Apple Mac OS X tips and tweaks

Make use of Finder's title bar icon

Some features in the operating system are really obvious and they can be seen straight away, but there are other features that are not so noticeable. In fact, there may be features that have been there from the start and you just haven't found them yet. After months or even years of using an operating system, you might discover a shortcut and then wonder why you never used it before. Here's one little feature in OS X Snow Leopard on the Mac that you may have missed and it is all to do with the icon in the title bar of Finder windows. Have you ever noticed this icon? Have you ever tried to click it? Right click it? Click and drag it? What happens?

Open a Finder window and in the middle of the title bar at the top is the icon for the folder. If you click it with the mouse you will notice that it highlights. This gives us a clue that it does something. However, left clicking doesn't seem to do much apart from flashing the icon.

If you left click (Ctrl+click) the icon, a pop-up list of folders is displayed. You can see the current folder, the parent, that folder's parent and so on. It goes right back to the top level. So if you are in Documents, for example, in my case it shows Documents, roland, Users, Macintosh HD, Roland Waddilove's Macbook. You'll have something similar, but with your user name and Mac name. You can click any of these locations to jump to that folder.

Although left clicking the folder icon doesn't do anything, you can click and drag the folder off the title bar and drop it on the desktop or in another Finder window. This moves the currently displayed folder. Don't do this with your Documents or Applications folder, or any other system folder. If you want to try it, open a folder that's not important and doesn't contain too many files, then click and drag the icon to the desktop. The folder is moved and the Finder window then displays the parent folder of the original. That can be useful when you are moving files and folders around.

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