I use spotlight for all kinds of math (12 / 4) * (44 + 35) etc

Command + c will copy the highlighted spotlight result.

Expose (show all windows) and drag and drop files to that window (i grab the file, while dragging show all windows by either a keybord key or hot corner and drop it to the new window)

Hold down command to move around background windows without giving it focus.

Ctrl + (arrows or numbers) to go to certain spaces.

While in spaces expose, hold down ctrl to move all of the windows of a certain application to another space.

Hold down a window's titlebar while switching spaces to move that window to the new space.

Drag folders that you frequent into the left side of finder. I have /private/etc in mine

Hold down command while clicking or pressing enter on a spotlight result will open its containing folder.

How did I forget about keyboard modifiers by holding down the alt key.

Drag a file/folder to terminal to get the path to that file printed in terminal. so I often type "cd " and then drag folder to get there

While switching apps via command+tab you can let tab go and either hide the application by pressing h or quit it by pressing q (I wish that you could minimize it by pressing m). You can also cycle backwards by pressing tilde (this only works if youre already command+tabbing) or shift+tab

* Gone from snow leopard, but i miss it* there used to be a keyboard shortcut (command, option, ctrl space) that opened a list of your last accessed files (i mistakenly found a bunch of porn website cookies on an intern's laptop once). This used to be useful to see which files you needed to upload /ftp.

IMO Spotlight is the best example of minimalist software design.

In a single universal field you have instant: app launcher, calculator, dictionary, file search, email search, contact search.

My single best tip for Mac power-users: learn what you can do with Spotlight.

Edit: grammar

Spotlight also has keywords -

kind:pdf

date:yesterday

author:short_name

from:contact_name

And the boolean relations AND, OR, NOT work as you might expect.

There's a lot of cool stuff hidden in Spotlight. Try

    man mdfind 

to play around with command-line Spotlight.

Here is a particularly good resource on this aspect of Spotlight:

http://hints.macworld.com/dlfiles/spotlight_cmds.txt

I know you didn't claim Apple invented it, but I thought it would be informative to say Apple have added their own ideas but the main idea comes from BeOS, a once commercially viable operating system. These days it lives on in an open source recreation that has improved on BeOS, called Haiku. It uses a 64-bit journaling file system which has been improved now called HaikuFS that can hold 80,000 petabytes, caches so is fast and has user-definable attributes, like for contacts, music or anything you can think of really which can help you find things fast. There's a reimplementation of Dashboard called Corkboard written by a fan so it goes both ways - good ideas are used elsewhere. :)

Forgot about the dictionary, I use it all the time in spotlight

I'm not sure what you're talking about - dragging files onto icons always worked for me. What was maddening for me though in Leopard (10.5) is that you couldn't drag a file to an already-open application, like you could in the Windows taskbar (like to drag a file to a specific explorer window, for example).

Thankfully, you can do this now in 10.6 - drag the file to an already open application and hold it there for a few seconds. Then the app comes up, then (without ever releasing the mouse button) drag the file to the application window, and hold for a few seconds. Now you can drop your file in that window. The whole process takes about 5-6 seconds (which is agonizingly slow), and, IMO one of the worst aspects of application-driven window management (versus window-driven window management).

You can drag files to application icons just fine in windows. You can't drop them on taskbar, but can on desktop (which you can embed into task bar to have immediate access to all your desktop icons with other apps maximized).

Just add desktop as a toolbar on the task bar, uncheck all the text and make it take full line, so as not to conflict with running apps. Then drag files onto those icons and they will be opened in new or running instances, whatever apps are designed to do.

Edit: so it looks like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15669592/taskbar.png

> To scroll a window in Windows, the window needs to have focus.

Katmouse http://ehiti.de/katmouse/