By Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek, Chris Stone

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Using Mac OS X

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There are actually two interface layers to Mac OS X. One is Aqua, the system's native graphical user interface (GUI); the other is a command-line interface (CLI), which is most commonly accessed via the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities). This chapter provides a quick overview of Mac OS X's Aqua environment; later chapters in the book will introduce you to the Terminal and the BSD Unix side, with a full examination of these deeper OS layers in Part V.

Mac OS X offers a feature-rich graphical user environment that makes it easy for people to interact with the operating system. This chapter starts out with a discussion of Mac OS X's Desktop, and introduces things like the menu bar, the Dock, and basic window controls. Chapter 2 covers the Finder, Mac OS X's file manager.

When you first log on to your Mac, you are presented with the Desktop, as shown in Figure 1-1. By "Desktop," we're referring to the entire screen and all of its interface elements, including the menu bar, the Dock, the Desktop, disk and file icons, and the various windows used by the Finder and other applications.

Figure 1-1: The Mac OS X Desktop

Regardless of which application you're using, Mac OS X's menu bar is always located across the top of the screen. This is different from Microsoft Windows or Linux GNOME or KDE Desktop environments, where the menu bar is attached to each individual window. There are some standard items that you'll always find in the menu bar, but as you switch from application to application, you'll notice that the menu names and some of their options change according to which application is active. Figure 1-2 shows the menu bar as it appears when the Finder is active.

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The Mac Desktop

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When you first log on to your Mac, you are presented with the Desktop, as shown in Figure 1-1. By "Desktop," we're referring to the entire screen and all of its interface elements, including the menu bar, the Dock, the Desktop, disk and file icons, and the various windows used by the Finder and other applications.

Figure 1-1: The Mac OS X Desktop

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The Menu Bar

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Regardless of which application you're using, Mac OS X's menu bar is always located across the top of the screen. This is different from Microsoft Windows or Linux GNOME or KDE Desktop environments, where the menu bar is attached to each individual window. There are some standard items that you'll always find in the menu bar, but as you switch from application to application, you'll notice that the menu names and some of their options change according to which application is active. Figure 1-2 shows the menu bar as it appears when the Finder is active.

Figure 1-2: The Mac OS X menu bar (with the Finder active)

As Figure 1-2 shows, the following menus and items can be found in the menu bar.

• The Apple menu (see Section 1.2.3)
• The Application menu (see Section 1.2.4)
• A default set of application menus (see Section 1.2.5)
• Menu extras (see Section 1.2.6)

A running application can have one of two possible states: active or inactive. An active application is the application you're currently using—in other words, the application that receives any input you generate through the keyboard or mouse (with the exception of clicks or keystrokes that switch between applications). An inactive application has been launched, but is running in the background.

You'll typically run many applications at once, using the Dock to track and manage them as described later in Section 1.3. For example, you might wish to browse the Web with Internet Explorer while you have Mail running in the background. If it alerts you to the arrival of new mail, you can make

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The Dock

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One of Mac OS X's most visually distinctive features is its Dock, a highly customizable strip of icons found (by default) along the bottom of the screen. Even if you choose to temporarily hide or change its location, the Dock remains active and always available.

As Figure 1-18 shows, the Dock can contain many different kinds of icons, including:

1. The Finder icon
2. Application icons
3. An active application
4. An inactive application
5. The Divider
6. A Finder folder
7. Minimized windows
8. The Trash icon

Figure 1-18: The Dock

The icons found in the Dock allow you to quickly launch and maneuver among applications, as well as provide shortcuts to frequently used folders and documents. These icons also sometimes act as applications in their own right. The Dock is the new home of the Trash, which used to reside at the lower-right corner of the Desktop in earlier versions of the Mac OS.

Application icons live to the left of the Dock's divider bar. Each one represents an application, either one that is currently running or one that's idle but "docked" (meaning that you've chosen to let its icon have a permanent home on the Dock).

Like any other Unix system, Mac OS X is usually running dozens of programs—more correctly known as processes—at any given time. Many of them, however, receive no representation in the Dock. These programs have no Aqua-based user interface, and some have no UIs at all.

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Windows

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Nearly every Aqua application centers its interface around windows. Windows can represent either abstract areas of user interactivity, such as with web browser or Terminal console windows, or they can represent the contents of real files or folders on disk.

This section will introduce you to the basic features present in most windows and to the various types of windows you'll encounter while using Mac OS X.

Windows in Mac OS X have an entirely different set of controls than those from earlier versions of the Mac OS. These window features are highlighted in Figure 1-27.

Figure 1-27: A typical window (from BBEdit)

The controls are listed as follows:

1. Close button (red)
2. Minimize button (yellow)
3. Zoom button (green)
4. Proxy icon
5. Filename or title
6. Toolbar button (not available on all windows)
7. Scrollbars and scroll arrows
8. Resize window control

The top part of the window is known as the titlebar . The titlebar is home to the three colored window control buttons used for closing (red), minimizing (yellow), and zooming (green) the window. Mousing over the buttons will change their state to be either an X, a minus sign (-), or a plus sign (+), respectively. These are visual cues of the function the button performs.

With some applications, you'll notice that the red Close window button has a dark-colored dot in its center. This means that the document you're working on has unsaved changes; if you save the document (File

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Opening and Saving Documents

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Nearly all applications that let you create and edit documents, and that make use of Mac OS X's Aqua interface, use the same dialogs for opening and editing files. They give you a variety of ways to navigate through the filesystem folder by folder until you find the place or object you're seeking, or simply specify a known location in a single step.

This section will discuss the open and save dialogs, showing you how to navigate through the maze of disks, folders, and files on your Mac.

The centerpiece of every Open dialog window, as shown in Figure 1-31, is a columnar view of some place in your filesystem. In fact, it has the same function as the Finder's Column View (see Section 2.2.3). Through it, you can select the file you'd like to open. Some applications might let you choose folders and disks to open as well.

Above that window floats a From pull-down menu. Its first (and default) option is always set to the right-most disk or folder selected in the window's path of columns. Pulling down and selecting something else from the menu instantly zaps the columnar window to a folder elsewhere on your filesystem. Its selections are similar, but not identical, to those of the Finder's Go menu:

Desktop ( -D)

Switches the location to your Desktop folder.

Home (Shift- -H)

Switches the selected location to your Home directory.

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Services

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The Services submenu can be found under most any Aqua program's application menu. It allows the foreground application to invoke functions of other applications, usually while passing along user-selected text or objects to them.

The Service menu's contents depend on the applications installed on your Mac. When installed, some applications like Mail and BBEdit can place entries in the Services menu. If an application provides more than one service, those items will be placed into a submenu named after that application.

As seen in Figure 1-35, Mail provides two services under Application → Services → Mail → Send To.

Figure 1-35: The Services menu

If you have some text or images selected in the foremost application and select Mail Text, the Mail application creates a new email message whose body consists of that selection. Selecting an email address in any application and then choosing Mail's Mail To service will also create a new email message, this time pre-addressed to the selected address. In both cases, the Mail application launches (if it wasn't already active) and makes itself the active application.

Some services make themselves especially easy to invoke through key bindings, which remain omnipresent throughout your use of the OS. The Make Sticky service turns any text you've selected into a new sticky note, and is bound to the key combo Shift- -Y.

Applications define the services they offer through the Info.plist files found within their bundles. See Chapter 22 for more information.

Of course, an application might have its own idea about what Shift- -Y means! An application's own key bindings always trump those in the Services menu. Services know when the current application has a binding that conflicts with theirs and might try to offer alternative keystrokes, changing its binding indicator in the Services menu to reflect this. If all of its bindings raise conflicts, it stops trying altogether, and can only be used through the Services menu for that particular application.

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Logging Out and Shutting Down

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When you're done using your Macintosh, there are two ways to bring your session to a close: shutting down, and logging out.

Because Mac OS X is a multiple-user system and a server platform, you should choose to shut down the computer only if nobody else on your local network is using it or the services it provides. This includes both the other human users on the system, who might be logged into it remotely (see Section 7.5 in Chapter 7) or using network-shared volumes (see Section 13.7), as well as people or programs using any running network services (described in Chapter 7).

For example, if you are using printer sharing (as described in Chapter 8) to let other computers in your home or office use the printer connected to your Macintosh, then shutting down the Mac will also make that printer invisible to the other machines. The same goes for any web, mail, or other network services the machine may be running. On the flip side, if you are the sole account holder of your Mac, connect through the Internet via dial-up, and do not run any public network services, then it won't hurt to shut down when you're all done for the day.

Logging out is the better option for Macs that are shared by many users, or that act as network servers. When you log out (via → Log Out, or Shift- -Q), then all the programs you launched since you logged in will terminate (Aqua applications all quit in the usual way, giving you a last chance to save changes), and you'll be dropped back to the login screen. Behind that placid-looking screen, though, the computer remains busy because every other process—including those owned by the system itself, as opposed to you or any other human user—continues to work. So, if you activate printer sharing and then log out, printer sharing still works, so long as the computer stays on and connected to the printer (or until you or another user with admin privileges deactivates printer sharing). This is because the internal programs that make printer sharing (and web serving, mail delivery, and all other core network services) work belong to the system—the root user—not to any individual user.

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Starting Up and Logging In

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When you turn on your Mac (or restart it), it spends a couple of minutes or so initializing various processes to ready the machine for user login, as well as whatever network service it may provide (see Chapter 7). Unix veterans are used to seeing this phase as a cascade of messages spilling down a text console, but Mac OS X hides all this information behind a plain white screen with a plain gray Apple logo on it.

You can see all that startup text if you really want to, by booting into single-user mode, as described in Chapter 11. This can be a useful diagnostic tool for hardcore Unix-heads who know what they're doing, or a way for the merely curious to watch the strange sight of their Mac rolling out of bed and stumbling around in pure-Unix mode before it puts on its Mac OS face. Use the exit command at the single-user shell to resume the normal Mac OS X boot process.

You may also view some of the machine's startup messages after the fact by looking at the file /var/log/system.log. (Note that only users with admin access can read the file.)

Eventually the system either settles on the login screen, or goes ahead to log in a specific user, depending upon the machine's configuration. In the former case, you've got to provide your username (either by choosing it from a list or typing it in—again, based on configuration settings in the Accounts preference pane) and password before you can continue into the Finder, whereupon you can actually start using the operating system.

Logging in is necessary because of Mac OS X's Unix-based file permissions system; before you can interact with the system in any way, the machine has to know who you are so that it can tell what files and folders you're allowed to access, and to what degree. Generally speaking, everything in your Home folder (which you can always go to through the Finder's Go → Home (Shift- -H) option) belongs to you, and you are unrestricted in how you read, modify, create and delete the files and folders within it (and the files and folders within those folders, and so on). Everything

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Chapter 2: Using the Finder

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The Finder is the application that gives you access to your entire filesystem, network drives, and any externally mounted drives, including USB and FireWire drives and devices, such as an iPod. With Jaguar, the Finder's capabilities have been expanded to include the ability to search for files on your system and to be used as an ad hoc FTP application.

This chapter will cover the use of the Finder, along with tips and tricks to make you a more efficient Mac user.

In earlier versions of the Mac OS, the Finder was located in the application menu at the far-right edge of the menu bar. The Finder was the application responsible for displaying the contents of a drive or folder; when it was double-clicked, a window would open, displaying either an Icon or List View of the contents. Mac OS X's Finder really isn't that different from Mac OS 9's Finder. It still displays the contents of drives and folders; however, now it is much more powerful, particularly in Jaguar. To open a new Finder window, click on the Finder icon, located at the far left of the Dock.

Near the top of the Finder window is a toolbar (shown in Figure 2-1), which offers a quick way to access files and directories on your system, and also to switch between the View modes discussed in the next section.

Figure 2-1: The Finder toolbar

The Finder toolbar has the following controls and icons by default:

Back

Takes you to the previous view in the same Finder window.

Forward

If you've gone backward in a Finder window, clicking the Forward button will take you forward in the view.

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Finder Overview

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In earlier versions of the Mac OS, the Finder was located in the application menu at the far-right edge of the menu bar. The Finder was the application responsible for displaying the contents of a drive or folder; when it was double-clicked, a window would open, displaying either an Icon or List View of the contents. Mac OS X's Finder really isn't that different from Mac OS 9's Finder. It still displays the contents of drives and folders; however, now it is much more powerful, particularly in Jaguar. To open a new Finder window, click on the Finder icon, located at the far left of the Dock.

Near the top of the Finder window is a toolbar (shown in Figure 2-1), which offers a quick way to access files and directories on your system, and also to switch between the View modes discussed in the next section.

Figure 2-1: The Finder toolbar

The Finder toolbar has the following controls and icons by default:

Back

Takes you to the previous view in the same Finder window.

Forward

If you've gone backward in a Finder window, clicking the Forward button will take you forward in the view.

View

The three Finder View buttons let you switch from Icon View, List View, or Column View, respectively, from left to right.

Computer

Clicking this icon is the same as invoking the Go → Computer (Shift-

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Finder Views

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The Finder serves as a graphical file manager, which offers three ways (or Views) to look at the files, folders, applications, and other filesystems mounted on your system. The Finder also sports a toolbar at the top of the window, which gives you quick access to frequently used files and directories, along with a built-in Search field for context-based searches.

More on the Finder toolbar and how to search for files later; for now, let's look at the three Views available to the Finder: Icon, List, and the new Column View. To select any of these views for a Finder window, click on the View menu and select "as Icons" ( -1), "as List" ( -2), or "as Columns" ( -3), respectively.

Depending on the View you've selected for your Finder window, you can also tweak the settings for that view by selecting View → Show View Options ( -J). The View Options for each View will be discussed in the sections that follow.

This shows the contents of a directory as file, folder, or an application icons, as shown in Figure 2-1. In this view, every Finder object appears as an icon of a variable size. Icons can be arbitrarily arranged within a window by dragging and dropping them to different locations. If you find that icons are overlapping or out of order, you can clean up the view by selecting View → Clean Up, or View → Arrange (by Name, Date Created, Date Modified, Size, or Kind).

Double-clicking on an icon will do one of three things, depending upon its type: launch an application, open a file, or display the contents of a double-clicked folder in the Finder window. If the Finder window's toolbar is hidden when you double-click on a folder, the contents of that folder will be displayed in a new Finder window, rather than the same Finder window.

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Menus and Keyboard Shortcuts

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On the Mac (as with Windows and Linux desktops), you have two ways of invoking commands in the GUI: by using the menus or by issuing shortcuts for the commands on the keyboard. Not every menu item has a keyboard accelerator, but for the ones that do—the more common functions—using the keyboard shortcuts can save you a lot of time.

Aside from its application menu, the Finder has the following menus in its menu bar:

• The Finder's application menu
• File
• Edit
• View
• Go
• Window
• Help

The commands found in these menus will are highlighted in Table 2-4 through Table 2-10. While most of these commands function the same across all applications, the functions of some, such as -B and -I, can vary between programs, and others may only work when the Finder is active. For example, -B in Microsoft Word turns on boldface type or makes a selection bold, while in Project Builder, -B builds your application. Likewise, -I in Word italicizes a word or selection, while hitting -I after selecting a file, folder, or application in the Finder opens the Get Info window for the selected item. Table 2-11 contains a listing of keyboard shortcuts that should work across most applications.

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Files, Folders, and Disks

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Your machine's filesystem refers to all the disks, both local and remote, that your computer is able to see and work with. The definition also includes the machine's installed hard disk(s); any removable media such as CDs, Zip disks, or digital cameras; mounted, in-memory disk images; and any filesystems (or parts thereof) that make themselves available over a network, mounted on your machine through AppleShare or SMB, for example.

The Finder gives you visual cues to let you know which of these you're working with, and it gives you the same methods to navigate through all of them.

The Finder lists all the machine's available disks in the Computer window, which you can summon through Go → Computer (Shift- -C).

As Figure 2-9 shows, this window contains one icon for each disk the Mac can see, as well as a special Network icon that leads to any directories mounted over the network filesystem (NFS, covered in Chapter 11).

Figure 2-9: The Finder's Computer window

The contents of the Computer window don't reflect any actual folder on your machine. The window is just an abstract container the Finder uses to visually represent all the machine's mounted volumes that contain all the real files and folders. As Chapter 11 covers in more detail, each disk has a "real" location, or mount point, somewhere on the physical filesystem—but you don't need to know this in order to use the Finder.

Disk icons also appear on the Desktop unless you've set the Finder Preferences to behave otherwise, as detailed later in Section 2.2.4.

As shown in Figure 2-9, disk icons can have a variety of shapes. Volumes based on local media, such as hard drives, CDs, and iPods, have icons shaped like the devices they're on. Network-mounted disks usually look like a standard disk icon supporting a blue sphere. "Virtual" disks mounted via Disk Copy have icons resembling generic disk drives.

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Moving, Copying, and Renaming Objects

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Moving a file or folder in Finder is as easy as dragging its icon. Some rules apply to what you can move and where you can move it, however, and you can perform more specific actions—such as copying files or creating aliases—through modifier keys.

First of all, due Mac OS X's strict, Unix-style file permissions, you might not be able to move or otherwise modify a file or folder. Anything in your home folder is generally malleable, and if you're in the system's admin group, you can choose to modify certain system-level folders, such as /Applications.

Otherwise, you may see a dialog box like the one in Figure 2-15, informing you that you lack the credentials to perform some action with the filesystem. If you still need it done, contact an administrator of this Mac. If you are an administrator (or the Mac's sole user!) and see this dialog, then you may be trying to manipulate root-owned files that the system doesn't want people messing with, such as those in the /System folder. Refer to Chapter 5 for more information about these and other special folders.

Figure 2-15: A permission-denied dialog box

Exactly what fate befalls a file when you drag it depends upon where you drop it, and if you were holding down modifier keys at the time.

See Chapter 5 for detailed information about Mac OS X's file permissions system and user accounts.

To move an object, just click and drag it. Its destination depends on where you drop it.

If you drop an icon in the same window that it started in, its position in the filesystem doesn't change at all.

Dropping an icon into a different folder on the same disk moves the file, while dropping it onto a folder located on a different disk

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The Get Info Window

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Get Info gives you access to all sorts of information about the files, directories, and applications on your system. To view the information for an item, click on its icon in the Finder and either go to File → Get Info or use its keyboard shortcut, -I. The Get Info window, shown in Figure 2-20, has six different panes, which offer different kinds of information about the file.

Figure 2-20: The Get Info window for a PDF file

To reveal the content of one of these items, click on its disclosure triangle to expand the pane. The panes of the Get Info window include the following:

General

This pane tells you the basics about the file, including its kind, size, where it's located in the filesystem, and when it was created and last modified. The General section also includes two controls for attaching the following special properties to an object:

Stationary Pad

This checkbox only appears in a file's Info window. One of the most obscurely useful Finder commands that survived the transition to Mac OS X, this checkbox signals applications to treat this file as a template instead of an editable file. If opened with an application capable of working with stationary pad files, it will copy the files' contents into an untitled new document window, leaving the original file as is on disk.

Locked

When checked, the object becomes hard to modify or delete. Applications will read from, but won't change, a locked document. Locked folders will let you explore them, but you cannot add or remove anything from them. The Trash will not allow you to add a locked item to it. A locked object will get a tiny padlock added to the corner of its icon, which is a visual clue to you that the file is locked.

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Favorites

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Mac OS X's Favorites concept provides yet another way, along with Finder window toolbars and the Dock, to build shortcuts to frequently accessed folders and files. It can prove especially handy to make favorites out of folders you use frequently, since all the objects you've marked as Favorites show up as selections in the From: menu of the standard Open dialog box, and in the Where: menu of the standard Save dialog. This lets you quickly access these folder from inside most any application—see Section 1.5.

Aqua gives you several ways to create a new favorite:

• In the Finder, select the object(s), then choose File → Add To Favorites.
• Drag an object onto the heart-shaped Favorites icon in a Finder window's toolbar.
• Click the Add to Favorites button (see Figure 1-32) on any application's Open or Save dialog after selected an object within it.
• Add aliases of the objects to ~/Library/Favorites (see Section 2.5.3).

All of these methods add aliases of selected objects to ~/Library/Favorites directory. You can visit this folder in any of the usual ways, or by clicking once on the Favorites icon in a Finder window's toolbar.

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Searching for and Locating Files

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Mac OS X gives you five ways to find files — two easy-to-use methods through the Finder, and three more as Unix commands you can invoke through the Terminal.

Selecting File → Find ( -F) in the Finder brings up the window shown in Figure 2-21. You can also open the Find window by clicking on the word "Search" below the Search field in the Finder's Toolbar.

Figure 2-21: The Finder's file-finding interface

Mac OS Versions 8.5 through 10.1 launched the separate Sherlock application at this Finder menu command. Sherlock still exists in the latest versions of Mac OS X (see Section 6.1), but it has been demoted to work solely as a web-searching interface. Aqua-based file-finding functions have been placed back in the Finder's realm.

The "Search in" pop-up menu lets you define the domain of your search. It contains the following choices:

Everywhere

The search will include every disk mounted on the filesystem, including network-mounted volumes.

Local disks

The search will include every disk mounted on the filesystem, except for network-mounted volumes.

Home

The search will limit itself to your Home folder.

Specific Places

Selecting this summons a filesystem browser, which lets you add disks to include in the search, as well as individual folders within any mounted disk.

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Relaunching the Finder

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The Force Quit window (see "Force-Quitting Applications" in Chapter 1) is the quickest way to restart the Finder if it seems to be stuck, or if you want to apply some change you've made by hacking the Dock's preferences (see Chapter 5).

To restart the Finder, go to → Force Quit (Option- -Esc), select the Finder, and click on the Relaunch button. As with force-quitting other applications, a warning sheet will slide down from the window's titlebar asking you to confirm the operation. If you still want to restart the Finder, click on the Relaunch button; if not, click on the Cancel button or hit -. (Command-period) to cancel the operation.

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Chapter 3: Mac OS 9, Mac OS X,and Classic

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Mac OS X is way ahead of its time. When Apple developed this hybrid operating system, they knew it would take a while for application developers to Carbonize their applications to run on Mac OS X. Rather than locking out older software entirely, Apple made it possible to run both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on the same system, and took it a step further by building a Mac OS 9 virtual machine into Mac OS X, called The Classic Environment, or just Classic.

This chapter covers some of the changes between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and introduces you to Classic.

There are many noticeable changes in the user interface from earlier versions of the Mac OS to Mac OS X, while others may not be so apparent. Two of the biggest changes from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X can be found in the Apple menu and the Control Panels.

The Apple menu, displayed as an apple symbol ( ) in the menu bar, is completely different. For Mac OS 9 users, the thing that will probably impact you most is that you can no longer store aliases for files, folders, or applications here. Here's what you'll find in Mac OS X's Apple menu:

About This Mac

This option pops open a window that supplies you with information about your Mac. Aside from telling you that you're running Mac OS X on your computer, the window shows you which version of Mac OS X is installed, how much memory you have, and the speed and type of processor in your computer. Clicking on the More Info button will launch the Apple System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities), which gives you a greater level of detail about your computer.

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Changes to Mac OS X from Mac OS 9

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There are many noticeable changes in the user interface from earlier versions of the Mac OS to Mac OS X, while others may not be so apparent. Two of the biggest changes from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X can be found in the Apple menu and the Control Panels.

The Apple menu, displayed as an apple symbol ( ) in the menu bar, is completely different. For Mac OS 9 users, the thing that will probably impact you most is that you can no longer store aliases for files, folders, or applications here. Here's what you'll find in Mac OS X's Apple menu:

About This Mac

This option pops open a window that supplies you with information about your Mac. Aside from telling you that you're running Mac OS X on your computer, the window shows you which version of Mac OS X is installed, how much memory you have, and the speed and type of processor in your computer. Clicking on the More Info button will launch the Apple System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities), which gives you a greater level of detail about your computer.

As mentioned in Chapter 1 and shown in Figure 1-8, clicking on the version number in the About This Mac window will reveal the build number of Mac OS X; clicking it again will show the hardware serial number for your computer. These small details are important to have when contacting Apple Customer Service and when reporting a probable bug.

In earlier versions of the Mac OS, the About box would change depending on which application was active. For information about the application, you now have to use the Application menu (located to the right of the Apple menu) and select the About option.

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What Is Classic?

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To help bridge the application gap between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, Apple has built a virtual machine that enables you to run older Mac software under Mac OS X in the Classic Environment, or just Classic. Classic is an emulator that looks and feels just like Mac OS 9, and, in fact, it is—just slightly watered down.

Classic allows you to run most older Mac applications on Mac OS X without requiring you to boot directly into Mac OS 9. The big difference is that Classic applications won't benefit from the features of Mac OS X, such as protected memory and its advanced printing capability. Meaning, if a Classic application crashes, it could bring down everything else running under Classic; just as a crash under Mac OS 9 could affect your entire system.

Additionally, some Control Panels ( → Control Panels), such as Control Strip, Memory, and Remote Access, are disabled. However, if you boot into Mac OS 9 instead of Mac OS X, you will be using a full version of the OS. See Section 3.8 later in this chapter for details on how to choose your Startup Disk.

If you want Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on separate partitions, you will need to partition your hard drive and reinstall both systems. In most cases, the biggest benefit to installing Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on separate partitions is being able to choose which version of the OS to boot at startup by holding down the Option key. Otherwise, you can choose which OS to boot using the Startup Disk Control Panel (Mac OS 9) or System Preferences → Startup Disk (Mac OS X).

At the time of this writing (January, 2003), Apple will reportedly make it impossible for you to boot into Mac OS 9. This would mean that the only way you will be able to run Mac OS 9 applications on new Macintosh computers will be via Classic.

Until all Mac applications are Mac OS X-compliant, you will need to install a version of Mac OS 9 (9.2.2, to be exact) if you want to run older Mac applications. Most new Apple hardware will ship with Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X preinstalled on the same disk partition. However, the boxed release of Mac OS X Jaguar doesn't include a copy of Mac OS 9. If you find yourself in need of Classic, you can probably find a copy of Mac OS 9 on eBay at

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Starting Classic

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When Classic is started, it doesn't actually boot Mac OS 9. Instead, it launches the Classic Startup process, found in /System/Library/CoreServices. In turn, the Classic Startup process looks for a Mac OS 9 system folder on the system. If one is found, Classic will start; if not, you will receive an error message, letting you know that Classic cannot be started because there isn't a valid Mac OS 9 system folder on your computer.

There are three ways to launch Classic:

Launch a Classic application

When you launch any Classic application (one of the three application flavors the Finder recognizes; see Chapter 2), Mac OS X will automatically start Classic if it isn't running already.

The Classic preferences panel

Go to System Preferences → Classic → Stop/Start, and click on the Start button to launch Classic.

The table view under "Select a system folder for Classic:" lists every disk or partition on the filesystem that holds a Mac OS 9 System Folder. (If you've gone the usual route of installing Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X on the same disk or partition, then you'll see just one choice here.)

Starting Classic when you log on

Select the checkbox next to "Start Classic when you login" to have the Classic environment launch automatically when you log in to your account.

Savvy Unix users will quickly see that there's a fourth way to launch Classic: from the command line. If you launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities), you can launch the Classic Startup process (Classic Startup.app) by switching directories to /System/Library/CoreServices and issuing either of the following commands:

% open Classic\ Startup.app

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Controlling Classic

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Classic's preference panel, shown in Figure 3-2, has three tabs, or panes, from which you can control its settings and monitor its activities. To launch the Classic preference panel, go to System Preferences → Classic.

Figure 3-2: The Classic preference panel

The three tabbed panes found in the Classic preference panel include:

Start/Stop

This pane, shown in Figure 3-2, provides controls for starting, stopping, restarting, and force-quitting Classic. A bolded message near the top of this pane will let you know whether or not Classic is running, and the text box below it will look for and display a valid Mac OS 9 System Folder.

Advanced

This pane, shown in Figure 3-3, gives you more granularity and control over how Classic will run on your system.

Figure 3-3: Classic's Advanced pane

The controls found in the Advanced pane include:

Startup Options

This pop-up menu can be used to specify whether Mac OS 9's extensions will be turned off by default, or whether to open the Extension Manager as Classic starts up, which allows you to select which extensions to load. A third item in this menu is "Use Key Combination," which lets you specify a keyboard shortcut (up to five characters) for stopping and restarting Classic.

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Managing Classic Applications

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Mac OS X's Finder manages your Classic applications just like any other; the only difference is that they are stored in /Applications (Mac OS 9), rather than /Applications. When Classic is running, you won't work with the old Mac OS 9 Finder; however, when a Classic application is running in the foreground, the menu bar changes to that of Mac OS 9. Similarly, the Dock provides space for the icons of Classic applications and even lets you keep them in the Dock.

You can easily identify a Classic application in the Dock, as its icon will have a Mac OS 9-style (32 × 32 pixel) icon, which will look "chunky" if viewed at a higher resolution.

As mentioned earlier, Mac OS 9 applications don't benefit from Mac OS X's protected memory space or its dynamic memory allocation. In Classic, a Mac OS 9 application is still a Mac OS 9 application, requiring you to assign memory the old way: via the Get Info window. Figure 3-5 shows the Get Info window for Mac OS 9's Script Editor (/Applications (Mac OS 9)/Apple Extras/AppleScript).

Figure 3-5: Mac OS 9's Script Editor's Info window, showing the Memory section

The Memory section of the Info window (available only for Classic applications) lists the following three items:

Suggested Size

This number represents the amount of RAM (in kilobytes) that the application's developers suggest to get optimum performance from the application. This number will always remain constant, and cannot be changed.

Minimum Size

This field holds the minimum amount of memory the application needs before it can launch.

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Using Classic Applications

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Classic is unlike other OS emulators in that the emulated applications, though running in their own separate environment, visually integrate with the Mac OS X workspace. You use the Finder and the Dock with Classic application icons just as you would with any other.

Some concessions do have to be made, however, because Classic applications don't know how to interact at all with the Aqua environment. (If they did, they would be true Carbon applications and wouldn't rely on Classic.) While we certainly won't cover everything about Mac OS 9 applications here, we will cover some of the more noticeable differences you'll have to work with.

As mentioned earlier, when a Classic application is running in the foreground, Mac OS X's menu bar is replaced with a Mac OS 9-style one, as shown in Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6: A typical Classic application's menu bar

Mac OS 9's menu bar is structurally quite different from Aqua's (which you'll see again as soon as you switch back to an Aqua application or click on the Desktop). Here's a brief rundown of what you'll find in Mac OS 9's menu bar:

• The rainbow-colored Apple menu contains the application's About box, as well as all the objects within /System Folder/Apple Menu Items on the Classic startup volume, including a path to Mac OS 9's Control Panels.
• Standard application menus, such as File, Edit, and Help. Note the lack of a Mac OS X-style application menu here.
• The only menu extra you'll see when in Classic mode is the Clock.
• The application menu, which is located to the right of the Clock. Mac OS 9's application menu is entirely different from the one you'll find in Mac OS X. This menu contains a list of all active applications (including Aqua ones, as shown in Figure 3-6), and options for hiding the current or other applications, as well as a Show All option to unhide any hidden applications. As such, it mixes some of the functionality of Mac OS X's application menu and Dock.

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Printing from Classic

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