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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: How the Mac Is Different

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When you get right down to it, the job description of every operating system is pretty much the same. Whether it's Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Billy Bob's System-Software Special, any OS must serve as the ambassador between the computer and you, its human operator. It must somehow represent your files and programs on the screen so that you can open them; offer some method of organizing your files; present onscreen controls that affect your speaker volume, mouse speed, and so on; and communicate with your external gadgets, like disks, printers, and digital cameras.

In other words, Mac OS X offers roughly the same features as recent versions of Windows. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these features are called different things and parked in different spots. As you could have predicted, this rearrangement of features can mean a good deal of confusion for you, the Macintosh foreigner. For the first few days or weeks, you may instinctively reach for certain familiar features that simply aren't where you expect to find them, the way your tongue keeps sticking itself into the socket of the newly extracted tooth.

To minimize the frustration, therefore, read this chapter first. It makes plain the most important and dramatic differences between the Windows method and the Macintosh way.

As a critic might say, Apple is always consistent with its placement of the power button: It's different on every model.

On iMacs and Mac Minis, the power button is on the back panel. On Power Macs, it's on the front panel. And on laptop Macs, the button is near the upper-right corner of the keyboard. (Then again, if you have a laptop, you should get into the habit of just closing the lid when you're done working, and opening it to resume; the power button rarely plays a role in your life.)

In every case, though, the power button looks the same (Figure 1-1): it bears the logo.

Figure 1-1: Every Mac's power button looks like this, although it might be hard to find. The good news: Once you find it, it'll pretty much stay in the same place.

Every Windows mouse ever made has at least two mouse buttons. You use the left one for selecting things, and the right one for making shortcut menus appear (Figure 1-2). If you have a newer mouse, it might even have a scroll wheel in the middle for efficiently scrolling long documents and Web pages.

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Power On, Dude

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As a critic might say, Apple is always consistent with its placement of the power button: It's different on every model.

On iMacs and Mac Minis, the power button is on the back panel. On Power Macs, it's on the front panel. And on laptop Macs, the button is near the upper-right corner of the keyboard. (Then again, if you have a laptop, you should get into the habit of just closing the lid when you're done working, and opening it to resume; the power button rarely plays a role in your life.)

In every case, though, the power button looks the same (Figure 1-1): it bears the logo.

Figure 1-1: Every Mac's power button looks like this, although it might be hard to find. The good news: Once you find it, it'll pretty much stay in the same place.

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That One-Button Mouse

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Every Windows mouse ever made has at least two mouse buttons. You use the left one for selecting things, and the right one for making shortcut menus appear (Figure 1-2). If you have a newer mouse, it might even have a scroll wheel in the middle for efficiently scrolling long documents and Web pages.

The mouse that came with your Mac, however, has only one mouse button—the equivalent of the Windows left mouse button. You use it exclusively for selecting and clicking things.

That's not to say that you can't "right-click" things with your one-button mouse—you can, as shown in Figure 1-2. On the Mac, though, you're supposed to produce shortcut menus by holding down the Control key as you click things on the screen.

Furthermore, if this Control-clicking business bothers you, you'll be happy to hear that two-button mice work just fine on the Mac, too; they let you go back to right-clicking things, and the little scroll wheel works, too.

You can connect the two-button USB mouse from an old PC, for example, or buy one for $10 or $15 to use with your Mac. (Heck, even Apple sells something called the Mighty Mouse. It looks like it has no buttons at all, but its single, unified shell has left-side and right-side sensors that let you left- and right-click.)

You generally don't need to install driver software for USB mice, even if they're designed for use with Windows. Still, it's worth checking the manufacturer's Web site for Mac OS X drivers, since such software may give your two-button mouse even more features than it has by default. For example, the driver software may make a mouse's third and fourth buttons trigger special functions.

Figure 1-2: Unless you use your own two-button mouse, you'll have to use the Control-clicking method to produce the shortcut menus, shown here in Windows (left) and on the Mac (right).

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On, Off, and Sleep

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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.

It's clear that Apple expects its customers not to shut down their machines between sessions, because the company has gone to great lengths to make doing so inconvenient. (For example, you have to save your work in all open programs before you can shut down.)

That's OK. Sleep mode (called Standby on the PC) consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and in memory, and wakes the Mac up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep, use any of these techniques:

• Choose → Sleep. (The menu, available no matter what program you're using, is at the upper-left corner of your screen.)
• Press the Power button on your machine—or, if you don't have one easily accessible, press Control-Eject key. On some models, doing so makes the Mac sleep immediately; on others, you have to click Sleep in the dialog box that appears (Figure 1-3).
• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver control panel described on Section 13.11.4 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

Figure 1-3: Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Enter for Shut Down.

You shouldn't have to restart the Mac very often. But on those rare occasions, including severe troubleshooting mystification, here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose → Restart. Click Restart (or press Enter) in the confirmation dialog box.
• Press the Power button or Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-3, if your Mac doesn't automatically go to sleep. Click Restart (or type R).
• If all else fails, press Control--Power key. (On newer keyboards that lack a power key, use Control--Eject instead.) That restarts the Mac instantly, but you lose any chance to save changes in your open documents.

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The Menu Bar

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It won't take you long to discover that on the Macintosh, there's only one menu bar. It's always at the top of the screen. The names of these menus, and the commands inside them, change to suit the window you're currently using. That's different from Windows, where a separate menu bar appears at the top of every window.

Mac and Windows devotees can argue the relative merits of these two approaches until they're blue in the face. All that matters, though, is that you know where to look when you want to reach for a menu command. On the Mac, you always look upward.

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Finder = Windows Explorer

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In Mac OS X, the "home base" program—the one that appears when you first turn on the machine and shows you the icons of all your folders and files—is called the Finder. This is where you manage your folders and files, throw things away, manipulate disks, and so on. (You may also hear it called the desktop, since the items you find there mirror the files and folders you might find on a real-life desktop.)

Getting used to the term Finder is worthwhile right up front, because it comes up so often. For example, the first icon on your Dock is labeled Finder, and clicking it always takes you back to your desktop.

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Dock = Taskbar

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At the bottom of almost every Mac OS X screen sits a tiny row of photorealistic icons. This is the Dock, a close parallel to the Windows taskbar. (As in Windows, it may be hidden or placed on the left or right edge of the screen instead—but those are options primarily preferred by power users and eccentrics.)

The Dock displays the icons of all your open windows and programs, which are denoted by small black triangles beneath their icons. Clicking these icons opens the corresponding files, folders, disks, documents, and programs. If you click and hold (or right-click, or Control-click) an open program's icon, you'll see a pop-up list of the open windows in that program, along with Quit and a few other commands.

When you close a program, its icon disappears from the Dock (unless you've secured it there for easy access, as described on Section 3.2.1).

You can cycle through the various open programs on your Mac by holding down the key and pressing Tab repeatedly. (Sound familiar? It's just like Alt-Tabbing in Windows.) And each time you just tap -Tab, you bounce back and forth between the two programs you've used most recently.

What you may find confusing at first, though, is that the Dock also performs one function of the Windows Start menu: It provides a "short list" of programs and files that you use often, for easy access. To add a new icon to the Dock, just drag it there (put programs to the left of the divider line; everything else goes on the right). To remove an icon from the Dock, just drag the icon away from the Dock. As long as that item isn't actually open at the moment, it disappears from the Dock with a little animated puff of smoke when you release the mouse button.

The bottom line: On the Mac, a single interface element—the Dock—exhibits characteristics of both the Start menu (it lists frequently used programs) and the taskbar (it lists currently open programs and files).

If you're still confused, Chapter 3 should help clear things up.

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Menulets = Tray

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Most Windows fans refer to the row of tiny status icons at the lower-right corner of the screen as the tray, even though Microsoft's official term is the notification area. (Why use one syllable when eight will do?)

Macintosh fans wage a similar battle of terminology when it comes to the little menubar icons shown in Figure 1-4. Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans prefer to call them menulets.

In any case, these menu-bar icons are cousins of the Windows tray—that is, each is both an indicator and a menu that provides direct access to certain settings in System Preferences. One menulet lets you adjust your Mac's speaker volume, another lets you change the screen resolution, another shows you the remaining power in your laptop battery, and so on.

Figure 1-4: The little icons at the upper-right corner of the Mac OS X screen are called Menu Extras or menulets. Almost every one is both a status indicator and a pop-up menu.

Making a menulet appear usually involves turning on a certain checkbox. These checkboxes lurk on the various panes of System Preferences (Chapter 13), which is the Mac equivalent of the Control Panel. (To open System Preferences, choose its name from the menu, or click the light-switch icon on the Dock.)

Here's a rundown of the various Apple menulets that you may encounter, complete with instructions on where to find this magic on/off checkbox for each.

The following descriptions indicate the official, authorized steps for installing a menulet. There is, however, a single folder on your hard drive that contains all 23 of them in a single window, so that you can install one with a quick double-click. To find them, open your hard drive → System → Library → CoreServices → Menu Extras folder.

• AirPort status lets you turn your wireless networking card on or off, join existing wireless networks, and create your own private ones. To find the "Show" checkbox: Open System Preferences → Network. From the "Show:" pop-up menu, choose AirPort.
• Battery shows how much power remains in your laptop's battery (laptops only).

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Keyboard Differences

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Mac and PC keyboards are subtly different, too. Making the switch involves two big adjustments: Figuring out where the special Windows keys went (like Alt and Ctrl)—and figuring out what to do with the special Macintosh keys (like and Option).

Here's how to find the Macintosh equivalents of familiar PC keyboard keys:

• Ctrl key. The Macintosh offers a key labeled Control (or, on laptops, "ctrl"), but it isn't the equivalent of the PC's Ctrl key. The Mac's Control key is primarily for helping you "right-click" things, as described above.
  Instead, the Macintosh equivalent of the Windows Ctrl key is the key. It's right next to the Space bar, bearing both the cloverleaf symbol and the Apple logo. It's pronounced "command," although novices can often be heard calling it the "pretzel key," "Apple key," or "clover key."
  Most Windows Ctrl-key combos correspond perfectly to key sequences on the Mac. The Save command is now -S instead of Ctrl-S, Open is -O instead of Ctrl-O, and so on.
  Mac keyboard shortcuts are listed at the right side of each open menu, just as in Windows. Unfortunately, they're represented in the menu with goofy symbols instead of their true key names. Here's your cheat sheet to the menu keyboard symbols: represents the Shift key, means the Option key, and refers to the Control key.
• Alt key. On most Mac keyboards, a key on the bottom row of the Macintosh keyboard is labeled both Alt and Option (at least on Macs sold in the U.S.). This is the closest thing the Mac offers to the old Alt key.
  In many situations, keyboard shortcuts that involve the Alt key in Windows use the Option key on the Mac. For example, in Microsoft Word, the keyboard shortcut for the Split Document Window command is Alt-Ctrl-S in Windows, but Option--T on the Macintosh.
  Still, these two keys aren't exactly the same. Whereas the Alt key's most popular function is to control the menus in Windows programs, the Option key on the Mac is a "miscellaneous" key that triggers secret functions and secret characters.

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Disk Differences

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Working with disks is very different on the Mac. Whereas Windows is designed to show the names (letters) and icons for your disk drives, the Mac shows you the names and icons of your disks. You'll never, ever see an icon for an empty drive, as you do on Windows.

As soon as you insert, say, a CD, you see its name and icon appear on the screen. In fact, every disk inside, or attached to, a Macintosh is represented on the desktop by an icon (see Figure 1-5). That's why the icon for your primary hard drive has been sitting in the upper-right corner of your screen since the first time you turned on the Mac. (It's usually named Macintosh HD.)

If you prefer the Windows look, in which no disk icons appear on the desktop, it's easy enough to re-create it on the Mac, as shown in Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5: Top: Disk icons won't appear on the desktop if you choose Finder → Preferences and turn off these three checkboxes.
Bottom: Choose Go → Computer to open the Mac's version of the My Computer window.

Ejecting a disc from the Mac is a little bit different, too, whether it's a CD, DVD, Zip disk, floppy, shared network disk, iDisk, iPod, or external hard drive. You can go about it in any of these ways:

• Control-click (or right-click) the disk's desktop icon. From the shortcut menu that appears, choose "Eject [whatever the disk's name is]" (Figure 1-6).
• Click the disk's icon and then choose File → "Eject [disk's name]" (or press -E).
• Drag the icon of the disk onto the Trash icon at the end of the Dock. (You'll see its icon turn into a giant Eject symbol, the Mac's little acknowledgment that it knows what you're trying to do.)

Figure 1-6: The Macintosh provides at least three different ways to make a physical disk pop out of its drive (floppy, CD, DVD, whatever). The same methods serve to unmount (remove from your screen) any other kind of disk (network disk, flash drive, iDisk, non-startup hard drive, or whatever).

For you, the Windows veteran, the main thing to remember here is that you never eject a Macintosh disk by pushing the Eject button

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Where Your Stuff Is

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The folders of Mac OS X bear some resemblance to those in Windows. For example:

Applications is Apple's word for programs.

When it comes to managing your programs, the Applications folder (which you can open by choosing Go → Applications) is something like the Program Files folder in Windows—but without the worry. You should feel free to open this folder and double-click things. In fact, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. This is your complete list of programs. (What's on your Dock is more like a Greatest Hits subset.)

Better yet, on the Mac, programs bear their real, plain-English names, like Microsoft Word, rather than eight-letter abbreviations, like WINWORD.EXE. Most are selfcontained in a single icon, too (rather than being composed of hundreds of little support files), which makes copying or deleting them extremely easy.

Your documents, files, and preferences, meanwhile, sit in an important folder called your Home folder. Inside are folders that closely resemble the My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music folders on Windows—except that on the Mac, they don't say "My."

One way to find it is to open the Macintosh HD (hard drive) window, double-click the Users folder inside it, and then double-click the folder inside it that bears your name and looks like a house (see Figure 1-7). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders to organize, back up, and so on.

Mac OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder, however.

• Choose Go → Home.
• Press Shift--H.
• Click the Home icon in the Sidebar (Section 3.2.3).
• Click the Home icon on the Dock. (If you don't see one, consult Section 3.2.3 for instructions on how to put one there.)

Figure 1-7: For the most part, the folders you care about on the Mac are the Applications folder in the main hard drive window (top) and your own Home folder (middle and bottom). You're welcome to save your documents and park your icons almost anywhere on your Mac (except inside the System folder or other people's Home folders).
But keeping your work in your Home folder makes backing up and file sharing a heck of a lot easier.

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Window Controls

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As in Windows, a window on the Mac is framed by an assortment of doodads and gizmos (Figure 1-8). You'll need these to move a window, close it, resize it, scroll it, and so on. But once you get to know the ones on a Macintosh, you're likely to be pleased by the amount of thought those fussy perfectionists at Apple have put into their design.

Here's an overview of the various Mac OS X window-edge gizmos and what they do.

When several windows are open, the darkened window name and colorful upper-left controls tell you which window is active (in front). Windows in the background have gray, dimmed lettering and gray upper-left control buttons. As in Windows, the title bar also acts as a handle that lets you move the entire window around on the screen.

Here's a nifty keyboard shortcut with no Windows equivalent: You can cycle through the different open windows in one program without using the mouse. Just press -' (that's 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 programs.

Perhaps more usefully, you can use Control-F4 to cycle through the open windows in all programs.

After you've opened one folder inside another, the title bar's secret folder hierarchy menu is an efficient way to backtrack—to return to the enclosing window. Figure 1-9 reveals everything about the process after this key move: pressing the key as you click the name of the window. (You can release the key immediately after clicking.)

Instead of using this title bar menu, you can also jump to the enclosing window by pressing -up arrow. Pressing -down arrow takes you back into the folder you started in. (This makes more sense when you try it than when you read it.)

Figure 1-8: When Steve Jobs unveiled Mac OS X at a Macworld Expo in 1999, he said that his goal was to oversee the creation of an interface so attractive, "you just want to lick it." Desktop windows, with their juicy, fruit-flavored controls, are a good starting point.

One more title bar trick: By double-clicking the title bar, you

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Terminology Differences

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There are enough other differences between Mac and Windows to fill 15 pages. Indeed, that's what you'll find the end of this book: an alphabetical listing of every familiar Windows feature and where to find its equivalent on the Mac.

As you read both that section of the book and the chapters that precede it, however, you'll discover that some functions are almost identical in Mac OS X and Windows, but have different names. Here's a quick-reference summary:

Windows term	Macintosh term
Control Panel	System Preferences
Drop-down menu	Pop-up menu
Program	Application
Properties	Get Info
Recycle Bin	Trash
Search command	Spotlight
Shortcuts	Aliases
Taskbar	Dock
Tray (notification area)	Menulets
Windows Explorer	Finder
Windows folder	System folder

With that much under your belt, you're well on your way to learning the ways of Mac OS X.

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Chapter 2: Windows and Icons

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When you turn on a Mac, you hear a startup chime from the Mac's built-in speakers. You see the Apple logo as the machine warms up, 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 wizard (the "What's your time zone? What's your name?" screens that appear the first time you turn on a new Mac), 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 2-1. Click your name in the list, type your password, and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 12 covers much more of this business of user accounts and logging in.

Most of the objects on your screen should seem familiar. They are, in fact, cousins of elements you already know from Windows. Here's a quick tour (see Figure 2-2).

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 Simple Finder mode for you. Details on Section 12.2.

In the Mac world, the icons of your hard drive and any other disks attached to your Mac generally appear on your desktop for quick access.

Figure 2-1: Left: On Macs that have been configured to accommodate different people at different times, one of the first things you see upon turning on the computer is this dialog box. Click your name. (If the list is long, you may have to scroll to find your name—or just type the first couple of letters of it.)
Right: Then type in your password and then click Log In (or press Return or Enter). If you've typed the wrong password, the entire dialog box vibrates, in effect shaking its little head, suggesting that you mistyped your password.

This ribbon of translucent, almost photographic icons is a launcher for programs, files, folders, and disks you use often.

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Logging In

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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 wizard (the "What's your time zone? What's your name?" screens that appear the first time you turn on a new Mac), 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 2-1. Click your name in the list, type your password, and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 12 covers much more of this business of user accounts and logging in.

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The Elements of the Mac OS X Desktop

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Most of the objects on your screen should seem familiar. They are, in fact, cousins of elements you already know from Windows. Here's a quick tour (see Figure 2-2).

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 Simple Finder mode for you. Details on Section 12.2.

In the Mac world, the icons of your hard drive and any other disks attached to your Mac generally appear on your desktop for quick access.

Figure 2-1: Left: On Macs that have been configured to accommodate different people at different times, one of the first things you see upon turning on the computer is this dialog box. Click your name. (If the list is long, you may have to scroll to find your name—or just type the first couple of letters of it.)
Right: Then type in your password and then click Log In (or press Return or Enter). If you've typed the wrong password, the entire dialog box vibrates, in effect shaking its little head, suggesting that you mistyped your password.

This ribbon of translucent, almost photographic icons is a launcher for programs, files, folders, and disks you use often.

In principle, the Dock is very simple:

• Programs go on the left side. Everything else goes on the right, including documents, folders, disks, and minimized windows. (Figure 2-2 shows the dividing line.)
• You can add a new icon to the Dock by dragging it there. Rearrange Dock icons by dragging them like tiles on a puzzle. Remove a Dock icon by dragging it away from the Dock, and enjoy the animated puff of smoke that appears when you release the mouse button. (You can't remove the icon of a program that's currently open, however.)
• Click something once to open it. A tiny triangle underneath a program's icon lets you know that it's open.
• Each Dock icon sprouts a pop-up menu, similar to a shortcut menu. A folder can show you a list of what's inside, for example, while a program's pop-up menu gives you options to quit, hide the program, and so on. To see the menu, hold the mouse button down on a Dock icon, or Control-click it, or (if you have a two-button mouse) right-click it.

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Icon View

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Chapter 1 provides a guided tour of the various gizmos around the edges of a window (the Close button, Resize box, and so on)—but what about what's inside a window?

As it turns out, you can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of three ways: as icons, as a single list, or in a series of neat columns (see Figure 2-3). 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 2-3, or choose View → as Icons (or View → as Columns, or View → as List). The keystrokes -1, -2, and -3 achieve the same results, but save you time since you don't have to use the mouse.

Figure 2-3: 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.

In icon view, each 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.)

If you then choose View → Show View Options (or press -J), you'll discover a wealth of interesting display options for this view.

Mac OS X can scale your icons to almost any size without losing any quality or smoothness. In the View → Show View Options window (Figure 2-4), 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. Then 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 2-4: 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.

You can control the type size of icon names on the Mac. In fact, if you choose "This window only" at the top of the dialog box, 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. Here's how to master these columns.

As in Windows, the column headings in a list view aren't just signposts—they're buttons, too. Click Name for alphabetical order, Date Modified to view newest first, Size to put the largest files at the top, and so on.

It's especially important to note the tiny, dark gray triangle that appears in the column you've most recently clicked. It shows you which way the list is being sorted. For example, if the Size column is selected, an upward-pointing triangle means smallest things go first.

The keystrokes for opening and closing flippy triangles in a list view are worth committing to memory.

Pressing the Option key when you click a flippy triangle lets you view a folder's contents and the contents of any folders inside it. The result, in other words, is a longer list that may involve several levels of indentation.

If you prefer to use the keyboard, substitute the right-arrow key (to expand a selected folder's flippy triangle) or left-arrow key (to collapse the folder listing again). Here again, adding the Option key expands all levels of folders within the selected one.

Suppose, for example, that you want to find out how many files are in your Pictures folder. The trouble is, you have organized the graphics files within that folder in several category folders. And you realize that the "how many items" statistic in the status bar shows you how many icons are visible in the window. In other words, you won't know your total photo count until you've expanded all the folders within the Pictures folder.

You could perform the entire routine from the keyboard like this: Get to your own Home folder by pressing Shift--H. Select the Pictures folder by typing the letter P. Open it by pressing -O (the shortcut for File → Open) or -down arrow. Highlight the entire contents by pressing -A (the shortcut for Edit → Select All).

Now that all folders are highlighted, press Option-right arrow. You may have to wait a moment for the Mac to open every subfolder of every subfolder. But eventually, the massive list appears, complete with many levels of indentation. At last, the "items" statistic in the status bar at the bottom of the window gives you a complete, updated tally of how many files are in all of those folders added together.

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Column View

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Icon view and list view should certainly be familiar from your old PC. But column view is probably something new—and welcome.

The goal is simple: Create a means of burrowing down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.

The solution, a distant relative of the tree view known as Windows Explorer, is shown in Figure 2-10. It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows the icons of all your disks, including your main hard drive.

Figure 2-10: If the rightmost folder contains pictures, sounds, or movies, Mac OS X even lets you look at them or play them, right there in the Finder. If it's a certain kind of text document (AppleWorks or PDF, for example), you actually see a tiny preview of the first page. If it's any other kind of document, you see a blowup of its icon and a few file statistics. You can drag this jumbo icon anywhere—into another folder, for example.

When you click a disk (once), the second pane shows a list of all the folders on 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 to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you're 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 now burrow down a different rabbit hole.

Furthermore, the Sidebar (Section 3.2.3) is always at the ready to help you jump to a new track; just click any disk or folder there to select a new first-column listing for column view.

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

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What's in Your Home Folder

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As noted in Chapter 1, your Home folder (choose Go → Home) will be your primary activity center on the Mac. It stores not only your documents, music files, photos, and so on, but also all of your preference settings for the programs you use. Because you'll be spending so much time here, it's worth learning about the folders that Apple puts inside here. As a convenience, Mac OS X creates the following folders:

• Desktop folder. When you drag an icon out of a window and onto your Mac OS X desktop, it may appear to show up on the desktop, but that's just an optical illusion. In truth, nothing in Mac OS X is ever really on the desktop. It's actually in this Desktop folder, and mirrored on the desktop area.
  You can entertain yourself for hours by proving this to yourself. If you drag something out of your Desktop folder, it also disappears from the actual desktop. And vice versa. (You're not allowed to delete or rename the Desktop folder.)
• Documents. Apple suggests that you keep your actual work files in this folder. Sure enough, whenever you save a new document (when you're working in AppleWorks or Word, for example), the Save As dialog box proposes storing the new file in this folder, as described in Chapter 4.
  Your programs may also create folders of their own here. For example, if Microsoft Entourage is your email program, you'll find a Microsoft User Data folder here (which contains your actual mail files). If you use a Palm organizer, you'll find a Palm folder here for your palmtop's calendar and phone book data. And so on.
• Library. The main Library folder (the one in your main hard drive window) contains folders for fonts, preferences, help files, and other files essential to the operation of Mac OS X.
  But you have your own Library folder, too, right there in your Home folder. It stores exactly the same kinds of things, but they're your fonts, your preferences, and so on.
  This setup may seem redundant if you're the only person who uses your Mac. But it makes perfect sense in the context of families, schools, or offices where numerous people share a single machine. Because you have your own Library folder, you can have a font collection, sounds, and other preference settings that are in effect only when

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File and Folder Icons

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Just as in Windows, every document, program, folder, and disk on your Mac is represented by an icon. In Mac OS X, icons look more like photos than cartoons, and you can scale them to just about any size (Section 2.3.1). Otherwise, icons work just as they do in Windows. They're your ticket to moving, copying, and deleting your files and folders.

A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 255 letters and spaces. Better yet, you're about to discover the first of many degrees of freedom that come with a move to the Mac: Punctuation is permitted. For the first time in your life, you can name a file, say, "Update 11/15/06," without getting yelled at by your operating system. In fact, you can use any symbol you want except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes.

To rename an icon, begin by highlighting it (with a single click, for example). Then do one of these two things:

• Click once on its name.
• Press Return or Enter.

Either way, a rectangle now appears around the name (see Figure 2-12). At this point, the existing name is highlighted; simply begin typing to replace it, as you do in Windows.

If you just want to add letters to the beginning or end of the file's existing name, press the left or right arrow key immediately after pressing Return or Enter. The insertion point jumps to the corresponding end of the file name.

A space is considered alphabetically before the letter A. To force a particular folder to appear at the top of a list view window, therefore, type a space before its name.

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, you can also click any visible piece of information about that file—its name, size, kind, date modified, and so on.) The icon darkens, and its name changes color.

Figure 2-12: Click a selected icon's name (top left) to produce the renaming rectangle (top right), in which you can edit the file's name. Once the existing name is highlighted, begin typing to replace it (bottom left). When you're finished, press Return, Enter, or Tab to seal the deal, or just click somewhere else.

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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. You can cancel the copying process by pressing either -period or the Esc key.

Understanding when the Mac copies a dragged icon and when it just moves the icon bewilders many a Windows refugee. However, the scheme is fairly simple:

• Dragging from one folder to another (on the same disk) moves the icon; dragging from one disk to another copies the folder or file. So far, this is the same as Windows.
• Option-dragging it (that is, pressing the Option key while dragging) copies the icon instead of moving it. Doing so within a single folder produces a duplicate of the file called "[Whatever its name was] copy."
• Dragging an icon from one disk to another while pressing moves the file or folder, in the process deleting it from the original disk. (Press just after you start to drag.)

You can use the Copy and Paste commands to get files from one window to another, too: Highlight the icon or icons you want to move, choose Edit → Copy, open the window where you want to put the icons, and then choose Edit → Paste. You get a second set of the copied icons, exactly as in Windows.

Well, almost exactly like Windows. On the Mac, you can't cut and paste icons to move them—you can only copy and paste them to make a copy of them.

Here's a common dilemma: you want to drag an icon not just into a folder, but into a folder nested inside that folder.

Figure 2-14: Top: To make spring-loaded folders work, start by dragging an icon onto a folder or disk icon. Don't release the mouse button. Wait for the window to open automatically around your cursor.
Bottom: Now you can either let go of the mouse button to release the file in its new window, or drag onto yet another, inner folder. It, too, will open. As long as you don't release the mouse button, you can continue until you've reached your folder-within-a-folder destination.

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Aliases (Shortcuts)

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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 2-15). It's the same idea as a file shortcut in Windows: When you double-click the alias, the original file opens. Since 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.

Another way to create an alias is by Control-clicking (or right-clicking) a normal icon and choosing Make Alias from the shortcut menu that appears. You can also create an alias by Option--dragging the icon out of its window.

Figure 2-15: Top: You can identify an alias by the tiny arrow badge on the lower-left corner. Bottom: If the alias can't find the original file, you're offered the chance to hook it up to a different file.

An alias takes up virtually no disk space—even if the original file is enormous—so you don't have to worry about filling up your hard drive. Aliases are smarter than Windows shortcuts, too: Even if you rename the alias, rename the original file, move the alias, and move the original, double-clicking the alias still opens the original icon.

That's just the beginning of alias intelligence. Suppose you make an alias of a file that's on a removable disk, such as an iPod. When you double-click the alias on your hard drive, the Mac requests that particular disk by name. And if you double-click the alias of a file that's stored on a different machine on your network, Mac OS X attempts to connect to the appropriate machine, prompting you for a password—even if the other machine is thousands of miles away and your Mac must dial the modem to connect.

Mac OS X makes it easy to find the file an alias "points" to without actually having to open it. Just highlight the alias and then choose File → Show Original (-R). Mac OS X immediately displays the actual, original file, sitting patiently in its folder, wherever that may be.

And if for some reason your alias ever "breaks," you're offered the chance to connect it to a new file, as shown at the bottom of Figure 2-15.

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Color Labels

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Mac OS X includes a welcome feature that isn't available on Windows: icon labels. This feature lets you tag selected icons with one of seven different labels, each of which has both a text label and a color associated with it.

To do so, highlight the icons. Open the File menu (or the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click the icons). There, under the heading Color Label, you'll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven different labels you can use. Figure 2-16 shows the routine.

After you've applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks. For example:

• Round up files with Spotlight. Using the Spotlight file-finding command described later in this chapter, you can round up all icons with a particular label. Thereafter, moving these icons at once is a piece of cake: Choose Edit → Select All, and then drag any one of the highlighted icons out of the results window and into the target folder or disk.
• Sort a list view by label. No other Mac sorting method lets you create an arbitrary order for the icons in a window. When you sort by label, the Mac creates alphabetical clusters within each label grouping, as shown in Figure 2-17.
• Track progress. Use different color labels to track the status of files in a certain project. The first drafts have no labels at all. On