You may have noticed a menu item in many of your applications called Services. This is OSX’s way of letting you know how you can make applications interact with each other. One feature of Services that I find both interesting and useful in Safari is the Speech option.

START READING

I often find myself reading news articles from multiple news sources online that are covering the same article. I like to see how they’re different and see if one media source is applying any additional information that another may be missing. Safari and Mac OSX Speech option is perfect to allow me to essentially read two articles at once. Safari reads out loud the first article while I continue on to the next one.To get Safari to start reading for you:

1. Find a website you’d like Safari to read back to you
2. Select the text you’d like to read
3. Click Safari on the menu bar
4. Highlight Services, Speech, and then click “Start Speaking Text”

Thats all it takes and your mac will quickly start reading back to you the contents of the website. This is a great way to get multiple things done at once. I personally enjoy having Safari read back recipes to me while I’m cooking, or reading back blog articles on my google reader page. How would you use this feature? Don’t forget, you can create a keyboard shortcut to Start Speaking Text with just a few clicks on the keyboard.

We’ve mentioned previously how convenient the new custom dashboard widget creation feature in Safari is but have a few additional tips on ways that you can get more out of using the browser.

One Click - Tabbed Browsing

One of the greatest things about Safari is how easy it is to open multiple tabs of websites you’re interested in visiting. I personally will open links from articles I’m reading in new tabs so that I’m not pulled away from the article until I finished reading it. After finishing, I then can click through the open tabs and review the links that the article references.

Safari makes this quick and easy. With a mighty mouse, or any mouse with a scroll wheel button, you can open links in new tabs by clicking them with the center scroll wheel. This can also be accomplished by cmd+click any link. A new tab will open and load the link but the focus of the browser stays on the article you’re currently reading.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS - OPEN BOOKMARKS

Safari also provides a great and easy way to open your bookmarks. To open the any of the bookmarks on your bookmark bar press cmd+ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. Command+1 will open the bookmark furthest to the left and so on moving along the number lines.

If you want to open these in new tabs, be sure to press cmd+t to open a new tab and then cmd+1 to open the first bookmark in the new tab.

Be sure to check back for more hints and tips in Safari Hints and Tips Part 2

KEYBOARD SHORTCUT SUMMARY:

• command+click = Open link in new tab
• command+t and command +1 = Open Bookmark 1 in New Tab
  
• command+1 = bookmark 1
• command+2 = bookmark 2
• command+3 = bookmark 3
• command+4 = bookmark 4
  
• command+5 = bookmark 5
  
• command+6 = bookmark 6
  
• command+7 = bookmark 7
  
• command+8 = bookmark 8
  
• command+9 = bookmark 9
• command+0 = bookmark 10

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A few days ago my brother-in-law asked me if there was a keyboard shortcut for fast user switching. He and his wife share their iMac and he wondered if there is a way to do it without the extra mouse clicks. Being ever the optimist, I told him I was sure there was and I would look into it.

If that was all there was to it, it wouldn’t be worth blogging about. Turns out, there isn’t a built in keyboard shortcut for Fast User Switching (FUS). Keyboard shortcuts are generally available for accessing menu items of the current window. In addition, there are keyboard shortcuts for Spotlight, Exposé, Dashboard, and other Operating System-ish commands. Although I think there could be room in the OS shortcuts for FUS, it’s not and that’s not as much fun. A little Google-ing brought me to a macoshints.com article where they wrote a little applescript app to do FUS from the Terminal application. Now my brother-in-law is an OK Mac user, but asking him to open Terminal and type in commands would be a big step backwards (not to mention take longer). So I borrowed the code from macosxhints.com site and produced my own User Switcher app.

The app is pretty simple, it opens a small window and prompts you to type in the account name you want to switch to. If you type in a recognized account name, then the login window appears, you type in the password and presto, you’re FUS’d. If the account can’t be found, the app quits. So instead of a keyboard shortcut for FUS, all you need is a keyboard shortcut for the User Switcher app.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut for launching applications, at least not one for that specific purpose. But Apple does have Spotlight, which is a generic keyboard shortcut that can launch any application. All you have to do is drop the User Switcher app into your Applications (or Documents) folder and Spotlight will do the rest. Once Spotlight “learns” where it is, FUS can be as easy as cmd + space + u. Enjoy (User Switcher is provided as is; enjoy at your own risk). User Switcher.app

Since Maciverse loves to show people wonderful ways to use their new Apple products it would be silly of us not to point out how kind Apple is in creating video tutorials for us.

They’ve recently updated their Mac section of their website to include Find Out How, a video tutorial section that helps show users how to use their new Computer. Find tutorials on how to navigate around OSX, iLife, and iWork. While all the tutorials aren’t in video format they will help you quickly become comfortable with your Apple computer.

Check out how to add RSS feeds to Mail, Capture Screenshots, or Share your photos over a network.

Thanks to the follows over at lifehacker.com for pointing out how simple it is to customize your own keyboard shortcuts for the various applications you work with in Mac OS X.

1. Navigate to System Preferences for Keyboard and Mouse

2. Select the Keyboard shortcuts tab

3. Click the (+) and then add the application, the menu bar item, and then assign the keyboard shortcut you’d like to apply to that command.

Its that simple! You can head over to lifehacker.com to view additional comments on the process of creating a keyboard shortcut for any menu action in any program.