Following up on a tip posted yesterday over at Mac OS X Hints which made the little (invisible) bell above my head go “ding ding ding” — I noticed that menu items in applications on Mac OS X use curly quotes and not straight quotes which follows good typographic form. That being said, I realized that this might be the reason why I hadn’t been able to create a new keyboard shortcut for the “Update songs on …” command in the iTunes File menu.

Earlier I tried with regular quotes and noted that it simply didn’t work. I gave up quickly on this one because it wasn’t terribly important, but I’m now happy to report: problem solved.

So for anyone who may not know how to create curly quotes (or typographers quotes as they’re often called), press Option-Left Square Bracket for the opening quotation mark and Option-Left Shift-Square Bracket for the closing quotation mark. For single quotes, use the Right Square Bracket key; the remainder of the key sequence is the same.