A quick tip today which is another one of those that you’d likely never just happen upon but once you know how to use it, you might just find yourself using this trick all the time. The tip is simple and uses the OS X Dock in a way that you may never have thought possible.
The basic premise is this: how many times a day do you come across something, either on the web, in an article, in a file, etc that you want to share with someone else.
The usual drill is to copy the content, go open an email message and then paste it in. I guess that’s one way to do it but it’s hardly an efficient way. As an alternative, consider this:
Don’t do the copy-and-paste thing. Instead, just highlight the text that you want to work with and simply drag-and-drop it right on the Mail icon in the Dock. This will open Mail and put the text into a new mail message.
This tip also works in other Cocoa applications like Text-Edit, Stickies, and Safari. For example, if you’re reading a story and want to do a Google search on something you’ve read, just highlight the next and drag-and-drop it on the Safari icon in the Dock. It will launch Safari and display the Google search results.
Simple, yet effective – definitely fits my criteria for a good Mac tip.
What a great tip! I’m going to send this to my Windows friends using your tip just to make them drool. Thanks.
You have Windows friends?
This is one of the best tips I have ever seen. I have already done it with a google search. It works!
This only worked for me if Mail was already running. If it wasn’t, dragging selected text to the icon in the Dock merely initiated Mail, but did not open a new Message with the copied text inserted. I am running the latest versions of OS, Mail, and Safari. Still a useful feature, but not quite complete in my specific case.
Doesn’t work with Panther, apparently. Tried to drag the article to mail (open) to send to friends.
Still running 10.3.9 in a few of my Macs. Will try it in Tiger t’night.
Jared — I’m very happy to hear that you liked the tip and found it useful. I’ll try to put up some other similar easy but practical tips along these lines.
Miller – I get the identical result (which is odd and since it opens Mail anyway, it might as well finish the task we asked it to perform in the first place). My personal solution is that since I have a dozen or so applications that are in use all day long anyway, I tend to just keep them open but minimized (I spend far too much time looking at the time spent opening and closing my regular application vs the memory cost of just leaving them open all the time and finally decided on the later) which makes Mail always available for use in this trick.
Bob – Sorry to hear about this not working with Panther. I do keep a 17″ 2nd gen iMac around running Panther but wanted to get this tip posted before getting home where I could test it on that machine but hopefully you’ll find it useful on the Tiger boxes.
Jeff
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