Since I switched over from Windows XP to Mac OS X Leopard this past November one of the more puzzling things has been how to add desktop shortcuts.  This was real easy in Windows’ Internet Explorer.  Just Right-click your desktop and select “Create Shortcut”.  On a Mac (FireFox or Safari) this is not an option.

I finally found the answer, and like most things on the Mac, it’s easier than the PC.

You may have noticed while surfing around that when clicking text on a page it sometimes turns into a box, one that you can drag.  I know I did, and I always wondered what I could do with it.  Now I know.

You can drag any text link from a page onto your desktop to create a shortcut.  Also, if you want to make a desktop shortcut of the current web page, just drag the icon that appears to the left of the URL in the address bar.  This is by default a globe icon, but a site can customize it so it may look like some other 16×16 image.  Either way, just drag it to your desktop and it will create a .webloc file.  Just click it to open it up in your default browser!

Works great in both FireFox and Safari.

Just click and drag the icon to your desktop when it turns to a hand icon.

I’m glad to have a social network otherwise I’d miss out on some great tips. Adobe has published a new development environment for building desktop apps. In their words:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex™, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.”

I used to build desktop apps through Visual Basic back in “the day” but since the web came out I have been developing 100% for the web… until recently when I had to build some cross-platform desktop widgets. For that I turned to the Yahoo! Widget Engine. But it is very limited.

Since AIR uses technologies I’m already developing in, this sounds very interesting. I can’t wait to have some time to learn more about this. It says that it’s cross-platform, but I wonder how cross-platform it is? Obviously Windows and Mac are supported, but what about Ubuntu? If all three are supported (Mac, Windows, Linux), then I’m sold! It looks like, however, only Mac and Windows are supported by the look of their runtime download page.

AIR home page
AIR runtime

I installed the Windows runtime, and it was a very fast download and super quick install. I then installed the snitter AIR app for Twitter and it works really well.

Thanks Chris Harrison for the tip!