Mac OS X Power Hound | O'Reilly Media

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Mac OS X may look "so good, you just want to lick it," as Steve Jobs famously put it. The truth is, though, that the best stuff is under the hood. The incredibly stable Unix core multitasks like a pro and opens up a world of software previously unavailable to Mac fans.

This OS is unlike anything that came before, which has tripped up more than one computer veteran. But the time you invest learning Mac OS X will gain you boatloads of speed and efficiency. Just keep an open mind—think "Zen and the Art of Computing."

You won't get far with your Mac (or this book) until your Mac is turned on. But even that simple act, as it turns out, has a few nuances worth learning.

The dialog box shown in Figure 1-1 greets millions of Mac mavens every morning. It's the login dialog box, which you use to identify yourself and instruct the Mac to display your files, desktop picture, and settings while hiding everyone else's. (More on this accounts system in Chapter 5.)

You can save some mousing around by navigating this box with the keyboard. For example, select your name from the list by typing your first initial (or the first couple of letters, if the list is long). As you do so, the highlight bar moves down the list, matching what you type. When the name you want is highlighted, press the Return or Enter key, type the password, and then hit Return again.

If you hold down Shift when you select your account's name, the window will fade to the password screen in super-slow motion. (Make sure a jealous PC fanatic is watching when you do this.)

Figure 1-1: Before you can start using your machine, your Mac wants to make sure it knows who you are . . . or at least who you want to be today.

Of course, the accounts system mentioned in the previous hint is primarily designed for families, schools, or businesses, where different people use the same Mac at different times. If you're the only one who uses your machine, and you're not worried about security, all this business about choosing your name from a list and entering a password is so much red tape. "It's me!" you feel like saying, "Who the heck else would it be?"

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

You won't get far with your Mac (or this book) until your Mac is turned on. But even that simple act, as it turns out, has a few nuances worth learning.

The dialog box shown in Figure 1-1 greets millions of Mac mavens every morning. It's the login dialog box, which you use to identify yourself and instruct the Mac to display your files, desktop picture, and settings while hiding everyone else's. (More on this accounts system in Chapter 5.)

You can save some mousing around by navigating this box with the keyboard. For example, select your name from the list by typing your first initial (or the first couple of letters, if the list is long). As you do so, the highlight bar moves down the list, matching what you type. When the name you want is highlighted, press the Return or Enter key, type the password, and then hit Return again.

If you hold down Shift when you select your account's name, the window will fade to the password screen in super-slow motion. (Make sure a jealous PC fanatic is watching when you do this.)

Figure 1-1: Before you can start using your machine, your Mac wants to make sure it knows who you are . . . or at least who you want to be today.

Of course, the accounts system mentioned in the previous hint is primarily designed for families, schools, or businesses, where different people use the same Mac at different times. If you're the only one who uses your machine, and you're not worried about security, all this business about choosing your name from a list and entering a password is so much red tape. "It's me!" you feel like saying, "Who the heck else would it be?"

If that's your situation, you can set up the system so it logs you in automatically at startup, bypassing the login screen altogether.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Sight and sound are the primary senses you use to experience the glory of a Mac. (Smell cartridges are, mercifully, still years away.) Mastering the screen and speaker controls, therefore, offers big payoffs.

Figure 1-4: Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, press the R key instead of Restart, S for Sleep, Esc for Cancel, or Enter for Shut Down.

Ordinarily, you're supposed to adjust your screen or speaker settings by opening System Preferences and clicking the Displays or Sound icon. But if you're just seeking a quick brightness or volume adjustment, life's too short for that slow-lane method. Instead, you can use the dedicated keys for adjusting brightness or volume that come on every modern Mac keyboard. (The brightness keys look like suns, and the volume keys look like speakers.)

Sometimes, though, you need access to more sophisticated controls. For example, you might want to adjust the screen resolution to see how your Web page would look on a different screen, or you might want to change the built-in beep sound. For these tasks, only the System Preferences panes will do.

So here's the tip: on a PowerBook or iBook, you can jump directly to the Displays preference pane by holding down Option and pressing one of the brightness keys. You can jump to the Sound pane by holding down Option and pressing one of the volume keys. And if you're lucky enough to have a PowerBook with a glow-in-the-dark keyboard, you can jump to the Keyboard & Mouse pane by holding down Option and pressing one of the keyboard-brightness keys.

On desktop Macs, you can only access the Sound pane using this trick; desktop keyboards don't have brightness keys.

When you change the volume on Mac OS X using the keyboard, you hear a muted clicking noise while a speaker icon appears on the screen. According to Apple's logic, if you can see

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

What would the Mac be without its glorious, overlapping, drop-shadowed windows?

Unix, that's what.

In any case, mastering the many wonders of the Mac OS X window is a key survival skill.

Minimizing windows is one of OS X's more compelling visual tricks. With a simple click of the yellow button, the active window shrinks down and places itself in your dock, ready for future use with the click of a mouse.

But what if you've minimized 15 different Safari windows to the Dock, and decide you want them all back? It's rather annoying to click 15 times just to get your windows back.

Luckily, there's a fast way out: just hold down the Option key before you click any of the minimized windows, and they'll all expand into a nicely organized bunch on your desktop.

Unfortunately, this great timesaver generally works only for Cocoa applications such as Mail, Safari, TextEdit, and OmniWeb. Carbon programs (like the Finder and Office 2004) won't even unminimize a single window if you have the Option key held down.

When you find yourself with several open windows in one program, especially in the Finder, don't waste time trying to close them individually. Instead, Option-click the red close button at the top left of any open window. Presto! All windows close at once. (That is, except in Word 2004; Microsoft marches to a different drummer.)

Suppose you're writing a training manual about a piece of software. As you write up your witty little descriptions of the elements of some dialog box, you may find it frustrating that your word processor's own window is covering up what you're trying to describe.

That's precisely when you should use the

-key trick. By pressing

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans on the Internet have named the little menu-bar icons shown in Figure 1-8 menulets. Most are both indicators and menus that provide direct access to settings in System Preferences. However, there's more to them than you may suspect.

Figure 1-8: You can rearrange the icons (including the clock) by holding down the

key and dragging them around the menu bar. You may wish to position your most-used icon in the top-right corner, so it never gets cut off by a program with numerous menus.

In general, you install a menulet by turning on the representative checkbox in System Preferences. You'll find such checkboxes in the Date & Time, Displays, Sound, and other panels.

You can remove a menulet by

-dragging it off of your menu bar (or by turning off the corresponding checkbox in System Preferences). You move them around on the menu bar the same way—by

-dragging them horizontally.

If you have a small computer screen, OS X may cut off the leftmost menulets when you have a program with a lot of menus open. (This happens on some laptop screens when using Xcode, for example.) For this reason, it's best to position your most essential menulets on the right—that way, they'll never get cut off.

The prescribed way to eject a CD or DVD is to press the Eject (or F12) key on your keyboard. That's not much help if you have a non-Apple keyboard, though (or if, thanks to a rash of bad luck, you find yourself without a keyboard altogether).

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Whether you've just started using Mac OS X or switched a long time ago, you should take some time to individualize your new computing world. After all, the odds that Apple came up with an operating system that perfectly suits you, NASA scientists, and the 8-year-old down the street are pretty slim.

Like it or not, Mac OS X comes with a number of built-in features that you may not need; they also drink up memory and horsepower that could be used for stuff you do care about. Called services in Apple-speak, they include Personal File Sharing, Windows Sharing, Personal Web Sharing, Remote Login, FTP Access, Remote Apple Events, Printer Sharing, and so on.

To limit the amount of memory these services use, simply turn off the ones you don't need. If you're not on a network (or the Internet), you don't need any of them. If you share files with a Mac or a Windows PC on a network, though, leave on Personal File Sharing (for sharing with other Macs) and/or Windows Sharing (for sharing with networked PCs).

To turn these features on and off, choose

→ System Preferences. Click the Sharing icon, click the Services tab, and check off the corresponding checkboxes.

It's a classic problem. You're sitting in a large office, with printers scattered all over the premises. You print an important document and have no clue where to pick it up. (This situation is especially worrisome if what you're printing is your resumé and cover letter to a headhunter.)

Fortunately, Figure 1-9 illustrates a sneaky trick that reveals the name of the Mac that's attached to a certain printer, the better to help you stalk it down.

Every night, without complaint or fuss, Mac OS X performs a series of system-maintenance tasks: exciting things like cleaning up temporary files left by your programs, updating databases that track files, and deleting system logs. Without these regular operations, you'll wind up with wasted hard drive space and some file searches won't work.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Finder, also known as the desktop, represents what most people think of when they picture a Macintosh: user-friendly and efficient. As you'll discover in this chapter, however, you can make it even more so.

Although it appears simple on the surface, the Finder is actually a complex program, powerful enough to manage disk and network interaction. To maximize your time in the Finder, you'll want to get acquainted with some of its more subtle features.

In Mac OS X 10.3, your Finder can seemingly have as many unique looks as cats have lives, as seen in Figure 2-1.

To eliminate the sidebar from a standard Finder window, just double-click the small dot between the sidebar and the main portion of the window. To remove the toolbar and the sidebar, click the pill-shaped button in the upper-right corner of the window, or select View → Hide Toolbar.

It's impossible to have a Finder window without a toolbar but with a sidebar.

Figure 2-1: Eenie, meenie, minie, moe...with which Finder shall I go? At top is a Finder window with its toolbar and sidebar; the middle version has vanquished the sidebar; and the bottom image has lost both the sidebar and toolbar.

When a Finder window is in list view, you can re-sort the list by clicking any column heading, like Date Modified or Kind, as shown in Figure 2-2.

But that's baby stuff. The power user, of course, can change the sort column without assistance from the mouse by simply pressing Control-Tab to "click" the column to the right, or Shift-Control-Tab to "click" the one to the left.

Mac OS X no longer comes with an Erase Disk command, at least not in the Finder. Instead, to erase one of your disks—say, a rewritable CD—you must use Disk Utility, a program in your Applications

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Although it appears simple on the surface, the Finder is actually a complex program, powerful enough to manage disk and network interaction. To maximize your time in the Finder, you'll want to get acquainted with some of its more subtle features.

In Mac OS X 10.3, your Finder can seemingly have as many unique looks as cats have lives, as seen in Figure 2-1.

To eliminate the sidebar from a standard Finder window, just double-click the small dot between the sidebar and the main portion of the window. To remove the toolbar and the sidebar, click the pill-shaped button in the upper-right corner of the window, or select View → Hide Toolbar.

It's impossible to have a Finder window without a toolbar but with a sidebar.

Figure 2-1: Eenie, meenie, minie, moe...with which Finder shall I go? At top is a Finder window with its toolbar and sidebar; the middle version has vanquished the sidebar; and the bottom image has lost both the sidebar and toolbar.

When a Finder window is in list view, you can re-sort the list by clicking any column heading, like Date Modified or Kind, as shown in Figure 2-2.

But that's baby stuff. The power user, of course, can change the sort column without assistance from the mouse by simply pressing Control-Tab to "click" the column to the right, or Shift-Control-Tab to "click" the one to the left.

Mac OS X no longer comes with an Erase Disk command, at least not in the Finder. Instead, to erase one of your disks—say, a rewritable CD—you must use Disk Utility, a program in your Applications → Utilities folder.

Once you're in the program, select the disk you wish to erase from the list on the left, and then click the Erase tab.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Finder offers a variety of ways to navigate the various windows and menus on your screen. Some, like clicking, are obvious. Others, such as the hints in this section, are less so.

When you're typing up a storm, the six inches from your keyboard to your mouse can feel like six miles. To help keep your hands in one place, Apple provides some keyboard shortcuts for the Finder:

In the Finder, -1, -2, and -3 switch the window to icon view, list view, and column view, respectively.
If you press -` (next to 1 on the keyboard), the Finder cycles among its open windows. The Finder treats the desktop itself as a window, so if you've got three open windows, you must repeat the keystroke four times to return to the first one.

This window-rotating ploy works in any program, not just the Finder.

In list view, if you press the right arrow key, the Finder expands a selected folder's flippy triangle, revealing the files and folders inside it. If you press the left arrow key, the Finder collapses it again (Figure 2-5).
If you press -delete, the Finder throws your selected item(s) in the Trash.
If you press Shift- -delete, the Finder empties the Trash. (To bypass the confirmation box, hold down Option, too.)

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

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 2-16, top). Since it's not a duplicate of the file—just of the icon—it therefore requires negligible storage space. When you double-click the alias, the original file opens. Even if you rename the alias, rename the original file, move the alias (even to a different drive), or move the original (on the same drive only), double-clicking the alias still opens the original icon.

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.

The only problem with creating an alias by using the Make Alias command is that you wind up with the word alias on the end of the file name. If you want the thing to look halfway decent, you're now committed to the tedious task of backspacing over that little suffix. You can also create an alias by Control-clicking a normal icon and choosing Make Alias from the shortcut menu that appears, but once again, the word alias appears on the resulting alias.

Fortunately, you can avoid the whole issue by creating an alias by Option-

-dragging the original icon out of its window. Aliases created this way lack the word alias on the file name.

Figure 2-16: Top: You can identify an alias by the tiny arrow badge on the lower-left corner. (Longtime Mac fans should note that the name no longer appears in italics.)

Mac OS X makes it easy to find the file to which an alias points without actually having to open it. Just highlight the alias and then choose File

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

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. In general, 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 viewing. (Instead of clicking Back, you can also press -[, or choose Go → Back—particularly handy if the toolbar is hidden.)

The Forward button 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.

The Back button is also your ticket to the window you were in before you used the Finder's Search bar.

View controls. The three tiny buttons next to the Forward button switch the current window into icon, list, or column view, respectively.
Action button. This pop-up contains an assortment of handy "action" items that help with tasks such as labeling files and folders, moving items to the Trash, and creating new folders. Nearly identical actions are also available when you control-click an item in the Finder.
Search. This is your Find command. It lets you pinpoint a certain icon within this window (or within any of its folders).

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

When you're not actually working on a document, you're probably manipulating one or more files or folders in the Finder. The following hints will help you maximize your file and folder manipulation time.

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. Unfortunately, understanding when the Mac copies a dragged icon, as opposed to merely moving it, bewilders many a beginner. Here's the scheme:

Dragging from one folder to another (on the same disk) moves the icon.
Dragging from one disk (or disk partition) to another copies the folder or file.
Option-dragging copies the icon instead of moving it—always. 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, deleting it from the original disk in the process. (Press immediately after you start to drag.)

This method is not recommended for moving batches of files. If a network connection (or the electricity) goes out during the operation, you have no way of knowing when the system will delete the originals, and you could lose some files as a result. When moving large selections, therefore, it's better to copy the files first and manually delete the originals later (once you're sure the new files were copied successfully).

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

One of the tremendous benefits of the Mac has always been the degree of customization that you can apply to your environment. Icons, sounds, graphics, and color can make your computer truly your computer. The following hints let you exceed the standard tricks and create a unique operating environment.

Behind the initial login screen, the background image is blue with some white arcs running through it in a semicircular pattern. It's very attractive—the first 4,000 times you look at it.

If you'd like to express your creativity by replacing this background with something groovy and personal, try this technique:

Because you're altering the screen everyone sees before login, this change affects all account holders on the Mac.

Choose an image you'd like to use.

Any JPEG is fine, though there's no point in using an image that's larger than your display area.
In the Finder, open the Library → Desktop Pictures folder.

A list of the standard Apple desktop images appears. Aqua Blue.jpg is the file you want to replace. Drag it out of the folder to a safe place as a backup (or just rename it).
Drag your own graphic into the Desktop Pictures folder. Rename your file Aqua Blue.jpg.

This sleight-of-hand allows the system to find it during the startup process.

If you don't have a file in this folder called Aqua Blue.jpg, Mac OS X simply uses a solid blue background for the login screen.
Log out to bring up the login panel.

Presto! Your new image appears behind your login screen.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

The Dock, a central and critical component of Mac OS X, combines several important operating-system functions into a single row of icons across one edge of your screen. It's a program launcher, a program switcher, a document-storage site, an information hub, a floor wax, and a dessert topping!

Seriously, though, the Dock can help simplify your workflow, and you can personalize it to within an inch of its life. The hints in this chapter are designed to make your time with the Dock more productive. And if you can't stand the thing, the last hint explains how to vanquish the Dock completely.

By now, you already know the basics of the Dock: any icon you drag onto it is installed there as a large, square button (Figure 3-1); and 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 you frequently access.

Figure 3-1: Everything on the left side is an application—a program, in other words. Everything else goes on the right side—files, folders, minimized windows, and so on.

The other basic Dock information morsel is that folders and disks are hierarchical. That is, if you click a folder or disk icon on the right side of the Dock and hold down the mouse button, a list of the icon's contents sprouts out of it. This hierarchical structure lets you burrow into folders within folders. (See Figure 3-2 for an illustration.)

Figure 3-2: As long as you keep the mouse button pressed, you can burrow into folders within folders—either with the intention of opening a file or folder (by releasing the mouse button as you point), or just to see what's inside.

To make the pop-up menu appear instantly, just Control-click the Dock icon or right-click it (if you have a two-button mouse).

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

By now, you already know the basics of the Dock: any icon you drag onto it is installed there as a large, square button (Figure 3-1); and 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 you frequently access.

Figure 3-1: Everything on the left side is an application—a program, in other words. Everything else goes on the right side—files, folders, minimized windows, and so on.

The other basic Dock information morsel is that folders and disks are hierarchical. That is, if you click a folder or disk icon on the right side of the Dock and hold down the mouse button, a list of the icon's contents sprouts out of it. This hierarchical structure lets you burrow into folders within folders. (See Figure 3-2 for an illustration.)

Figure 3-2: As long as you keep the mouse button pressed, you can burrow into folders within folders—either with the intention of opening a file or folder (by releasing the mouse button as you point), or just to see what's inside.

To make the pop-up menu appear instantly, just Control-click the Dock icon or right-click it (if you have a two-button mouse).

The coolest trick about these menus, though, is that you navigate them entirely from the keyboard. For example, if you've put the Applications folder in the Dock, you can Control-click it to make the menu of its contents appear, and then you can type uti to jump right to Utilities. From there, you can press the right arrow key to display the contents of the Utilities folder and type ter to jump to the Terminal. With a quick hit of the Space bar, you can open it.

Nobody but you can put icons on the right side of the Dock. Program icons, however, appear on the left side of the Dock automatically whenever you open a program (even one that's not normally listed in the Dock). These icons remain there for as long as the program is running, and they give you a quick way to add a program's icon onto your Dock for good, as shown in Figure 3-3.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Sure, anyone can work with the Dock by dragging stuff to and fro, Control-clicking various icons to use shortcut menus, and so on. However, much more power lurks in the heart of the Dock. (Use it only for the forces of good.)

Most of the fun of the Dock comes from pressing modifier keys (Shift, Option, and so on) as you click. Here are the most winning combinations:

If you Option-click a program's Dock icon, that program opens, but the Dock instantly hides the one you were using previously, along with all of its windows.
If you Option- -click a program's Dock icon, that program opens, and the Dock hides the windows of all other running applications. This trick is a fantastic way to leap into one program—the Finder is a frequent candidate—and instantly get everything else out of your hair.

When you use this method, already-minimized windows vanish from the Dock altogether. (When you unhide a program, its minimized window icons reappear.) It's ideal when, say, you're surfing the Web and you've minimized 20 windows to the Dock; now if you hide the browser, you don't have to look at all that screen clutter until you want it back.
If you -click any icon on the Dock, you jump to the Finder, where a folder window opens highlighting whatever you clicked on. You might use this technique when you want to back up a document or folder whose icon is on the Dock, and you don't want to sift through the whole hard drive to find it.
If you Control-click the divider bar that separates the two sides of the Dock, a menu appears (Figure 3-7).

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Sure, the Dock is useful, boosts your productivity, and so on, but if productivity were the only point of using a computer, we'd all be using DOS. Using the following techniques, you can express your inner coolness.

Each time you drag an icon off the Dock, you're treated to a little animated puff of white smoke. (Never say Apple didn't benefit from its $500 million investment in the Newton.)

But if that's all you want out of life, you're no better than the other downtrodden masses using Mac OS X. Why not use a colored puff of smoke instead?

This modification requires a graphics program that can edit PNG files—Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GraphicConverter, for example. It also requires some Terminal editing.

The first order of business is to create the new graphic that will serve as the replacements for the existing white poof. In a graphics program, create a file that's 128 pixels wide, 640 pixels high, 72 dpi, and has a transparent background. You're going to use this image template to create five images, each in a 128 128 pixel square.

If you're using Photoshop Elements, for example, create a grid with 128-pixel spacing (Preferences → Grid) and then make sure it's visible (View → Grid). Create each individual image so that it's centered within its own square. This step ensures a smooth animation in your custom poof. You can see a very simple example of a finished image in Figure 3-11.

Figure 3-11: This disappearing Aqua-blue star (trust us, it's blue) is about to become the Dock's new poof animation. You can work with layers, transparency, and so on, as you normally would; just make sure that each of the five images is located in exactly the same portion of its 128 128 cell as the others.

Once you've completed your masterpiece, choose File → Save As, and change the file format to PNG (no interlacing). Save the file somewhere that's easy to find, like your desktop, and name it something obvious like "newpoof.png."

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

For the longest time, the success of Mac OS X was up in the air. It all boiled down to one thing: programs. Without applications, no operating system can survive, and for most people, switching to Mac OS X meant having to buy all new, Mac OS X-compatible programs.

Fortunately, the tide has turned at last. All of the big-name programs have finally been made over in the Mac OS X mold, and thousands of smaller, lesser-known programs are sprouting up to make this operating system more interesting, useful, and fun.

All you need to do now is figure out how to use them.

As you start using all your marvelous Mac OS X programs, you could find yourself spending more time sifting through open windows than breathing. The following hints can help you manage the window glut. (Also be sure to read the Exposé hints section of this chapter, where you'll learn to master the hidden tricks of Panther's new window management tool.)

If there are a lot of open windows cluttering your screen, you can minimize them individually to the Dock as a housekeeping measure. Hiding them one by one, however, takes a lot of time that would be better spent playing Bugdom, for example.

It's easier to use the Hide Others command, which appears in each program's Application menu (the boldfaced menu that bears its name). Choosing Hide Others instantly hides the windows of all programs except the one you're currently using—an especially likeable trick if your program offers the semi-standard Option-

-H keyboard equivalent.

Hiding other programs isn't the same thing as quitting them (which takes time) or even minimizing their windows (which entails a good deal of clicking to bring them back later). It's simply an invisibility mode unto itself.

Alas, not every program offers the Option-

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

As you start using all your marvelous Mac OS X programs, you could find yourself spending more time sifting through open windows than breathing. The following hints can help you manage the window glut. (Also be sure to read the Exposé hints section of this chapter, where you'll learn to master the hidden tricks of Panther's new window management tool.)

If there are a lot of open windows cluttering your screen, you can minimize them individually to the Dock as a housekeeping measure. Hiding them one by one, however, takes a lot of time that would be better spent playing Bugdom, for example.

It's easier to use the Hide Others command, which appears in each program's Application menu (the boldfaced menu that bears its name). Choosing Hide Others instantly hides the windows of all programs except the one you're currently using—an especially likeable trick if your program offers the semi-standard Option-

-H keyboard equivalent.

Hiding other programs isn't the same thing as quitting them (which takes time) or even minimizing their windows (which entails a good deal of clicking to bring them back later). It's simply an invisibility mode unto itself.

Alas, not every program offers the Option-

-H keyboard shortcut, and in those situations, mousing up to the Hide Others command is a lot of trouble.

Fortunately, that shortcut has a shortcut of its own: rather than using the Hide Others command, you may find it faster simply to Option-

-click the Dock icon of the program you want to keep around. (Option-

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Exposé is a window-management tool built-in to Mac OS X 10.3. With the press of a key (or the click of a mouse), your open windows magically arrange themselves onscreen, making it easy to find just the one you want. Or they fly off to the edges of the screen, making it easy to work with files on your desktop. Exposé is one of those technologies that, after you use it a few times, make you wonder how you got along without it. Here are some hints to help you maximize this powerful feature.

The standard method of activating Exposé is to use the keyboard: F9 to shrink all onscreen windows; F10 to show the current application's windows; and F11 to show the desktop. However, there's an alternative, hidden method of using at least two of Exposé's modes: the "Floating Exposé Blob." As shown in Figure 4-5, the floating blob is a translucent gelatinous globule that hovers over all your open windows.

Figure 4-5: Top: Most of the time, the Floating Exposé Blob is partially transparent, so you can see what's underneath it.

To activate the blob, you first must make a quick visit to Terminal, found in Applications → Utilities. Type the following line, then hit Enter:

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-floater -bool true

For this change to take effect, you'll need to quit and restart the Dock. You can do so in the Terminal by typing killall dock. As soon as the Dock restarts, you should see The Blob. As explained in Figure 4-5, you can activate a couple of Exposé modes via the blob (and for real fun, add the Shift key to either sequence to watch the fun in slow motion).

You can drag the blob around onscreen, too. To make it vanish entirely, just repeat the above command in Terminal replacing "true" with "false."

When you use Exposé's Show Desktop key (F11), all open windows fly off to the edges of the screen, leaving only a thin border to let you know they're out there. But there's a hidden Show Desktop mode that shrinks your open windows in plain sight, as seen in Figure 4-6.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Once you've tweaked your machine to suit your style, you can use these hints to increase your efficiency.

The Open and Save dialog boxes offer an ingenious column-view look at your entire hard drive, making it easy for you to choose a folder for opening or saving a document. Trouble is, the dialog box appears with all the majesty of a peanut floating in the middle of your screen. It's just too small—and there's no reason it should be that way.

Fortunately, Mac OS X lets you expand these dialog boxes and even remembers the size you like. Now the next time you open or save something in that program—even if you restart the program—the dialog box remains your preferred size.

Simply follow the directions in Figure 4-8.

When you bring up an Open or Save dialog box in Mac OS X, you can click various columns, folders, and pop-up menus to navigate your system.

It's often much faster, though, if you tell the dialog box, "Look here!" and shove the icon you want under its nose, by dragging a file or folder directly into the dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-9.

To navigate directly to your desktop folder from an Open or Save dialog box, the Hide All Windows Exposé trick ( Section 4.2.2) can be a handy timesaver. Once you reveal the desktop, just begin dragging the icon you want, press the keyboard shortcut to turn off Exposé, and drop the icon right into the dialog box.

Figure 4-8: Top: To make a program's Open and Save dialog boxes easier to use, click the lone triangle to the right of the Save As label.

When using Save As, you can quickly jump to any folder on your system by hitting the / key. When your press this key, a "Go to the Folder" dialog box pops up, allowing you to type the path to your destination.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

For a company whose core audience includes graphic designers and photographers, the printing features of Mac OS X got off to a shaky start. With each new version of Mac OS X, however, the situation (especially regarding printer drivers) improves. In the meantime, you've got these helpful tips.

It could happen to you: you have to print a document over and over in draft mode, then your hand becomes tired from changing the settings in the Print dialog box every time you need such a printout.

Fortunately (although few Mac fans realize it), the Print dialog box lets you save combinations of settings. To create custom print settings and then save them for future use, follow the directions in Figure 4-18.

Figure 4-18: To preserve printing settings, choose File Print to summon the Print dialog box. Make the settings you'd like to preserve. Before you click Print, choose Save As from the Presets pop-up menu, and give this setting combination a name. You can recall the whole shebang in the future by simply selecting this name from the pop-up menu.

To delete a custom setting from the Presets pop-up menu, choose it in the menu, and then choose Delete from the same menu.

In Cocoa applications, you open the font panel by hitting

-T. This panel is relatively large as it consists of a preview area, columns for Collections, Family, Typeface, and Size, in addition to several formatting settings.

It doesn't have to be so large, though. To work with a much smaller font panel, just drag up and left from the resize handle on the lower-right corner of the window. As you shrink the panel, sections will disappear or change into different forms until you're left with a truly tiny font panel, as seen in Figure 4-19.

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

As described in the sidebar on Sidebar 4.2, Mac OS X is like the renaissance operating system: it's a polyglot, capable of running three different kinds of software: Cocoa (written from scratch for Mac OS X), Carbon (an older program that's been updated for Mac OS X), and Classic (Mac OS 9 programs that are still Mac OS 9 programs).

Although somewhat unknown to those who are new to the Mac with OS X, Classic programs (older, Mac OS 9-compatible ones) are likely to be part of most longtime Mac fans' lives for a while yet to come. Therefore, it's well worth familiarizing yourself with Classic, the Mac OS 9 simulator that opens up automatically whenever you try to launch a Mac OS 9 program.

Do you have an aging printer that works great in Classic programs but doesn't work in Mac OS X programs?

Your first resort should be to contact the printer company or, at the very least, to search the Web to see if some enterprising programmer has adapted a printer driver to work with your Mac. That should include a stop at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net, where you'll find Gimp-Print, a collection of hundreds of Mac OS X printer drivers for older printers. Although Gimp-Print is included in Mac OS X 10.3, it's still worth a visit to their site to see if any updated drivers have been released.

If you're still having no luck, and you need to print on that old printer only occasionally, here's a method of last resort. In a Mac OS X program, save the document as a PDF file (File → Print → Save as PDF). Next, open the document in a Classic program that can read PDF files, like Adobe Acrobat—look in your Applications (Mac OS 9) folder for the Classic version. Now print away.

If you're accustomed to the old Mac OS 9 days—where you'd use the

menu to launch control panels and programs—you might not know how to access your control panels from Mac OS X. You could, of course, switch to a Mac OS 9 program every time you need to bring up the old

Additional content appearing in this section has been removed.
Purchase this book now or read it online at Safari to get the whole thing!

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|Buy reprint rights for this chapter

Although Mac OS X is nice and stable, you may still experience problems from time to time. When you do, here are some simple steps to resolve the trouble.

Corrupted preference files can cause all kinds of strange behavior in certain programs: a program that used to work perfectly suddenly starts quitting at random, Mail stops working altogether, and so on. Eliminating the preference folder for a misbehaving program can often restore it to working order. Although you lose your preference settings when you use this technique, it's occasionally a necessary evil of troubleshooting.

Mac OS X maintains a separate preference file for each person who has an account. You can find your personal collection in the Home → Library → Preferences folder. Look for a file with the name of your misbehaving program and drag it to the Trash—com.apple.dock.plist is the Dock preference file, for example. If this action fixes the problem, you're done troubleshooting! (If not, gnash your teeth and try the next hint.)

In the case of the aforementioned Mail malfunction, a bad Address Book entry could be at fault since Mail reads the Address Book each time it opens. If that's at the root of your woes, you can revitalize Mail just by trashing the Address Book's database.

One of Mac OS X's most useful troubleshooting features is its multiuser capabilities. If you're experiencing trouble with some element of the system, and the previous hint didn't resolve it, the next step is to create a new "troubleshooting only" account.

Open System Preferences, click Accounts, and click the plus sign at the bottom left to add a new user. Fill in the form that appears, and assign the account a useful name like "Test Account" or "Save My Bacon." On the Security tab, turn on "Allow user to administer this computer" to make sure your test account has full system-management powers. Now log out of your normal account and log in as the test user (or click the Login

Table of Contents