Think about signing up for a National Association of Photoshop Professionals membership.

Their site offers lots of tutorials, tricks, tips, etc. Plus they have DVDs and books to buy at discount. You can download brushes and presets and stuff, and there’s even a help desk where you can ask how to do something if you can’t remember or figure it out. It’s a nice community of professional Photoshop users.

Your $99 annual membership comes with a subscription to Photoshop User magazine. I was a member for two years, then I lapsed for a year and I just renewed. If you do sign up, use this link and I’ll get credit…

Say you’re working in a given application and you want to hide it. Maybe you’re taking a break, or maybe you just need to get a quick look at the desktop–to quickly find something or email a file. You could use Expose, if you have it set up. You could also choose Hide (application) from the app’s menu. You could even Hold Command and hit H. OR you could hold Option and click anywhere on the desktop, which is my new favorite. Try it.

Hide application: With the application you want to hide active, simply Option-click the desktop.

As far as I can tell, there is no command to “batch zip” files in OS X. If you had ten folders and wanted to create ten zip files–one zip for each folder–you’d have to do it one at a time. That is, you would, if you weren’t here downloading the Finder plugin I made to batch zip files.

Here is the workflow file (43kb). Download it, extract it, and open it in Automator (it will open itself in Automator if you just double click it). From there, look at the pretty code written by my friend Micah for a second, then choose File | Save As Plug-in. Enter a name (this is what you’ll see in the finder when you execute the command, so be descriptive. “Batch Zip Files” works well), and make sure Finder is selected in the “Plug-in for:” box. Click Save and you’re done.

Now when you want to archive multiple files, just select them, right-click (CTRL-click) them, navigate to More | Automator | (whatever you called it) and you’re zipping away.

Note: this creates .tgz files, which are actually TAR archives.