So I’ve had my Mac for near on a month now I think. Either that or time has passed particularly fast. Never the less I have gotten firmly to grips with the Mac, and working with it productively for Web Design & Development, so here are a few tips if you too are new to Mac OSX.

Spaces

By now you most likely have discovered spaces, or if you’ve ever used linux you’ll know these better as ‘multiple desktops’. Either way its all good, and perfect for web design – and in a lot of ways as made my multiple monitors redundant. Now although spaces is good, It got annoying when I lost programs, files and windows across 4 windows (you can have up to 16, but to be honest that is just stupid). So this is what I did to start with.

Allocated my spaces

I started by saying:

1. I’ll use this for my primary programs, being Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, anything which Im going to use for a long period of time really – and only use this in space one.

2. I’ll use this space for communications, this is anything to do with the web and talking to people. So I put Tweetdeck, Google Talk, MSN anything like that here.

3. Browsers, this is where all the browsers will be kept, Firefox, Safari, IE etc.

4. Other, Generally I don’t need this, so in tend to keep a Finder window open, but otherwise its my fallback.

Select which Spaces to Open which Applications

Ok, now this was a great idea, and I started doing it, trouble was, old habits had already kicked in, and I was finding it a little difficult to get them all in the right places. But I found a fix to this problem, if you open the options up you can allocate which programs open where! Here’s a screenshot of how I have it set up at the moment.

To get here go to System Preferences: Expose and  Spaces and your done:

So that was starting to help, I could separate what I was doing easily, and navigating to them was easy to. I mapped the Command key to arrow keys OR command key to numbers, to easy switch between desktops. See the screenshot above for that.

So with this done, I started to work faster.

Stacks

Stacks are great, I use the default one which comes already set up for downloads, shows me the most recent download closes to the dock for ease. But I also set up new ones. So I have a stack for downloads, Dropbox (so I can collaborate with colleagues) and to HTDOCS of my MAMP (mac, apache, mysql, php) setup. This allows me to get to the sites I’m developing quickly. The only trouble I found was the dock was full of applications I never used, and spotlight was so quick, I use that instead to open applications, so I’ve really brought that down to a minimum, and it only fills out at the dock when I’m working.

When everything is closed, I only have, Finder, iChat and Safari in the dock as well as my stacks & trash, making only seven Items. The rest were unnecessary and got really clocked up when I had all the others + was working on a project. Here’s a screenshot:

Now it May look quite minimal in the middle of the screen, but as soon as I start to work, it fills out with another 3, 4 icons, which really for me is more than enough, an exactly what I need to work.

I also made the mock quite small, and don’t have it autohide, as thats more hassle than its worth. If I want to Hide I’ll use the shortcut, but that isn’t very often.

Change your mouse settings from the defaults

Now by default, you don’t have a right click enabled, and holding ctrl + click seems rather devolutionary than evolutionary, so I soon re-enabled that again. Also, I don’t tend to use the widgets very often, so I re-mapped the trackerball press from widgets to Expose, hide all windows. Which I use far more often. Here are my mouse settings:

Now if you combine all of these things, as well as using as many shortcut keys as possible, you will find yourself to be far more efficient on a Mac, hope these help.