navigation of documents, web pages included. The "home," "end," "page up" and "page down" keys are there as relics from the pre-mouse days when most of what was done on a computer took the form of long pages of various lines of text or code. But there's more! The arrow keys are another multi-directional scroll entry point. Left, right, up and down, they will scroll through documents big and small! However, the space bar is placed in a location that allows for a fast click down a page, whereas the other keys require hand movement, something I strive to avoid as much as possible. A word of caution: the space bar works as a space bar in t e x t d o c u m e n t s , b u t f o r o t h e r a p p l i c a t i o n s , s p a c e a r o u n d ! ! ! [Britt Godwin]

So I've got the Open Apple Bookmark key in Safari, but what if I use Firefox?

As those of us using a Mac are ahead of the game already, many of us are using the open-source (read: Free) web browser Firefox. As I explained in my last column regarding the Open Apple "D" to bookmark a web site in Safari, I like doing things as simply as possible. Thoreau's mandate of "Simplify, Simplify, Simplify" is especially true in the world of I.T., but alas, is often not meant to be. But enough about gates, windows and other hardware construction.

Firefox wants you to be able to access your bookmarks quickly and easily, preferably without taking your hands from the keyboard, as if your hands are on the keyboard, you're probably doing something important (your erstwhile author notwithstanding). To access your bookmarks in Firefox, they included a logical command sequence (if 2 buttons can be called a sequence--a "duo-quence, perhaps?)--Open Apple button and "B." That has the effect of opening up a side bar with all your bookmarks right there. But that's not even the cool part--it also opens up a search field with the input focus already there (in other words, just open and type). Searching in this toolbar is like searching for music in iTunes--with each letter typed, it dynamically searches your bookmarks for the most likely matches and brings them to the fore. Instead of scrolling through Freya-knows how many bookmarks looking for that "something I bookmarked a week ago that had to do with dwarf goats and maple syrup," you can just type in goats, and there it is! Easy! Constructive laziness triumphs again!!! [Britt Godwin]

As many of you may know by now, I am a big fan of easier ways to do routine tasks on my Macs. I don't feel that this necessarily makes me a "power user," rather I see myself as wanting to eliminate as many extraneous movements as possible. Call it constructively lazy.

One of my favorite ways to eliminate unnecessary caloric exertion is by minimizing the movements from the keyboard to the mouse and vice-versa. While surfing the wonders of the World Wide Web, I begin to experience Web whiplash from switching back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse in order to pull down the bookmarks menu and bookmark a site, then back to the keyboard, and over to the mouse again, and back, and forth and back... You get the idea. There is a quicker and easier way, O fearless readers! Take heart! The heavens opened, the angels sang, and there was the Apple key!!! With this slick little tool, all one has to do to bookmark a site is merely press the key (I use my middle finger, but your mileage may vary), and while holding the Open Apple key, press the "D" button. Now why the "D" button, rather than "B" for "Bookmark?" My theory is that if your fingers are already on the home keys, trying to reach the Open Apple with one finger and the "B" key with another begins to look like mini yoga. Some of you may be that flexible, but I get cramps trying to do things like that. Your fingers are already on the "D" button, so that saves another step at the expense of mnemonic recall. However, "D" sounds just like "B," making the recall easier. Try it--there's no substitute for a good mouse, but sometimes it's just too far away. [Britt Godwin]

The recent upgrade to 10.4 Tiger has changed a few things, mostly for the better, but one of the minor quibbles I'd like to address is that Preview will no longer play animated .Gif files. This is particularly annoying for those of us that create web pages, as Preview was a fast, easy way to see the various animated .Gif's in a collection. All the little animated smilies in web pages banging their yellow heads against brick walls, dancing or singing can no longer be viewed as an animated file from the hard drive using Preview, which was the default way to view these up until now. The decision to eliminate this admittedly niche, but useful little function is beyond me to decipher, but take heart, .Gif fans! Safari to the rescue!!!

To play an animated .Gif, right-click (or control-click for those single-buttoners) and in the resulting menu, instead of Preview as the default, select Safari. It will open a new blank page with your .Gif bopping, or bouncing, or doing whatever it is animated .Gif's do with their spare time. I hate to admit it, but I think Windows beat us on this one... [Britt Godwin]

The Bookmarks Toolbar Folder in Firefox and the corresponding Bookmarks Bar in Safari can provide a quick shortcut to commonly-accessed bookmarks, instead of scrolling down through sometimes many dozen (or hundreds, in my case, but no--I'm not really that disorganized...) bookmarks in search of your financial page or family homepage. When bookmarking a site, it goes into a long list, accessed through the Bookmarks menu. When bookmarking a site, a menu asks you where you'd like to save it. The default location is in the Bookmarks menu, but this window contains a pull-down menu in which "Bookmarks Toolbar" is an option.

This saves the bookmark in a slim bar below the address bar (http://www.yaddayadda.com.etc) as a 1-click button to take you right to the site you need. I keep my financial bookmarks, theater movie listing sites and search engines loaded up in mine.

You can even rename them, so instead of a long, convoluted name specified by the site, you can just rename it "Visa" or "Homepage." To do that in Safari, right-click (or Ctrl-click, for one-button users), select "Edit Name" and you now have a 1-button shortcut to a commonly-used link. Saves time and frustration, both valuable commodities in the often-convoluted digital world. [Britt Godwin]

So it's late, you're feeling like rocking out to your favorite tunes, and you really don't want to listen to a random selection of everything in your iTunes Music Library. You could really go for just the best tracks of your collection without the weird b-sides or songs that just didn't quite make the cut. This is where the Rating Stars come into play.

Rating stars are a way to organize your music in yet another way, unique to you alone. It is a way for you to pick just the cream of the crop when a playlist is too limited and the full library is too much. Rating stars allow you to listen to just those couple of great tracks that get your heart rate jumping and your feet hopping, like radio stations way back when, but without the annoying DJ's and used car commercials.

To assign a star rating from 1 to 5 onto a track, right-click (or Control-Click for 1-button users) on a track name in the iTunes main window. This will bring up a short menu on which the second track is My Rating. Select a star or 5 and let iTunes do the rest. For even more control, make a Smart Playlist and tell it to put only 5-star songs in that contain "Sad Songs" in the comments box. I explain the beauty of Smart Playlists here. For now, shoot for the stars!

Many times in my articles you have noticed me referring to a "right-click" (at least, I hope so...), whereas the default mouse shipped with Apple computers has been inexplicably a single-button mouse. This is changing with the advent of the Mighty Mouse from Apple, but there are legions of the faithful still using a single-button mouse. Why, you ask, is a second button so important? For Apple in their infinite wisdom has seen fit to simplify such silly Goldberg-esque contraptions such as drivers, DLL files and Explorer trees in favor of an interface that is elegant in its streamlined, intuitive logic.

However, as computers will always (in the forseeable future, anyway...) be a relatively complex device, certain measures are required to effectively interface with a machine containing literally billions of moving parts. They don't move far, but the fact they all work constantly astounds me. How does this relate to a second button on a mouse? First, an explanation of the second (or third, etc...) button: A single button is like a finger--with a single finger you can do things like turning on light switches, operating a remote control, and other movements requiring simple directions. Typing would soon become not only unbearably slow but with the resulting frustration, actually hazardous to your health (or am I the only one with keyboard rage?). A right mouse button doubles the complexity of the device, but since it only had one button to begin with, I feel it's not too great a jump. However, that second button opens up realms full of options that can make life in the digital world simpler and quicker. This may seem paradoxical, as doubling the device's complexity rarely improves anything, but bear with me.

Even Apple cannot entirely engineer a second button out of the computer--it may have been fine in System 6 while playing Asteroids on a 9" mono screen, but in today's computing world, anything beyond double-clicking needs a second button. Let me explain: think of a second button not as added complexity, but as a fingertip menu to access often-used commands. In Microsoft Word, for instance, selecting a batch of text and copying it, then pasting requires the selection of the text with the left button, then moving up to the cryptographic icons in the multiplicity of toolbars, selecting "Copy," then moving to the spot at which the paste will be completed, going back to the toolbar, selecting "Paste," and hopefully, if you got the insertion bar placed right, the operation is complete. In a simple text editor like TextEdit, there are no commands in the toolbar--you have to use an Apple Menu pull-down to find Copy and Paste.

Now with a right mouse button, all you need to do is select the text, then right-click, and Tada! There are your Copy and Paste commands right there at your fingertips. This is only one of the examples in which a right-click can save time and more importantly, hand movement, and over the millions of motions an average user will perform over their computing career, saving 2 or 3 out of 20 or so (empirically determined) is a significant savings. Try right-clicking on other things around the computer (if so equipped, or if not, the equivalent command is Control-Click). Once you have mastered the right button, the other half of your computer will be opened to you. Happy clicking!!!

I know what you're thinking: This computer can't be all that smart... it just does what I tell it to. Even my wife doesn't do that, and she's smarter than I am. But lo! There on the horizon! A whiiiiiiiite whaaaaaale!!! No, sorry. Wrong article.

Wouldn't it be nice if every time you imported a sad song, it went into a playlist with all the other sad songs, or when preparing to burn an Audio CD, the playlist would limit itself to just what will fit on 1 CD (or 2 or whatever)? That would be smart, and that's where the Smart Playlist comes in. Similar to the category headings in iTunes (Artist, Song, Genre, etc.), Smart playlists allow you to define and refine those headings with a surprisingly powerful, yet easy-to-use list of criteria.

To open a new Smart Playlist, open iTunes and pull down the "File" menu from the top Apple Menu. Select "New Smart Playlist" which will open a small window with text fields. There are "+" and "-" buttons next to the first field. This is where you can get specific. Each one of those buttons opens another field for further refinement of your library. Go ahead and start a new Smart Playlist--now select a criteria from the first pull-down menu (it'll say "Artist"). Let's make it "Date Added" and use the second pull-down menu to make it "is in the last" 1 week. Now hit the "+" to open up another field and let's make this one "Genre," telling it that we want it to only contain "Rock." Live Updating is checked by default, so we hit "OK" and our playlist is created. The default name will be "Rock," but by clicking on it, you can rename it whatever you'd like. Now, any time you add a song to your iTunes Music Library with the info fields filled out (done by default from iTunes Music Store), it will find all the music added in the last week that is listed as "Rock" and add it to that playlist. This can be a great tool for importing from CD's as well, as iTunes will automatically connect to the CDDB database and find the info for the CD for you, ready to import with all the pertinent info filled in already. With a few of these Smart Playlists created, this can take much of the organizational burden off you, as every time you add a track, it can automatically go where it is supposed to. Unless you like running your fingers through your playlists and savoring the feel of days' worth of musical bliss, but I could be the only one who does that...? What can I say--I'm a musical micromanager, and these Smart Playlists let me do it because I want to and no longer because I have to. Now that's working smarter instead of harder. [Britt Godwin]

iTunes of course comes standard with a predetermined set of categories for sorting your tunes such as Track Name, Genre, and Artist, but there are more hidden away that will allow you to organize your musical library to a degree that would give a librarian hives. In the main music window (where all the names of the tracks and artists are displayed), there is a skinny bar above all the names of the tunes. This usually has the headings Name, Time, Artist, Bit Rate, etc. Right-click (or Control-Click for 1-button users) on any of these headings and a drop-down menu will appear. This can also be accessed through the Apple Menu Bar under "Edit" and then at the bottom, "View Options."

This menu has a rather extensive list for organizing your collection according to the usual methods--Artist, Album, Bit Rate, etc., but also contains headings as obscure as the Year the track was released, the Sample Rate, or even the most recently played tracks. This wealth of information allows you to lay your hands on any track or group of tracks fitting nearly any criteria you select within seconds (or even less). Suppose you're putting on a dance party and want just the tracks with more than 100 beats per minute. Select that option and iTunes will bring that to the top of the display column, ready to bounce. Maybe you're in a Rachmaninov mood and want to find everything you have by him--select the Composer option, and Bang! There is every composer listed, all without having to remember how to spell Rachmaninov.

All this functionality comes with a price, however--in order to sort by these categories, the information must be there to begin with. For those of you who have come by your musical collections in ways other than the iTunes Music Store, it can potentially be a long process. However, happily the iTunes Music Store tracks come with all pertinent information already inputted for you, so all you have to do is select which way you want your tunes displayed, and iTunes is there for you. Now you can shuffle your tunes like a hand of cards or you can stack the deck any way you want. With this deck, it's always going to turn up a full house. [Britt Godwin]

Tabbed browsing is a great way to maximize screen real estate while keeping your browsing organized. Along with the "Open link in new tab" command, found by Ctrl-clicking (or right-clicking if using a multi-button mouse). This will open up a new toolbar underneath the address bar, called the tab bar, appropriately enough. This is where you can essentially store links that you'd like to follow up later. Today's web pages are so rich with links that there are invariably more places to go then memory available to remember them (and I mean the gray cells). But, you counter, can't I just click the back button when I'm done following a link? Yes, but going back through the maze of links is time-consuming, click-intensive and frequently annoying, especially if some of the sites have popups, spyware or worse.

Tabbed browsing allows those fragments of thought processes to occupy a concrete (well, as permanent as anything on the web) spot, awaiting only your attention to return and give those frozen moments life, like ephemeral bookmarks. It has the added advantage of loading pages in the background, so that when you are ready to return, they are fully loaded and ready to peruse (unless you're on dial-up, in which case the limited bandwidth would be better spent loading the current page). For those with a memory like a Swiss... umm... a thing with holes in it, tabbed browsing allows us the luxury of putting links on a back burner for later retrieval. Open up the tabbed browsing and give it a try--after a little while you'll wonder what the back button is for.