TUAW Tip: Cancel stuff
No, I'm not talking about hitting the Cancel button. I'm also not talking about hitting Esc. I'm talking about canceling operations. Ever had a page take forever to load, and you just want Safari to cut it out? You don't really want to close the window, just stop loading whatever wacky CSS business was loading. Hitting Cmd-Period (that's the Apple and the . key) will stop whatever active process is going, usually it's indicated by a little blue progress bar. For instance, if you've ever gone to "Save for web..." in Photoshop, but the image was enormous, that preview can take a minute to load. You can cancel this, resize, and then preview, all without leaving the Save for web interface window. Using escape would have canceled the save, so cmd-period has a little niche use here. Cmd-period does cancel things at times, in Finder and "standard" UI dialog boxes where you have a Cancel or OK option. It's been around forever, as I remember cancelling things all the time on my dad's SE/30— mostly because I'm an impatient snot. For added fun, cmd-period will open the CD tray when you're in open firmware.
