Apologies for not posting in a long amount of time aside, I wanted to share two quick Mac tips:
The first one is an easy way to see if your document is unsaved in OSX – in an application like Microsoft Excel, just take a look at the red close button in the top left hand corner. If you see a black dot in the middle, you’ve made unsaved changes. While you’re at it, be sure to change your autosave setting in your Microsoft Office application preferences to something less than the default 10 minutes (due to traumatic experiences, I have mine set to 1 minute). You can find that setting under Preferences–>Save–>Save AutoRecover information after this amount of minutes. Thanks to OSXDaily for pointing the black dot out – always wondered what that was.
The second tip is an interesting productivity approach that has actually been built into OSX since its first release. Its called Single Application Mode, and the idea is that you only show one application on your screen at once. When you’re working in this mode, each time you switch from one application to another (using the dock), OSX will hide all of the other windows. This is similar to how the iPhone functions. If you’re looking for minimal distractions and have no desire to maximize your windows fully, simply enter these two commands into Terminal.app (Applications–>Utilities):
defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true
killall Dock
To get rid of Single App Mode, all you have to do is run the same two commands, but change the word true to false. For more information, see this TidBITS article on the subject.
Hope those tips are useful – let me know what you think.