Two New Switcher Questions/Complaints

I have had my new (and first ever) Mac for about three weeks now. I have gotten over "switcher culture shock" and am pretty productive now in this new OS X environment. Two things continue to really bother me though - perhaps you can help?

1. Launching Infrequently Used Apps - For frequently used apps, you put them in the dock and all is well. For the less frequently used apps, it seems that you have to (1) open up Finder, (2) click Applications on the side bar, (3) double click the app to launch it and (4) finally, close the Finder window. Thats a lot of work! I miss my Start menu believe it or not! One click and you are done. Is there a better way than all this Finder jiggling around that I have outlined above? I have found a shareware offering called Classic Menu, which indicates that it allows the building of Start Menu type functionality (apparently Macs had this in days gone by). Is something like this the best solution or is there a more graceful "Mac way" that I just haven't figured out yet?

2. Moving the cursor to the start or end of a line. In Windows and in Linux, the Home key on the keyboard moves the cursor to the start of the line and the End key moves it to the end. In the Mac world, it seems that the Home key moves the cursor to the start of the document and the End key to the end of the document. After a while I realized that for one line "documents" like the address/URL bar of my browser, up arrow moves the cursor to the start of the line and down error moves the cursor to the end of the line. This is OK for single line entries, but what do you do when you are in the middle of a multiline entry and you just want to jump to the end of the line you are on? Is there a generally accepted way to do this, or do you have to painfully move the mouse pointer to the end of the line and then click?

Thanks for any and all input!

1. if you are using Tiger use spotlight, that little magnifying glass in the upper right corner. Just type the name of the app in and it should be the first entry just hit the down cursor and enter.

2. command + cursor left/right will take you to the beginning and end of the line

Why not create aliases on your desktop for your less frquently used apps that you like to get to now and then? Or you can use spotlight like stated above.

Here's a trick I learned from the folks at the Apple Store after only having my iMac for a week. Go into your HD in Finder, drag the Applications Folder into the second half of your dock (beside the Trash Bin). Now click and hold the mouse over the folder in the dock for 2 secs, and the contents will pop up like the Windows Start menu. Hope this trick helps. I have one for my Home directory, Applications, and Downloads directory.

More and more i enjoy the benefits of Quicksilver.

quicksilver is indeed brilliant, you can press a key combo (default is ctrl + space) and a little dialogue window pops up, you can then start typing the name of the the app you want (you dont have to be exact, for example, say you want to open the keyboard and mouse preference pane, you can just type keyp (i need to add the extra p because i have keynote installed)) and it will quickly (less than a second) "search" then just press return. Quicksilver also has A LOT of extra features, it's more than just an app-launcher, do some googling for some of guides etc out there if you interested.

iPodJon120 said:

Now click and hold the mouse over the folder in the dock for 2 secs, and the contents will pop up like the Windows Start menu.

Click to expand...

In fact, this just simulates a right click - either use command+click or the two-finger click on the macbook/powerbook to make it appear with no delay.

cazabam said:

In fact, this just simulates a right click - either use command+click or the two-finger click on the macbook/powerbook to make it appear with no delay.

Click to expand...

its control+click for a right click not command+click. Interestingly enough i just tried command+click on a dock icon to see if it did anything and it shows the app in finder

I use Spotlight to launch infrequent apps. Before Tiger I used either Quicksilver or the App folder on the dock suggestion above.