A few people emailed to thank me for posting the keyboard shortcut that closes and opens the mailbox drawer in Tiger.

In Panther, you will remember, an icon in the main toolbar offered a way to do this. You can still add it to your toolbar by Control-clicking on the toolbar, selecting Customize Toolbar, and dragging the Mailboxes icon into the toolbar from the palette of icons. Or, you can do it as a keyboard shortcut:

Command-Shift-M

Think – “I am in Command. I will Shift the Mailboxes”

If the existing keyboard shortcuts don’t do what you want, Chuck Toporek over at O’Reilly offers a short tutorial on how to roll your own. Remember, it’s faster and better to use the keyboard.

Although I stumbled across a dissenting view tonight from Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini (“Leading authority on software design” — HotWired) who said in 1989:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

— Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
— The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

keyboard shortcuts, productivity, tips, mailbox drawer, mail.app, apple mail

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Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, keyboard shortcuts, mail.app, mailbox drawer, Productivity

This entry was posted on Friday, 16th September, 2005 at 12:10 am and is filed under Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.