Mac Kindergarten

As you start to get more comfortable using your Mac, keyboard shortcuts provide a great way to do things quickly.

Mac OS X has great support for keyboard shortcuts. For now, we will only look at the most basic ones.

Application Switcher

Press and hold Command (next to the space bar) and press the Tab-key (upper left corner)

You get a window with all active applications, looking kind of like this:

Important is: Hold down the command key all the time and press the tab key to move to the next application. When you release both keys, this application will become active.

Hiding Applications

The feature to hide an application in Mac OS X is great to get an application out of sight, but still leave it running, keeping all your files open and all the input data. The application is just put in the background, nothing really happens (except the application is hidden), so don’t worry.
To hide an application simply press and hold command and press H.

You see in the Dock, that the application is still active (the little blue spot underneath the icon)

To make the application appear again, just click on its icon.