This is one of those posts that will be extremely boring to everyone except the people who, like me, are searching EVERYWHERE online for the answer, and are finding nothing but a bunch of sites where someone has asked the question and has received a bunch of answers that are useless. USELESS.
So. This is in answer to the question: If you are playing a game on your Mac, and the game takes up the entire screen, and you want to go back to your desktop but you don’t want to have to quit the game to get there, how do you do it? And the answer is: command-H.
The mnemonic is that H is for Hide; you’re hiding the window with the game in it.
This was such frustrating information to find. I was getting so tired of having to quit/re-launch Sims every single time an email came in or I wanted to check something online, but I couldn’t find the answer to what seemed like an easy question. I found one million answers to how to do it in WINDOWS and/or on a PC, but not on a Mac. And there were even questions where the person SPECIFIED it was a Mac, and asked NOT to receive answers for PCs, and people were STILL saying “I dunno, man, but on my PC it’s ____”—and then falling into bickering irrelevant arguments about which PC keyboard was the “standard” one! And this was ON A SITE ABOUT MAC PROBLEMS!! So when I finally did find the answer, I wanted to put it where I (and possibly others) could find it, when it’s been awhile since I’ve played Sims and I’ve completely forgotten and can’t believe I didn’t write it down.
OMG. I have been struggling with this for years. YEARS. Swistle you have just changed my life. Or at least changed my life when it comes to my ability to play The Sims.
this is great!! i’m a mostly-PC gal, but recently got a macbook for home, and maaan are there a lot of shortcuts i still need to learn on that thing.
I do believe there’s a whole list of what the keyboard shortcuts are on your computer itself. I’m not at home (with my MacBook), so I can’t tell you where it is right now, but it’s probably under Mac Help (which you can get to through any program) or under System Preferences/Profiler. You can print the list and tape it up by the computer.
I believe you can also press Command-Tab at the same time and cycle through the active programs on your Mac.
I know that on a PC you can play the Sims in windowed mode. Can you do that on a Mac? I normally play windowed so that I can see people on my IM list, check emails, etc easily.
(BTW, any chance you can add DISCUS as a commenting option? I HATE blogger/google’s comment box because it takes a long time to log in. I have to enter the captcha, and then sign in, and then my password’s been saved wrong and I have to sign in again (THIS IS THE ONLY SERVICE THAT SAVES THE PW INCORRECTLY), and then there’s another captcha, and I have to chose the sign in all over again, etc etc etc. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF google! Why can’t you do this right!)
I have not played Sims in many years, and have never played it on any of our Macs, and still I found this interesting. You have a gift, Swistle.
I don’t play SIMS or use a Mac, but I love when you do public service messages! I don’t know why, but it is def. a nod to the excellence or your writing.
I need to know, are the graphics for your Sims all jacked up on the Mac? Mine are and it drives me bananas. I’m playing Sims 3 when it happens. Know of any fixes for that??
Megan- The only problem I’ve noticed is that it won’t always speed up. It can be…very dull, to watch Sims sleep all night. It also sometimes gets quite slow even in normal mode. I’ve got Sims 2, though.
You are a hero.