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Mac OS X: The Missing Manual
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

By David Pogue

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Folders and Windows
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When you turn on a Mac with the latest version of Mac OS X, you'll know right away you're not in Kansas anymore. For the first time in the history of the Macintosh, no little smiling-Mac icon appears when you hit the power button. Instead, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, liquidy blue progress bar.
What happens next depends on whether you are the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or household.
  • If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in Appendix A, no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
  • If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list). Type your password if you're asked for it, and click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 11 offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.
Upon first starting up Mac OS X, most people emit (or manage to suppress) two successive gasps. The first is one of amazement, as the shimmering, three-dimensional Mac OS X desktop appears—a new world on an old machine (see Figure 1-2).
The second gasp is one of dismay, which comes upon closer examination of the strangely named folders and icons in the main hard drive window. Don't panic.
Most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of the elements made famous by the older Mac OS or Windows. The Mac OS X folder structure may be unfamiliar, but it's not hard to grasp. Here's a quick tour (see Figure 1-2).
If your desktop looks absolutely nothing like this—no menus, no icons, almost nothing on the Dock—then somebody in charge of your Mac has turned on
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Getting into Mac OS X
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When you turn on a Mac with the latest version of Mac OS X, you'll know right away you're not in Kansas anymore. For the first time in the history of the Macintosh, no little smiling-Mac icon appears when you hit the power button. Instead, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, liquidy blue progress bar.
What happens next depends on whether you are the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or household.
  • If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in Appendix A, no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
  • If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list). Type your password if you're asked for it, and click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 11 offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.
Upon first starting up Mac OS X, most people emit (or manage to suppress) two successive gasps. The first is one of amazement, as the shimmering, three-dimensional Mac OS X desktop appears—a new world on an old machine (see Figure 1-2).
The second gasp is one of dismay, which comes upon closer examination of the strangely named folders and icons in the main hard drive window. Don't panic.
Most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of the elements made famous by the older Mac OS or Windows. The Mac OS X folder structure may be unfamiliar, but it's not hard to grasp. Here's a quick tour (see Figure 1-2).
If your desktop looks absolutely nothing like this—no menus, no icons, almost nothing on the Dock—then somebody in charge of your Mac has turned on
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Windows and How to Work Them
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In designing Mac OS X, one of Apple's key goals was to address the window-proliferation problem. As you create more files, stash them in more folders, and launch more programs, it's easy to wind up paralyzed before a screen awash with cluttered, overlapping rectangles. Mac OS X offers some clever new tools for retaining control.
The title bar has several functions. First, when several windows are open, the darkened window name and light pinstripes tell you which window is active (in front); windows in the background appear dimmed, with translucent, slightly darker-striped title bars. Second, the pinstripes act as a handle that let you move the entire window around on the screen. That's a critical tool in Mac OS X, because you can no longer drag the other three edges of a window to move it.
Here's a nifty keyboard shortcut that debuted in Mac OS X 10.2: For the first time in Mac history, you can cycle through the different open windows in one program without using the mouse. Just press -~ (that is, the tilde key, to the left of the number 1 key). With each press, you bring a different window forward within the current program. It works both in the Finder and in your everyday programs.
(On the other hand, the -~ keystroke no longer summons the Go To Folder dialog box. The new keystroke for that is Shift- -G.)
After you've opened one folder that's inside another, the title bar's secret folder hierarchy menu is an efficient way to backtrack—to return to the enclosing window. Figure 1-3 reveals everything about the process after this key move: press the
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The Three Window Views
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You can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of three ways: as icons, as a single, tidy list, or in a series of neat columns. Figure 1-10 shows the three different views.
The status bar shows you disk-space information for the entire disk, but not how much disk space this particular window's contents occupy.
To find out that piece of information, make sure that no icon in the window is highlighted. Then choose File→Show Info (or press -I). The resulting Info window, which is described in more detail at the end of the next chapter, shows the size of the folder or disk whose window you're browsing, along with other useful statistics.
Every window remembers its view settings independently. You might prefer to look over your Applications folder in list view (because it's crammed with files and folders), but you may prefer to view the less populated Users folder in icon view, where the larger icons are easier to double-click.
To switch a window from one view to another, just click one of the three corresponding icons in the window's toolbar, as shown in Figure 1-10.
If you've hidden the toolbar, you can also switch views by choosing View→as Icons (or View→as Columns, or View→as List).
In any view (icon, list, or column), you can highlight an icon by typing the first couple letters of its name. In icon or list view, you can also press Tab to highlight the next icon (in alphabetical order), or Shift-Tab to highlight the previous one.
Figure 1-10: From top: The same window in icon view, list view, and column view. Very full folders are best navigated in list or column views, but you may prefer to view emptier folders in icon view, because larger icons are easier to click. Note to Mac OS 9 fans: Button view no longer exists in Mac OS X—or, rather, has turned into the Dock.
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Icon View
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In an icon view, every file, folder, and disk is represented by a small picture—an icon. This humble image, a visual representation of electronic bits and bytes, is the cornerstone of the entire Macintosh religion. (Maybe that's why it's called an icon.)
Mac OS X 10.2 introduced some of the most important icon-view options in Macintosh history. All of them are worth exploring. Start by opening any icon-view window, then choose View→Show View Options.

Section 1.4.1.1: Choosing icon sizes

Mac OS X draws the little pictures that represent your icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you (or the Mac) can scale them to almost any size without losing any quality or smoothness. You can specify a new icon size either for a single window or for every icon view window on your machine.
In the View→Show View Options window (Figure 1-12), complete with an Icon Size slider. Click one of the buttons at the top of the window, either "This window only" or "All windows," to indicate whether you want to change the icon sizes in just the frontmost window or everywhere on the Mac. Finally, drag the Icon Size slider back and forth until you find an icon size you like. (For added fun, make little cartoon sounds with your mouth.)
Figure 1-11: Mac OS X lets you choose an icon size to suit your personality. For picture folders, it can often be very handy to pick a jumbo size, in effect creating a slide-sorter "light table" effect. Just use the slider in the View Options dialog box, shown in Figure 1-12.

Section 1.4.1.2: Text size

Ring the bells! Fire the cannons! At last, Mac OS X fans can control the type size of icon names in the Finder!
In fact, if you choose "This window only" at the top of the palette, you can actually specify a different type size for
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List View
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In windows that contain a lot of icons, the list view is a powerful weapon in the battle against chaos. It shows you a tidy table of your files' names, dates, sizes, and so on.
All of the usual file-manipulation tips apply in list view. For example, double- clicking a folder doesn't open a new window (unless you're also pressing the key). Instead, the contents of the folder you double-clicked replace the contents of the window, as described in Section 1.2.7.
You have complete control over your columns. You get to decide how wide they should be, which of them should appear, and in which order (except that Name is always the first column). Here's how to master these columns:
Most of the world's list view fans like their files listed alphabetically. It's occasionally useful, however, to view the newest files first, largest first, or whatever.
When a desktop window displays its icons in a list view, a convenient new strip of column headings appears (Figure 1-15). The column headings aren't just signposts; they're buttons, too. Click Name for alphabetical order, Date Modified to view newest first, Size to view largest files at the top, and so on. (You can no longer perform the same function using commands in the View menu or by Control-clicking inside a window, as you could in Mac OS 9.)
It's especially important to note the tiny, dark gray triangle that appears in the column you've most recently clicked (Figure 1-15). It shows you which way the list is being sorted.
Figure 1-15: You control the sorting order of a list view by clicking the column headings (left). Click a second time to reverse the sorting order (right). You'll find the identical triangle, indicating the identical information, in email programs, in Sherlock (Chapter 20), and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of the list can be useful.
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Column View
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Icon view and list view should certainly be familiar to anyone who's used a personal computer before. But for most Mac fans, column view is something new—and welcome.
The goal is simple: To create a means of burrowing down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.
The solution is shown in Figure 1-19. It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane shows all the icons of your disks, including your main hard drive. (The Network icon gives you access to other computers on your office network, if you have one.)
When you click a disk (once), the second pane shows a list of all the folders in it. Each time you click a folder in one pane, the pane to its right shows what's inside. The other panes slide to the left, sometimes out of view. (Use the horizontal scroll bar or the Shift-Tab keystroke to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you're actually looking at the file icons inside the most deeply nested folder.
If you discover that your hunt for a particular file has taken you down a blind alley, it's not a big deal to backtrack, since the trail of folders you've followed to get here is still sitting there before you on the screen. As soon as you click a different folder in one of the earlier panes, the panes to its right suddenly change, so that you can burrow down a different rabbit hole.
The beauty of column view is, first of all, that it keeps your screen tidy. It effectively shows you several simultaneous folder levels, but contains them within a single window. With a quick -W, you can close the entire window, panes and all. Second, column view provides an excellent sense of where you are. Because your trail is visible at all times, it's much harder to get lost, wondering what folder you're in and how you got there, than in any other window view.
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Logging Out, Shutting Down
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If you're the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.
Apple clearly expects its customers not to shut down their machines between sessions; the company has gone to great lengths to make doing so inconvenient. (For example, pressing the Power button on most Mac models no longer offers you the option to shut down.)
That's OK. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep:
  • Choose →Sleep.
  • Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12, if you don't have an Eject key). In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-21, click Sleep (or type S).
  • Press the Power button on your machine. On many current models, doing so makes it sleep immediately.
  • Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver system preference described in Section 8.10 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.
Sometimes a Unix tentacle pokes through the user-friendly Aqua interface. Every now and then, you find a place where you can use Unix shortcuts instead of the mouse.
One classic example is the Go→Go to Folder command (Shift- -G; the keystroke changed Mac in OS X 10.2). It brings up a box like the one shown here.
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Getting Help in Mac OS X
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It's a good thing you've got a book about Mac OS X in your hands, because you certainly won't get much help from Apple.
Balloon Help is gone from Mac OS X. So is Apple Guide. What's left is the standard Help→Mac Help command, which you can also summon by pressing -?. You get a Web browser-like program that reads help files in your System folder→Libraries folder (see Figure 1-22).
Figure 1-22: The "drawer" at the right side shows the master list of help topics—AirPort Help, AppleScript Help, and so on—of which Mac Help is only one category. In other words, you can actually read the help screens for a program that you haven't yet launched. (Click the Help Center icon to hide or show the "drawer.")
You're expected to find the topic you want in one of these two ways:
  • Use the Ask blank. Type the phrase you want, such as printing or switching applications, into the blank at the top of the window, and then press Return.
    The Mac responds by showing you a list of help-screen topics that may pertain to what you need (see Figure 1-23).
  • Drill down. The starting screen offers several "quick click" topics that may interest you. If so, keep clicking blue underlined links until you find a topic that you want to read.
    As with the Search method, you can backtrack by clicking the Back (left-arrow) button at the bottom of the "browser" window.
Unfortunately, not very many actual Help screens are stored on the Mac itself; often, you'll have to connect to the Internet just to read a help topic. It's not always worth doing, considering the sparse, unhelpful results.
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Chapter 2: Organizing Your Stuff
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If you're used to older versions of the Mac OS, switching to Mac OS X means having to unlearn one deeply ingrained habit right away: double-clicking your hard drive icon to get started for the day.
If you do double-click that icon, you'll find folders called Applications, Library, and Users—folders you didn't put there. (If you upgraded an existing Mac to Mac OS X, you'll also see all your original hard drive folders nestled among them.)
Most of these new folders aren't very useful to you, the Mac's human companion. They're there for Mac OS X's own use. Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, to be accessed only occasionally for administrative purposes. (No wonder that in early versions of Mac OS X, Apple didn't put your hard drive icon on the desktop at all. The truth is, double-clicking it gains you very little.)
Instead of setting up your nest—your files, folders, aliases, and so on—in the hard drive window, from now on you'll set it up in your Home folder. That's a folder bearing your name (or whatever name you typed when you installed Mac OS X).
One way to find it is to double-click the Users folder, and then double-click the folder inside it that bears your name and looks like a house (see Figure 2-1). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.
Mac OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder.
  • Choose Go→Home.
  • Press Shift- -H.
  • Click the Home icon (the little house) on the toolbar.
  • Click the Home icon on the Dock. (If you don't see one, consult Section 3.2 for instructions on how to put one there.)
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The Mac OS X Folder Structure
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If you're used to older versions of the Mac OS, switching to Mac OS X means having to unlearn one deeply ingrained habit right away: double-clicking your hard drive icon to get started for the day.
If you do double-click that icon, you'll find folders called Applications, Library, and Users—folders you didn't put there. (If you upgraded an existing Mac to Mac OS X, you'll also see all your original hard drive folders nestled among them.)
Most of these new folders aren't very useful to you, the Mac's human companion. They're there for Mac OS X's own use. Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, to be accessed only occasionally for administrative purposes. (No wonder that in early versions of Mac OS X, Apple didn't put your hard drive icon on the desktop at all. The truth is, double-clicking it gains you very little.)
Instead of setting up your nest—your files, folders, aliases, and so on—in the hard drive window, from now on you'll set it up in your Home folder. That's a folder bearing your name (or whatever name you typed when you installed Mac OS X).
One way to find it is to double-click the Users folder, and then double-click the folder inside it that bears your name and looks like a house (see Figure 2-1). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.
Mac OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder.
  • Choose Go→Home.
  • Press Shift- -H.
  • Click the Home icon (the little house) on the toolbar.
  • Click the Home icon on the Dock. (If you don't see one, consult Section 3.2 for instructions on how to put one there.)
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Icon Names
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Every document, program, folder, and disk on your Mac is represented by an icon: a colorful little picture that you can move, copy, or double-click to open. In Mac OS X, icons look more like photos than cartoons, and you can scale them to any size (Section 1.4).
Hey, in Mac OS 9, I could print a Finder window. I'd get a neat list of the files, which I could use as a label for a CD I was going to burn, or something. How do I print a Finder window in Mac OS X?
You've heard the expression, "This dog don't hunt"? Well, this Finder don't print.
Still, it's easy enough to make a list of files for printing. Once the window is open on your screen, choose Edit→Select All. Choose Edit→Copy. Now switch to a word processor (or TextEdit) and paste. You get a tidy list of all the files in that window, ready to format and print.
This simple file name list still isn't the same as printing a window, that's true; you don't get the status bar showing how many items are on the disk, and how full the disk is. For that purpose, you can always make a screenshot of the window (Section 13.10), and print that.
Of course, that technique's no good if the list of files is taller than the window itself.
Really, what you want is Print Window, a handy shareware program dedicated to printing out your Finder windows, without any of these workarounds or limitations. You can download it from www.missingmanuals.com.
A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 256 letters and spaces. If you're accustomed to the 31-character limit of Mac OS 9, that's quite a luxurious ceiling.
If you're used to Windows, you may be delighted to discover that in Mac OS X, you can name your files using letters, numbers, punctuation—in fact, any symbol you want except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes.
Another naming restriction: You can't use a period or a slash to
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Selecting Icons
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To highlight a single icon in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once with the mouse. (In a list or column view, as described in Chapter 1, you can also click on any visible piece of information about that file—its size, kind, date modified, and so on.) The icon darkens, and its name turns blue (or whichever color you've chosen, as described in Section 8.11).
Hey, what's the deal with long file names? I thought this was the big deal in Mac OS X! But I tried saving an AppleWorks document, and it didn't let me use more than 31 letters!
It's true that you can assign a very long name to a file in the Finder. But you may soon discover that pre-Mac OS X programs, and even programs that have been rewritten (Carbonized) to run in Mac OS X, still limit you to 31 letters when naming a new document in the Save As dialog box.
Over time, software companies may get with the program and rejigger their software to overcome this anachronistic glitch. For now, though, all is not lost.
Even though you can use only 31 letters when saving a new document from, say, AppleWorks or Internet Explorer, you're welcome to rename the file in the Finder, using all 256 characters Mac OS X permits. When you reopen the document in the original program, you'll see an abbreviated name in the title bar (a file that, at the desktop, is called My Visit to Bill Gates's House, and Why I'll Take the Apple Bumper Sticker Off my Car Next Time opens into AppleWorks as something like My Visit to Bill Gates's H#B6C5).
The good news is that behind the scenes, Mac OS X still remembers its long name. Even if you edit and re-save the document, you'll still find its long file name intact when you view its icon on the desktop.
That much may seem obvious. But most first-time Mac users have no idea how to manipulate more than one icon at a time—an essential survival skill in a graphic interface like the Mac's.
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Moving and Copying Icons
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In Mac OS X, there are two ways to move or copy icons from one place to another: by dragging them, or by using the Copy and Paste commands.
You can drag icons from one folder to another, from one drive to another, from a drive to a folder on another drive, and so on. (When you've selected several icons, drag any one of them; the others tag along.) While the Mac is copying, you can tell that the process is still under way even if the progress bar is hidden behind a window, because the icon of the copied material shows up dimmed in its new home, darkening up only when the copying process is over. You can cancel the copying process by pressing either -period or the Esc key.
If you're copying files into a disk or folder that already contains items with the same names, Mac OS X asks you individually about each one. ("An older item named "Fiddlesticks" with extension '.doc' already exists in this location.") Note that, thank heaven, Mac OS X 10.2 tells you whether or not the version you're replacing is older or newer than the one you're moving. (Versions 10.0 and 10.1 didn't.)
Click Replace or Don't Replace, as you see fit, or Stop to halt the whole copying business.
For the speed fanatic, using the mouse to click an icon is a hopeless waste of time. Fortunately, you can also select an icon by typing the first couple letters of its name.
When looking at your home window, for example, you can type M to highlight the Movies folder. And if you actually intended to highlight the Music folder instead, press the Tab key to highlight the next icon in the window alphabetically. Shift-Tab highlights the previous icon alphabetically. Or use the arrow keys to highlight a neighboring icon.
(In Mac OS X 10.2, the Tab-key trick works only in icon and list views. It no longer works in column view, alas.)
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Aliases: Icons in Two Places at Once
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Highlighting an icon and then choosing File→Make Alias (or pressing -L), generates an alias, a specially branded duplicate of the original icon (see Figure 2-7). It's not a duplicate of the file—just of the icon; therefore it requires negligible storage space. When you double-click the alias, the original file opens. Because you can create as many aliases as you want of a single file, aliases let you, in effect, stash that file in many different folder locations simultaneously. Double-click any one of them, and you open the original icon, wherever it may be on your system.
You don't have to be content with the icons provided by Microsoft, Apple, and whoever else wrote your software. You can paste new icons onto your file, disk, and folder icons to help you pick them out at a glance.
The easiest way to replace an icon is to copy it from another icon. To do so, highlight the icon, choose File→Get Info, click the existing icon in the resulting window, and then choose Edit→Copy. (Close the Info window, if you like.)
Now click the icon to which you want the copied picture transferred. Once again, choose File→Get Info. Click the icon in the dialog box and this time choose Edit→Paste.
If you'd rather introduce all-new icons, you're welcome to steal some of the beautifully designed ones at www.iconfactory.com and the icon sites linked to it. Once you've downloaded these special icon files, you can copy their images from the Get Info window exactly as you would any icon.
To design a Mac OS X icon from scratch, you could, of course, use a graphics program like Photoshop, the painting module of AppleWorks, or shareware like GraphicConverter. (Remember to make your new icons 128 pixels square.) But sooner or later, you'll want to finish up in Iconographer (available at www.missingmanuals.com), which saves the result in the
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Favorites
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After years of watching Microsoft pilfer great ideas from the Mac OS, Apple decided that two could play that game—and it stole a feature right back. The File→Add to Favorites command ( -T) places the names of icons you've highlighted into the Go→Favorites command, as shown in Figure 2-8. The Favorites scheme, therefore, is yet another mechanism that lists your favorite files, folders, programs, disks, and even network-accessible folders for quick access—much like the Dock.
Figure 2-8: Suppose there's a program or document to which you'd like quick access. Highlight its icon (top) and choose File→Add to Favorites (or press -T). From now on, that item will appear in your Go→Favorites submenu (bottom).
Nor is the Go menu the only place Favorites are listed. You'll also see your personal Favorites list show up whenever you open or save a file, or click the Favorites icon on your Finder toolbar.
This feature relies on a special folder inside your Home→Library folder called, reasonably enough, Favorites. Every time you use the Add to Favorites command, the Mac puts an alias of the highlighted icon into this Favorites folder. (If you share your Mac, nobody else sees your Favorites. Mac OS X keeps track of each person's Favorites folder independently.)
This behind-the-scenes transaction is worth knowing about, if only because it offers the sole method of removing or renaming something from the Go→Favorites listing. That is, choose Go→Favorites→Go To Favorites (or press Shift- -F) to open the Favorites window; throw away or rename any of the aliases in it; and then close the window. The Go
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The Trash
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No single element of the Macintosh interface is as recognizable or famous as the Trash can, which now appears at the end of the Dock.
You can discard almost any icon by dragging it onto the Trash icon (which looks more like a wastebasket than a trash can, but let's not quibble). When the tip of your arrow cursor touches the Trash icon, the little wastebasket turns black. When you release the mouse, you're well on your way to discarding whatever it was you dragged. As a convenience, Mac OS X even replaces the empty-wastebasket icon with a wastebasket-filled-with-crumpled-up-papers icon, to let you know there's something in there.
Learn the keyboard alternative to dragging something to the Trash: highlight the icon and then press -Delete. This technique is not only far faster than dragging, but requires far less precision, especially if you have a large screen. Mac OS X does all the Trash-targeting for you.
File and folder icons sit in the Trash forever—or until you choose Finder→Empty Trash, whichever comes first.
If you haven't yet emptied the Trash, you can open its window by clicking the wastebasket icon once. Now you can review its contents: icons that you've placed on the waiting list for extinction. If you change your mind, you can rescue any of these items by dragging them out of the Trash window.
If dragging something to the Trash was the last thing you did, you can press -Z—the keyboard shortcut of the Edit→Undo command. This not only removes it from the Trash, but also returns it to the folder from whence it came. This trick works even if the Trash window isn't open.
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Get Info
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By clicking an icon and then choosing File→Get Info, you open an important window like the one shown in Figure 2-10. It's a collapsible, multi-panel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. For example:
  • For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.
  • For a document icon, you see when it was created and modified, and what programs it "belongs" to.
  • For an alias, you learn the location of the actual icon it refers to.
  • If you open the Get Info window when nothing is selected, you get information about the desktop itself, including the amount of disk space consumed by everything sitting on it.
  • If you highlight a gaggle of icons all at once, the Get Info window shows you precisely how many you highlighted, breaks it down by type ("23 documents, 3 folders," for example), and adds up the total of their file sizes. This is a great opportunity to change certain file characteristics on numerous files simultaneously, such as locking or unlocking them, hiding or showing their file name extensions (Section 4.3.3), changing their ownership or permissions (Section 11.4), and so on.
In Mac OS X versions 10.0 and 10.1, a single Info window remained on the screen all the time as you clicked one icon after another. (Furthermore, the command was called Show Info instead of Get Info. Evidently "Show Info" sounded too much like it was the playbill for a Broadway musical.)
Figure 2-10: Top: The Get Info window appears at first like this, with the information panels "collapsed." Bottom: Click each flippy triangle to open its corresponding panel of information. The resulting dialog box can easily grow taller than your screen (it's shown here split in half because the book isn't tall enough). That's a good argument for either (a) closing the panels you don't need at any given moment or (b) running out to buy a really gigantic monitor.
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Finding Files 1: The Search Bar
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In Mac OS X 10.2, Apple has radically redesigned the way you hunt down lost files and folders. In fact, you now have two different search tools—and neither one is Sherlock, the trusty file-finding tool of Mac OS 9.
The first one, the Search bar (Figure 2-11), is especially convenient because you can opt to have it appear at the top of every Finder window, all the time, ever ready to help you ferret out a stray icon. After 18 years, the Finder's name is finally justified.
If you don't see this little round-ended box at the top of every Find window, then check these conditions, all of which are described in the Finder toolbar discussion beginning in Section 3.4:
  • Your Finder toolbar must, in fact, be visible (see Section 3.4.1).
  • The window must be wide enough to reveal the Search bar.
  • The Search bar must be on the toolbar to begin with (Section 3.4.2).
If all is well, and the Search bar is staring you in the face, here's how to use it.
  1. Open the window you want to search. Click inside the Search bar.
    (Unfortunately, there's no keystroke to make your insertion point jump into the bar.)
    You're about to search in this window and all folders inside it. In other words, the window you open now will define the uncrossable borders for your little Jaguar search elves.
    There's nothing to stop you from opening your Home folder, or even the hard drive window itself, and using the Search bar to search your entire Mac.
  2. Type a few letters of the file or folder name you're seeking.
    For example, if you're trying to find a file called Poké;mon Fantasy League.doc, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice.
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Finding Files 2: The Find Program
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The Search bar is simple, fast, and above all, convenient. It's always there, happy to serve you, no matter what Finder window you're in.
It's not, however, the most powerful search program on earth. It searches only for icons' names, not their sizes, dates, and so on. And it can't look for words inside your files.
There is a program that can perform these more complex searches, though; in fact, no modern self-respecting operating system would be without it. But here's a bit of news that may shock veteran Mac and Windows users: In Mac OS X 10.2, you don't search your own machine using the same program you use to search the Web. (Heresy! Scandal! Sacrilege!)
Actually, it's a move to be applauded. Over the years, be-all, end-all search programs like Apple's Sherlock and Microsoft's Search Assistant had become slow, sluggish, ungainly creatures that didn't do either job especially well. In Mac OS X 10.2, you use one program just for finding files on your Mac, and a different one (Sherlock 3) to search the Internet. (More on Sherlock in Chapter 21.)
To meet the new file-finding tool, choose File→Find (or press -F). The shockingly simple dialog box shown in Figure 2-13 appears next.
As you'll soon discover, the Find program can hunt down icons using extremely specific criteria. If you spent enough time setting up the search, you could actually use this program to find a document whose name begins with the letters Cro, is over one megabyte in size, was created after 8/1/02 but before the end of the year, was changed within the last week, has the file name suffix .doc, and contains the phrase "attitude adjustment." (Of course, if you knew that much about a file, you'd probably know exactly where it is, too, without having to use the Find program. But you get the picture.)
To use the Find program, you need to feed it two pieces of information: where you want it to search, and
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Chapter 3: Dock, Desktop, and Toolbar
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You can't help reacting, one way or another, to the futuristic, sleek, cool looks of Mac OS X the first time you arrive at its desktop. When you stop to think about it, though, the environment owes most of its different, photo-realistic looks to three key elements: the Dock at the bottom edge of the screen, the toolbar at the top of every Finder window, and the shimmering, sometimes animated backdrop of the desktop itself. This chapter shows you how to use and control these most dramatic elements of Mac OS X.
In the old days, the optimists saw the doughnut, and the pessimists saw the hole.
If you're a Mac fan, the debate doesn't concern the doughnut so much as the Dock. This strip of icons at the bottom of the Mac OS X desktop combines the functions of what Mac fans once knew as the Application menu, menu, Launcher, Control Strip, and pop-up windows—all in a single new onscreen gadget. (If you're a former Windows user, the Dock is less of a shock, because some of its functions resemble the Windows taskbar.)
The pessimist thinks that's ridiculous. "You've just combined the Launcher function, which stores unopened programs until you need them, with the Application menu function, which is supposed to show you which programs are currently running."
The optimist says, "Well, yeah—isn't that great?"
Apple's thinking goes like this: Why must you know whether or not a program is already running? That's the computer's problem, not yours. In an ideal world, this distinction should be irrelevant. A program should appear when you click its icon, whether it's open or not—just as on a PalmPilot, for example.
"Which programs are open" already approaches unimportance in Mac OS X, where sophisticated memory-management features make it hard to run out of memory. You can open dozens of programs at once in Mac OS X, since the limiting factor is no longer how much memory you have, but how much unused hard drive space there is.
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The Dock
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In the old days, the optimists saw the doughnut, and the pessimists saw the hole.
If you're a Mac fan, the debate doesn't concern the doughnut so much as the Dock. This strip of icons at the bottom of the Mac OS X desktop combines the functions of what Mac fans once knew as the Application menu, menu, Launcher, Control Strip, and pop-up windows—all in a single new onscreen gadget. (If you're a former Windows user, the Dock is less of a shock, because some of its functions resemble the Windows taskbar.)
The pessimist thinks that's ridiculous. "You've just combined the Launcher function, which stores unopened programs until you need them, with the Application menu function, which is supposed to show you which programs are currently running."
The optimist says, "Well, yeah—isn't that great?"
Apple's thinking goes like this: Why must you know whether or not a program is already running? That's the computer's problem, not yours. In an ideal world, this distinction should be irrelevant. A program should appear when you click its icon, whether it's open or not—just as on a PalmPilot, for example.
"Which programs are open" already approaches unimportance in Mac OS X, where sophisticated memory-management features make it hard to run out of memory. You can open dozens of programs at once in Mac OS X, since the limiting factor is no longer how much memory you have, but how much unused hard drive space there is.
And that's why the Dock combines the launcher and status functions of a modern operating system. Only a tiny triangle beneath a program's icon tells you that it's open. Icons no longer appear dark and hollow in Mac OS X when they're running, as they did in previous systems.
In any case, the Dock is a core element of Mac OS X, and it's here to stay. Whether or not you agree with Apple's philosophy, Apple has made it as easy as possible to learn to like the Dock. You can customize the thing to within an inch of its life, or even get rid of it completely. This section explains everything you need to know.
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Setting Up the Dock
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Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you'll enjoy: QuickTime Player, iTunes, iChat, and so on. But using your Mac without putting your own favorite icons on the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the Dock your own.
The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it (Figure 3-1) is installed there as a large, square button. A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, and programs that you access frequently.
You can install batches of icons onto the Dock all at once—just drag them as a group.
Figure 3-1: To add an icon to the Dock, just drag it there. You haven't actually moved the original file; when you release the mouse, it remains exactly where it was. You've just installed a pointer—like a Macintosh alias or Windows shortcut, you might say.
Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:
  • It has two sides. See the fine dark line running down the Dock in Figure 3-1? That's the divider. Everything on the left side is an application—a program. Everything else goes on the right side: files, documents, folders, and disks.
    It's important to understand this division. If you try to drag an application to the right of the black line, for example, Mac OS X will teasingly refuse to accept it. (Even aliases observe that distinction. Aliases of applications can go only on the left side, for example.)
  • Its icon names are hidden. To see the name of a Dock icon, just point to it without clicking. You'll see the name appear just above the icon.
    When you're trying to find a certain icon on the Dock, run your cursor slowly across the icons without clicking; the icon labels appear as you go. Better yet, you can sometimes tell documents apart by looking solely at their icons, as shown in Living Icons.
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Using the Dock
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Most of the time, you'll use the Dock as either a launcher (click an icon once to open the corresponding program, file, folder, or disk) or as a status indicator (the tiny black triangles, identified in Figure 3-1, indicate which programs are running).
But the Dock has more tricks than that up its sleeve. You can use it, for example, to pull off any of the following stunts.
In some ways, the Dock is exactly like the torn-off Application menu of Mac OS 9. For example, it lets you:
  • Jump among your open programs by clicking their icons.
  • Jump among your open programs by pressing -Tab. (That keystroke highlights successive icons on the Dock from left to right. Add the Shift key to move backwards—right to left—across the Dock.)
  • -drag a document (such as a text file) onto a Dock application button (such as the Microsoft Word icon) to open the former with the latter.
  • Hide all windows of the program you're in by Option-clicking another Dock icon.
This is just a quick summary of the Dock's application-management functions; you'll find the full details in Chapter 4.
If you turn on the amazing Mac OS X feature called full keyboard access, you can operate the Dock entirely from the keyboard; see Section 4.4.
Don't get so enamored of single-clicking the Dock icons that you miss this one. It turns out that if you Control-click a Dock icon—or, if you're in no hurry, hold down the mouse button on it—a hidden menu sprouts out of it (Figure 3-5).
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The Finder Toolbar
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At the top of every Finder window is a row of navigation and function icons. One click on any of these icons takes you directly to the corresponding disk or folder, or triggers the corresponding command.
The first time you run Mac OS X, for example, you'll find these icons on the toolbar:
  • Back, Forward. As you've probably noticed, the Mac OS X Finder works something like a Web browser. Only a single window remains open as you navigate the various folders on your hard drive.
    The Back button returns you to whichever folder you were just looking at. (Instead of clicking Back, you can also press -[, or choose Go→Back—particularly handy if the toolbar is hidden, as described on the next page.)
    The Forward button, new to 10.2, springs to life only after you've used the Back button. Clicking it (or pressing -]) returns you to the window you just backed out of.
  • View controls. The three tiny buttons next to the Forward button switch the current window into icon, list, or column view, respectively (Section 1.3). And remember, if the toolbar is hidden, you can get by with the equivalent commands in the View menu at the top of the screen—or by pressing -1, -2, or
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Designing Your Desktop
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In some ways, just buying a Macintosh was a renegade act of self-expression. But that's only the beginning. Now it's time to fashion the computer screen itself according to your personal sense of design and fashion.
How do I change the fonts used by the Mac OS X Finder?
In Mac OS versions gone by, you could choose any font you liked for your icon labels. You even had a choice of several fonts for use in your menus.
At least in Mac OS X 10.2, that flexibility is gone. You get Lucida Grande in your menus and as icon labels, love it or leave it. As noted in Section 1.4, you can change the type size—just not the font.
For now, Apple intends to remain conservative with the look of Mac OS X—both for "branding" reasons (to make Mac OS X instantly recognizable) and for technical ones (to make sure that it doesn't open a Pandora's box of interface hacks who wind up destabilizing the machine).
Cosmetically speaking, Mac OS X offers two dramatic full-screen features: desktop backgrounds and screen savers. (That's not counting the pictures and colors you can apply to individual folder windows, as described in Section 1.4.1.)
The command center for both of these functions is the System Preferences program (which longtime Mac and Windows fans may recognize as the former Control Panels). Open it by clicking the System Preferences icon on the Dock, or by choosing its name from the menu.
When the System Preferences program opens, you can choose a desktop picture by clicking the Desktop button, or a screen saver by clicking the Screen Saver button. For further details on these System Preferences modules, see Chapter 8.
One of the earliest objections to the lively, brightly colored look of Mac OS X came from Apple's core constituency: artists and graphic designers. Some complained that Mac OS X's bright blues (of scroll bar handles, progress bars, the
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Menulets: The Missing Manual
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