How do you do what you do?

[Yumunum]

How do you work your way through OS X? What helps your workflow best?

Spaces? Mission Control? Launchpad? Any tweaks? I know my question sounds broad but I think you know what I mean.

Here's what I do...

Dock: My dock is set to stay hidden until I move my mouse to the button of the screen. I used a terminal command to put an empty space after my last "pinned" (set to always be in my dock) app, that way I can always tell when I have extra junk open. I used TinkerTool to make my dock 2D (much prettier) and I have some extra folders to the right side of the dock. I also put an empty space separating the folders from the trash can. When I need to launch an app not in my dock, I use Spotlight.

Windows: I used BetterTouchTool to make some "gestures" for window managing. One being a three finger click, that maximizes my current window. Another being a four finger swipe down to close my current window. And lastly, a four-finger click brings up Mission Control (I only use it for Exposé though)

This works out great for me because my windows get as much space as possible, and I don't have to tediously click the "x" or use a keyboard shortcut to close any windows. It feels like a new experience.

So anyways, what do you guys do? I wanna hear new ideas, and see what cool things everyone else does.

 

[r0k]

Dock: I keep only a handful of apps in the dock, plus the ones the app store throws in there. I use spotlight to launch almost everything. In don't auto hide the dock. I switch off auto arranging and force everything to fans. If there's too much stuff or I don't see what I need I simply go to the top of the fan and pick xxx more in finder. I do have shortcuts to numbers, pages, keynote and libre office in the dock. I took garage band and imovie out of the dock. I added pcalc to the dock. I removed Safari and added Google Chrome to the dock. I had a 2D dock for a while but I don't mind using the defaults for most things except magnification. I keep magnification on but set to a small value. The icons get bigger when I hover, but they don't fill the bottom 1/3 of my screen. I have terminal and system preferences in my dock. I have Swackett in my dock.

I don't use launchpad. I don't like sitting there swiping through all those icons on my iPad and iPhone and it doesn't make any more sense to me on OS X. Mission control is "ok". I hardly use expose anyway so I don't mind the changes in Mission control.

 

[Modernape]

On Snow Leopard - 3 Spaces horizontally, using BetterTouchTool to 4-finger hoztl swipe between them. I rarely use the dock, just have my 5 main apps autostart at login.

 

[marsmissions]

I use one space and have iTunes, Mail, and iCal open in their own spaces in full screen. I use the dock to launch the apps I use most often. On the rare occasion I need to access others, I use launch pad.

 

[Jolly Jimmy]

I have global keyboard shorcuts set to open/close or activate/hide the apps I use the most using Spark. The rest I open using spotlight. I also use keyboard shortcuts to open finder items with certain apps. This saves me from right-clicking and going to the "Open with" menu.