Mission Control is a great feature found in OS X that can simplify the process of moving items between full screen apps when combined with Hot Corners. Hot Corners, a feature that I talked about in my 10 getting started tips for new OS X users, allows you to place your mouse pointer in one of the four corners of your Mac’s screen to invoke a specific response.
When combining the power of Hot Corners with Mission Control, you can easily move items to and from full screen apps. Have a look at our video tutorial inside for the details.
Although there are a variety of ways to invoke Mission Control, I find that setting up a Hot Corner makes the most sense when it comes to moving files. Hot Corners require no interaction from the keyboard, and no complex gestures from the trackpad. Using Hot Corners allows you to invoke Mission Control while holding an item on screen using the mouse or trackpad. In other words, it basically allows you to do two things at once with relative ease.
To enable Hot Corners for Mission Control, open System Preferences → Mission Control → Hot Corners.
Once the Hot Corners panel is open, select a corner, and choose the Mission Control option. I prefer to use one of the upper corners, since the Mission Control interface is located at the top of the screen, but the decision is yours.
After linking Mission Control to a Hot Corner, it’s just a matter of dragging an item into the corner to invoke Mission Control, and dragging the same item to one of the full screen apps displayed in its interface.
File in hand, you’ll need to ensure that you hover over the desired destination of the item for at least a second before OS X will switch over to the full screen app. You can then release the file when appropriate into the desired location.
If all of this sounds weird, be sure to check out our tutorial video above, which quickly demonstrates how it all goes down. As shown in the latter stages of the video, you can even use this technique to share text snippets between full screen apps.
Keep in mind that this is just one of many ways to move items to and from apps, full screen or otherwise. I find this method to be one of the more elegant solutions available when utilizing the built in features of OS X.
All of that said, I definitely think that there’s room for utilities that are dedicated to the task of moving around files, such as Yoink, available in the Mac App Store. I’ll be back in a future post that looks deeper into Yoink, one of my favorite ways to move items around OS X.
