A handy Mac OS keyboard shortcut

While at my last job, I found myself listening to internet radio an awful lot. This typically came in the form of Pandora and Last.fm. In an effort to keep from closing the window by accident, I started making a dedicated browser window and minimizing it to the dock (I didn’t know about Fluid at this point in time). While in Safari, Flash will stop playing in a minimized window, Firefox has no issue letting it run amok. Perfect! The only issue then was that I had to manually move the mouse over to my hidden dock, find the window, bring it back up, and then change the track when they played a sucky song. I tweeted about this, and Haveboard bailed me out with some awesome information: by hitting control + F3, you can pull up the dock, and navigate the icons with your arrow keys. Space bar or Return will then bring the selected item up.

This got the job done until my new Apple keyboard re-organized the media/expose keys, and it decided to save the preferences over to my laptop, even when the keyboard was disconnected. Now I have to mix in the function (fn) key along with the others, and that’s just way too much finger Twister ™ for my tastes.

I had all but given up on accessing minimized windows via the keyboard when I discovered something awesome. Now, this is going to be a little tough to explain with words, but I’m going to try.

1. First, minimize a window from a specific application that you want to access later.
2. Now, shift focus to another program. This can be finder or anything. (this will make sense in a second)
3. Hit Apple+Tab to bring up the application shifter view.
4. Tab over to the Application with the minimized window. (if you’ve never used this before, you have to keep the Apple key pressed while you tap Tab).
5. With the the Apple key still pressed and the application selected, also press the Option key.
6. Still here? Great. Now release the Apple key so the only thing you are holding on to is the Option key.
7. Voila. Minimized window from that Application pops right up.

Now, I know what you are thinking. That’s an awful lot of steps to just get to a minimized window that I could simply click on. But if you are like me, and you live inside of the Apple+Tab switcher, this is an amazing life saver. You are already pressing one of the keys necessary, and all you have to add to the mix is one more, right next to it.

As I type this, I’ve discovered that this doesn’t work 100% of the time for Firefox 3, but then again, what does work 100% of the time in Firefox 3? Earlier today, I discovered that I couldn’t access several of my sites. I filed a support ticket with my host, rebooted my server, everything. Then on a whim, I decided to try Safari. Every site came up. This “window keystroke” trick happens to work perfectly with every other application I use, including Microsoft’s Entourage. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mozilla.