Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell

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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 IV.

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 turn on your Mac (or restart it), it takes a minute or so for the system to start up. During this time, various processes and services are started before the user is presented with a login window. Unix veterans are used to seeing the startup phase displayed as a cascade of text messages spilling down the screen, but Mac OS X hides all this information behind a plain white screen with a gray Apple logo on it.

You can see all that startup text if you really want to, by booting into single-user mode (hold down

-S as your Mac starts up). 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 can also view some of the machine's startup messages after the fact by looking at the file /var/log/system.log; only users with admin privileges can read this file.

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When you turn on your Mac (or restart it), it takes a minute or so for the system to start up. During this time, various processes and services are started before the user is presented with a login window. Unix veterans are used to seeing the startup phase displayed as a cascade of text messages spilling down the screen, but Mac OS X hides all this information behind a plain white screen with a gray Apple logo on it.

You can see all that startup text if you really want to, by booting into single-user mode (hold down

-S as your Mac starts up). 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 can also view some of the machine's startup messages after the fact by looking at the file /var/log/system.log; only users with admin privileges can read this file.

Eventually the system either settles on the login screen or logs in a specific user, depending upon the machine's configuration (System Preferences→Accounts→Login Options). If presented with a login screen, you need to provide your username (either by choosing it from a list or typing your username into a text field) and password.

Once you've successfully logged in, Mac OS X loads your user account and presents you with your Desktop using the settings you've provided in System Preferences. You are now in your Home folder.

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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For most users, starting and shutting down your Mac is fairly routine: press the Power-On button to start, and go to

→Shut Down to turn off the machine at night. But there are times when you need to do more, for whatever reason. Table 1-1 lists some of the additional keys you can use when starting, restarting, logging out, and shutting down your system.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts listed in Table 1-1 work only on newer hardware. If you are using an older Mac, these keyboard shortcuts might not work.

Table 1-1: Keyboard shortcuts to start, restart, log out, and shut down
Key command	Description
C	Holding down the C key at startup boots from a CD (useful when installing or upgrading the system software).
N	Attempts to start up from a NetBoot server.
R	Resets the display for a PowerBook.
T	Holding down the T key at startup places your Mac into Target Mode as a mountable FireWire drive. After starting up, your screen will have a blue background with a floating yellow FireWire symbol. Target mode makes the hard drive(s) of your Mac appear as mounted FireWire drives when connected to another system.

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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 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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Regardless of which application you use, 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 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, these menus and items can be found in the menu bar:

The Apple menu (see Section 1.4.3)
The Application menu (see Section 1.4.4)
A default set of application menus (see Section 1.4.5)
Menu extras (see Section 1.4.6)
The Accounts menu (see Section 1.4.7)

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 "The Dock." For example, let's say you're browsing the Web with Safari (the active application) and have Mail running in the background (inactive). When new mail arrives, Mail alerts you by playing a sound and by placing a small red dot on its icon in the Dock with a number inside to let you know how many new messages you have. To see what those new messages are, you click on Mail's icon in the Dock to bring Mail forward, thus making it the active application and relegating Safari to the background.

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You can also cycle forward through active applications by pressing

-Tab from within any application. This opens the Application Switcher, shown in Figure 1-20, which lists the applications currently running on your Mac.

Figure 1-20: The Application Switcher

In earlier versions of Mac OS X,

-Tab (and Shift-

-Tab) cycled through active application icons in the Dock, highlighting them as you hit the Tab key.

To select an application in the Application Switcher, hold down the Command key and press the Tab key until the application you want to use is highlighted; then release the Command key to bring that application forward. If you hold down Shift-

and press Tab, you will cycle backward through the active applications.

You can also use the mouse in combination with the Application Switcher. For instance, you can use

-Tab to bring the Application Switcher into view, and then use the mouse to click on one of the application icons in the screen. When you click on an icon in the Application Switcher, that application comes to the foreground, and the Switcher fades away.

To toggle back and forth between the same two applications, press Command and Tab briefly and let go. When you don't hold the keys down, you'll be switched to the previously used application. Pressing them again brings you back to the other one.

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Another new feature added to Mac OS X Panther started out as a little system hack and eventually got pulled into Mac OS X as something called Exposé. If you've ever wished for a quick way to get at your Desktop or just the windows for a single application, Exposé (shown in Figure 1-21) is your answer.

Figure 1-21: Exposé in action

Exposé runs in the background and is configurable through its preferences panel (System Preferences→Exposé). The default keyboard shortcuts for Exposé are:

F9: Spreads out all windows so they're viewable on the Desktop.
F10: Separates just the active application's windows so they're viewable on the Desktop.
F11: Clears all windows from the Desktop so you can see what's there.

After using one of Exposé's keyboard shortcuts, you can either click on the window you'd like to bring forward or use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around; to select a window, hit the Return key.

Using Exposé's preference panel, you can configure Hot Corners to perform the actions of the function keys, or you can change the default key settings to something more convenient.

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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 1-22 shows, the Dock can contain many different kinds of icons, several of which are described in the list that follows.

Figure 1-22: The Dock

The Finder icon
Application icons
An active application
An inactive application
The Divider
Folders that have been placed in the Dock
A Quick Link
Minimized windows
The Trash icon

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 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).

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Windows in Mac OS X have an entirely different set of controls than those from earlier versions of the Mac OS. Controls for closing, minimizing, and zooming a window to a larger size are all grouped together at the left edge of a window's title bar, and the dialog windows, alerts, and sheets have changed as well.

This section introduces you to the basic features and types of windows you'll encounter while using Mac OS X.

Each window has a set of common controls, as shown in Figure 1-29.

Figure 1-29: Common window controls

The controls are listed as follows:

Close button (red)
Minimize button (yellow)
Zoom button (green)
Proxy icon
Filename
Toolbar button (not available on all windows)
Scrollbars and scroll arrows
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 changes 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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As mentioned earlier, all Open and Save dialogs in Mac OS X Panther use features of the Finder's user interface, making it easy to navigate through the filesystem until you find the folder or file you're seeking. This section discusses the Open and Save dialogs in more detail, showing you how to find what you're looking for on your Mac.

The Open dialog, shown in Figure 1-33, is very similar to the Finder. The dialog features the very same Sidebar that the Finder has and opens in a Column View for navigating through disks and folders for the item you want to open. Above the Column View is a pop-up menu that shows the path the folder or disk that's selected in the View's path, as shown in Figure 1-37.

Figure 1-37: The pop-up menu above the Open dialog's Column View lets you select a folder from which to open a file

As you can see from Figure 1-37, the pop-up menu is split in two. The top portion shows the path to the current folder, while the bottom half lists Recent Places that you recently opened a file from. In addition to using this pop-up menu, you can also use various keyboard shortcuts to switch the view or go to a different folder, as noted in Table 1-3.

Table 1-3: Keyboard shortcuts to use with the Open window and Save sheets
Keyboard shortcut	Action
-2	Switches the dialog to List View.

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The Services menu is available as a submenu in a 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 and the services they offer to other applications. When installed, some applications such as Mail, Safari, and BBEdit, place entries in the Services menu. If an application provides more than one service, those items are placed in a submenu named after that application. For example, Mail offers two services from its Application menu, Send Selection and Sent To, as shown in Figure 1-40.

Figure 1-40: The Services menu

With some text selected in a TextEdit document, if you select TextEdit (the application menu)Services→Mail→Send Selection, Mac OS X copies that text and places it in the body of a new message in Mail. Then all you need to do is enter the email address of the person you want to send the text to and click on the Send button. (The Services→Mail→Send To option places the selected item in an email message's To field.)

Some Services also offer key bindings, which makes it easy to send some selected text to a Bluetooth device (Shift-

-B), or to create a new sticky note (Shift-

-Y).

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 then be used only through the Services menu for that particular application.

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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 the 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 using network-shared volumes, as well as people or programs using any running network services.

For example, if you have enabled USB Printer Sharing so that others in your home or office can use the printer connected to your Mac, shutting down the Mac will also make that printer unavailable to the other users. The same applies to 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, and you're not running any public network services, then you shouldn't encounter any problems when you shut your Mac down at the end of 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 Username, or Shift-

-Q), all programs you haven't quit will be quit by the system as it logs you out; you'll then be presented with the login screen once again.

If other users are logged on to your Mac, either directly or through the network, they (and the programs running under them) won't be affected by logging out of your account locally.

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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 opened, 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.

With each new version of Mac OS X, Mac users have been presented with a new iteration of the Finder. Just as the Finder's icon is anchored in the Dock, the Finder is truly the cornerstone that marks the progress of Mac OS X's evolution through time. The same holds true in Panther, in which the Finder got a fresh new metal interface, a Sidebar, expanded search capabilities, and better functionality to make it easier for you to connect your Mac with other devices and other computers, including Windows machines.

This chapter covers the use of the Finder, and includes tips and tricks to make you a more efficient Mac user.

The Finder serves as a graphical file manager, which offers three ways (or Views) to look at files, folders, applications, and other filesystems (or volumes) mounted on your system. If you've used an earlier version of Mac OS X, you'll notice that Panther's Finder, shown in Figure 2-1, has changed dramatically.

Figure 2-1: Panther's new Finder and its controls

Panther's Finder has three main sections:

Toolbar: Located across the top of the Finder window, the toolbar offers buttons that let you go back or forward to previous views, buttons for changing the three views (Icon, List, or Column), the new Action menu, and a search field for quickly finding files and folders on your Mac. See Section 2.1.1 for more information on using the toolbar.

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The Finder serves as a graphical file manager, which offers three ways (or Views) to look at files, folders, applications, and other filesystems (or volumes) mounted on your system. If you've used an earlier version of Mac OS X, you'll notice that Panther's Finder, shown in Figure 2-1, has changed dramatically.

Figure 2-1: Panther's new Finder and its controls

Panther's Finder has three main sections:

Toolbar: Located across the top of the Finder window, the toolbar offers buttons that let you go back or forward to previous views, buttons for changing the three views (Icon, List, or Column), the new Action menu, and a search field for quickly finding files and folders on your Mac. See Section 2.1.1 for more information on using the toolbar.
Sidebar: Located at the left edge of the Finder window, the Sidebar offers a split view for accessing drives and other items on your Mac.

The top portion of the Sidebar has icons for any volumes connected to your Mac. This includes hard drives and partitions, FireWire and USB drives, CDs and DVDs, iDisks, disk images, and networked drives, such as FTP sites or Samba shares.

The bottom portion of the Sidebar includes clickable icons to quickly take you to your Desktop, Home folder, the Applications folder, or to the Documents, Movies, Music, or Pictures folder. This lower half of the sidebar is also user-customizable, which means you can add items (including files, folders, and applications) by simply dragging an item from the View area to this part of the Sidebar. See Section 2.1.3 for more information on how to use the Sidebar effectively.
The View

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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's Sidebar gives you quick access to frequently used files and directories.

The three Views available in the Finder window are Icon, List, and 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 select 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 view 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 Modified, Date Created, Size, Kind, or Label).

Double-clicking on an icon will do one of three things, depending on 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 are displayed in a new Finder window, rather than the same Finder window.

Table 2-1 lists some keyboard shortcuts for navigating within the Finder's Icon View.

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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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On the Mac (as with Windows and Linux desktops), you have two ways to invoke 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 these menus in its menu bar:

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

The commands found in these menus are highlighted in Tables 2-4 through 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 work only when the Finder is active. For example,

-B in Microsoft Word turns on boldface type or makes a selection bold, while in Xcode,

-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 lists keyboard shortcuts that should work across most applications.

As with other applications, options found in the Finder's application menu (Table 2-4) give the user access to its Preferences and the Services menu, and provide information about the Finder, options for hiding and showing windows, and options for emptying the Trash.

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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.

As shown earlier in Figure 2-1, the Finder's toolbar sports a Search field, which was added to the Finder in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), replacing Sherlock's old system search functionality. The Search field in Panther has been enhanced to allow you to search in the following places:

On any local disks mounted on your system, including external drives
Within your Home folder
Within a selected disk or folder
Everywhere on the system, including all three previously mentioned locations

To change the location of the search, click on the magnifying glass at the left edge of the Search field, and then select the location where you'd like to conduct your search. Your choices of places where you can search include:

Local disks: Searches through all the disks attached to your Mac, including hard disks, CDs, DVDs, FireWire, and USB drives.
Home: Searches for files located in your Home folder and any of the folders within, including the Desktop, Documents, Library, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public, and Sites folders.
Selection

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A file is a basic unit of filesystem currency in any modern operating system. The following sections discusses some of the file types you'll find in Mac OS X.

The system determines a document's kind in one of two ways. First it sees if the document has an attribute fork, a data attachment possessed by documents created by Classic and Carbon applications that provides information about the document's type (among other things). If the file lacks a attribute fork, it looks to the document's filename extension; Mac OS X maintains a system- wide map between these extensions and recognized document types.

The system's map that binds particular filename extensions to certain Aqua applications is made from two sorts of files. Each application's Info.plistfile (see Chapter 22) can define the filename extensions its documents use. For example, Terminal application files have the extension .term, and it says as much in its Info file (located, for the curious, at /Applications/Terminal.app/ Contents/Info.plist. If only one application lays claim to a particular file extension (as is the case with .term, at least in a fresh Mac OS X installation), the system will recognize a binding between that application and all files with that extension; double-clicking these documents in the Finder will open them through that application.

These claims, however, may be overruled by the contents of another file: com.apple.LaunchServices.plist, which is another XML property list file that exists in your Home folder's /Library folder (see Chapter 9). It lists the preferences that you have stated (through the Finder's Show Info window, and other means) regarding what applications to use with which files, or classes of files.

If the Finder encounters an ambiguity due to two or more applications recognizing the same file extension (as is the case with Acrobat Reader and Apple's Preview application with

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Folders, also referred to as directories (especially in a Unix context), give disks a hierarchical structure. A disk can hold any number of files and folders, and these folders can contain more files and other folders, ad infinitum.

Folders are colored blue by default, although some applications like to include their icon on the folder as well. This is similar to the default folders in a user's Home directory, which have icons to suggest their intended use. For example, the Documents folder has a generic document icon, the Library folder has four book icons, etc.

If the Finder is in Icon or List View, double-clicking a folder causes its contents to appear in a Finder window. Double-clicking a folder in Column View just displays the contents of the folder in the next pane to the right, as if you had single-clicked on the folder. If you double-click a folder on the Desktop, that folder opens in a new Finder window of its own in the default View (which is Icon View, unless you've selected Column View in the Finder's preferences; see earlier). You can go back to a folder's parent folder or disk by selecting Go→Enclosing folder in the menu bar or with the keyboard shortcut,

-Up Arrow.

If you hold down the Command key (

) and double-click on a folder, the folder opens in a new Finder window and brings that window to the front of the window stack.

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Under the hood, folders are actually Unix directories. However, not all Unix directories on the filesystem are folders; some are bundles, holding application resources or special multiple-file document types that the Finder doesn't think you really need to know about. For example, many of the programs in the Applications folder are bundles, though they may appear to be just a single file in the Finder. Other examples include:

Rich text documents you create with TextEdit that contain images and graphics (which end with a .rtfd extension).
Keynote presentation files (which end with a .key extension)
Data contained in a backup set, created with .Mac's Backup application (which end with a .backup extension)

To view the contents of a bundle, simply Control-click on the file and select "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu, as shown in Figure 2-20. When you select this option, a new Finder window opens in Icon View, revealing the bundle's contents. You can also select an item in the Finder and then select "Show Package Contents" from the Action menu in the Finder's toolbar.

Figure 2-20: Control-click on a bundle and select the "Show Package Contents" option to see what's inside

Another way to view a bundle's contents is from the command line, using the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities). For example, to view the resources associated with Safari, do the following:

MacChuck:~ chuck$ cd /Applications/Safari.app/Contents
MacChuck:/Applications/Safari.app/Contents chuck$ ls -la
total 40
drwxrwxr-x    7 root  admin    238  5 Dec 12:00 .
drwxrwxr-x    3 root  admin    102  5 Dec 14:56 ..
-rw-rw-r--    1 root  admin  10493 21 Jan 16:29 Info.plist
drwxrwxr-x    3 root  admin    102 30 Jan 07:58 MacOS
-rw-rw-r--    1 root  admin      8 21 Jan 16:29 PkgInfo
drwxrwxr-x  152 root  admin   5168  5 Dec 12:00 Resources
-rw-rw-r--    1 root  admin    459 30 Jan 14:30 version.plist

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An alias is a special file that acts as a pointer to its original file, folder, or disk elsewhere on your Mac. Opening an alias has the same effect as opening its original file. For example, the icons in the Dock are nothing more than aliases to their original application, file, or folder icons elsewhere in the filesystem. Step through the following list to create an alias.

Select an item in the Finder by clicking on it once, and then hold down on the mouse button.
With your other hand, hold down the Option- keys.
Drag the item to another location, such as your Desktop; when you move the item, the mouse pointer changes to a curved arrow.
When you release the mouse button, an alias of the original item is created wherever you dropped it.

This action is depicted in Figure 2-21. As you can see, the alias's icon matches that of its original, with the addition of a small arrow in its lower-left corner.

Figure 2-21: Create an alias by holding down Option-

and drag an item to another location, such as to your Desktop

You can also create an alias of any item you select in the Finder using File→Make Alias (

-L) in the menu bar, or by selecting Make Alias from the Action menu in the Finder's toolbar. In each case, the aliased file is created in the same directory as the original, which you can then drag to another location.

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To move an item from one folder to another, just click and drag it to another location in the filesystem. For this, it's sometimes easier to open two Finder windows, one that contains the item you want to move, and the other set to the location where you want to move it.

If you drop an icon in the same window it started in, its position in the filesystem doesn't change at all. However, if you're in Icon View, the position of the icon shifts to wherever you dropped the item.

Dropping an icon into a different folder on the same disk moves the file, while dropping it into a folder located on a different disk copies it, keeping the original file in place while creating a duplicate in the destination folder. This is useful for when you want to copy a folder onto an external FireWire drive or an iPod.

To make a copy of a file or folder, select the item in the Finder view and either:

Hold down the Option key, and drag the item to a new location
Select File→Duplicate ( -D) from the menu bar
Select Duplicate from the Action menu in the Finder's toolbar

When you use the Option-drag combination, the standard mouse pointer changes to an arrow with a little green bubble with a plus-sign inside, as seen in Figure 2-22.

Figure 2-22: Option-drag a file in the Finder to create a copy

If you are dragging the file to the same location, the Finder inserts a space after the filename and adds the word "copy" to the filename. For example, in Figure 2-22, the copy of cone_nebula.jpg would be named cone_nebula copy.jpg. Otherwise, if you are copying the file to another location, the file retains its original name.

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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 go to File→Get Info or use its keyboard shortcut,

-I. The Get Info window, shown in Figure 2-25, has six different panes, which offer different kinds of information about the file.

Figure 2-25: 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 appears only 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 copies 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 can read from, but not change, a locked document. Locked folders will let you explore them, but you cannot add or remove anything from them. The Trash doesn't allow you to add a locked item to it. A locked object gets a tiny padlock added to the corner of its icon, which is a visual clue that the file is locked.

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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 at this location. 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 launches the 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.

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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 at this location. 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 launches the 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.

Software Update

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