Look up in Dictionary. Spotlight. Color Code.

Best keyboard shortcut I learned today: Look up in Dictionary. Select a word and hit Command-Control-D (Apple-Control-D). Nice!

I’ve also been making more use of Spotlight lately. One thing I hadn’t considered was direct Dashboard Widget access — especially if it was one that wasn’t already open. So, for example, if I need to convert miles to kilometers, I can hit Command-Space to bring up Spotlight, then start typing ‘unit converter’ — by the time I have ‘unit’, the Unit Converter Widget has been highlighted. A quick Command-Return, and I can start converting units to my heart’s content.

Color Code is an interactive Java-based map of over 30,000 English nouns, created by artist Martin Wattenberg and programmer Jonathan Feinberg. ‘Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.’