That's one of the things I hate in OS X: many features are there, but hidden until you press some modifier key. Hold shift to maximize. Hold option while pasting to move a file instead of copying. Hold Cmd+Shift+. to see hidden files, and so on. That's the opposite of user-friendly.

The worst example of this tendency? Photobooth. You can press shift and alt to disable the flash and the delay (resp.), but there's no hint of this feature anywhere. I think it's not even in the help or in any documentation.

Open and Shift modifiers are listed in the help in Lion.

I'm using Lion and that does nothing in Finder or in Safari.

Right you are. It works in Chrome for me. I guess most apps don't have it.

Works for chrome. Doesn't work for Safari or Finder.

Or install a utility like RightZoom.

This type of thing is my biggest complaint with OSX.

I've been using OSX as my main desktop OS for about a year now, and it's unbelievable how many simple customizations require third party products. To make it worse, a lot of them cost money.

Coming from Debian and Fluxbox I'm used to almost any possible configuration or customization being possible via /etc, the files in ~/.fluxbox/, or utilities installed using synaptic.

Thanks for the tip! I didn't know about RightZoom.

Here are some little known Mac utilities I like:

* MutableCode's Breakaway let's you configure separate audio volumes (including silence) for with and without headphones.

* Stereopsis' Flux adjusts your display's color temperature to match the type of lighting in your room (e.g. daylight, halogen, fluorescent) to avoid the blindly blue glare in a dark room.

F.lux is actually available for all platforms! I've been using it on Windows for a while, one of my favorite small utilities.

Well, not iOS yet.

Separate volume bars for speakers/headphones are already maintained, no?

They certainly are on my work Mac (Snow Leopard).

Option/Alt + 'Plus button' does that in iTunes.