Options with your option key

So today's Sunday teaching episode is going to be a little bit different than what we normally do. First of all, I'm recording this on my iPhone using just press Record. So that's your first teaching lesson. And I'm gonna attempt to upload the audio while mobile. And I am doing this because I think it's a great experiment. And what I want to teach you is something fairly quick. So if you didn't know and this is going to be for Mac users, you can use your option key for a lot of different additional functionalities. Let me give you two examples if you are in the Apple menu. So if you press Vom, specifically if you're a voiceover user, or you click on that apple in the lower left hand corner, and then you scroll down to restart or shut down or log off. All three of these options end with dot, dot, dot or ellipsis. This means when you choose this option, then a dialog box will pop up and prompt you. For example, would you like to reopen Applications when you restart your computer? And then if you don't make an option after 1 minute, or if you don't make a selection after 1 minute, your computer will automatically restart and the state of the checkbox will be honored. However, if you hold your option key down and you tap the Enter key, it'll skip that pop up and immediately perform the action. So if you'd like to quickly restart your computer, choose Restart from the Apple menu, hold Option key down, and press the Enter key and it will skip that prompt. So you don't have to make a decision or wait 1 minute for your computer to restart. That's all good. But here's another cool thing. If you are like myself and you navigate Finder sometimes and you use Command Shift A, this will put you in your Applications folder. And in your Applications folder you can locate an application that you'd like to open with Command O. Well, when you open an application with Command O and you then Command tab back over to Finder, your applications is still open and sometimes you can get a lot of these windows open. Or here's a better example, if you want to open an application that's hosted in a DMG file, you can easily get a lot of different finder windows that are just remaining open. So if you do command option O, what happens is the current window you're in will close while the Application document, Audio file, any other content inside of Finder is opened for you. So my workflow now is to hit Command Shift A to open Applications, locate the application I'd like and use Command option O, and that will close the Applications window in Finder and open the application document, Audio file, video, et cetera that I had highlighted. So there's a couple of ways you can use your option key to be more effective on your Mac. We'll share more of these coming up in the future. And don't forget to stay subscribed every Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, 01:00 p.m.. Eastern, we're live ACB community. For more information.