Speed Up Your Mac (#1)

Updated December 15th, 2015.

Everyone wants a faster Mac. It’s a lot easier– and cheaper– to make yourself faster at using the Mac you have. Here’s a great way to do it. First in a series.

Ever seen one of these? It’s a Print dialog box with a couple of pop-up menus. If you want to make changes to the print settings you have to click the little up-down arrows in the blue area.

The problem with those little up-down arrows is they’re LITTLE. So you have to be rather precise with the mouse, and that takes time, and it’s the same with every pop-up menu, in every program, all day long. Except it’s not.

Turns out that you can click ANYWHERE on the pop-up menu. Anywhere! Here’s a picture showing you (in blue) where you can click– that’s a much bigger target, and much easier to hit. Knowing this, you don’t have to be so precise anymore, and that’ll save you time.

Here are some more examples. Which would you rather click on– the big area in blue, or the tiny area in red? Go for the blue. Make it easy on yourself.

Here’s the Appearance preference pane.

Here’s a slight variation: an iCal event entry panel. Still, it works the same way. Click in the blue area.

So there you have it. With a larger target it’s easier to put the mouse in the right place. Assuming you save two seconds per menu, and also assuming you deal with 37.4 pop-up menus per day (just guessing), you’ll save more than 5 hours in a year using this “aim for the larger target” method. That would let you spend more time baking cookies for sending to your favorite Mac guy.

By the way, this is my 200th post to this blog. How about that.

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