When you use Adobe Photoshop day in and day out, certain things about its interface and workflow start to grate on you, like the inability to zoom while in the middle of a transform or applying Layer Effects. Much to my delight, Photoshop is also jam packed with hidden commands and modifier keys, which turned up a discovery today, shown here:

If you’re in the middle of a Transform or Layer Effects change and need to get your changes just right, you can adjust your view simply by holding the correct keys and using your mouse. On the Mac, hold Space and drag to pan around the background window. Command-Space-click on the document to zoom in, and Command-Option-Space-click to zoom out. Note that some of these key combos collide with the system-wide Spotlight commands, so you may consider remapping them in System Preferences, depending on your usage of each. Personally, I’ve moved Spotlight to Control-Space just to use these great hidden features of Photoshop.

For the graphic designers and Photoshop enthusiasts, here are a few resources for identifying fonts:

WhatTheFont
WhatTheFont is far and away my favorite tool in the bunch primarilty because it’s automated, fast, and shockingly accurate. Just upload an image (the more contrast, the better) or provide a URL and their software will match characters and, more often than not, the correct font name.

WhatTheFont Forum
If fully automated solutions are of no help, you can always call upon others in the industry who deal with typefaces every day. Someone out there knows about your font, and the WhatTheFont Forum is one of the best places to get a good response.

Identifont
Identifont helps you find fonts by asking multiple questions about the font you’re looking for. It’s a unique approach that, in my usage, works about 30 to 40 percent of the time. As a last resort, it may very well come through, despite it’s apparently limited font selected.

While we’d all like our software and web pages to have instantaneous results, the reality is that some computer operations take a noticeable amount of time. When that happens, it’s good practice to display an icon or message indicating that your desired action is happening, and that your computer hasn’t simply ignored your obviously stressful request. For those developing software or web-based applications, here’s a small collection of Mac-like spinners of varying formats, including animated GIF and PNG image sequences (in filmstrip style). Just one collection of the many bits of “I might be able to use this one day” junk I collect while browsing the web or disassembling applications…

I updated the style of the Dugg Stories area, adding a white background for the items and a footer with links to my Digg RSS feed and Digg.com. Here is the final (hopefully!) version of my Photoshop file that went into the creation of the Digg sidebar area. In it you’ll find all the layers making up the header, middle, footer, and text elements, along with a few items that were created but not used. Enjoy!