Welcome2Mac: Smart Mailboxes, Control YouTube, and Jump to System Preferences

Welcome2Mac is The MacTipper Blog's weekly tip where all the people new to Apple's latest operating system can get Mac tips to help them better use Mac OS X.

In this week's Welcome2Mac, we'll take a look at smart mailboxes in Mail, controlling YouTube with your Keyboard, and the shortcut to the System Preferences.


You can easily make mailboxes that automatically file away messages for you. To make a new smart mailbox, go to the Mailbox menu and select "New Smart Mailbox…"

Once you choose the criteria, it will show up in the mailbox list.

You can edit smart mailboxes by double-clicking on them.

You can delete a smart mailbox by right clicking on it and selecting the delete option.


To control YouTube videos with the keyboard, click on the video player. (You can pause and play it or click on the main movie section.) Then use:

Spacebar: Pause
Right Arrow: Jump forward 20-some seconds.
Left Arrow: Jump to the beginning.

You can use Tab to jump between controls. At which point, a yellow box will appear over the active control. When the control you wish to activate has the yellow box over it (for example, the fullscreen button) hit the spacebar.


You can use Option-Adjust_Sound to open up the sound preferences.

On newer keyboards you can use Option-Exposé to jump to Exposé and Option-Adjust_Display_Brightness to jump to displays.

On backlight keyboards, you can use Option-Adjust_Keyboard_Brightness to jump the keyboard prefs.

Of course, this is only helpful if you use the other System Preference shortcut: Cmd-L. This will show all the System Preferences.

Combining these, you can hit Option-Adjust_Brightness + Cmd-L to quickly show you all the System Preference panes.