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Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Ed

By David Pogue
Price: $29.95 USD
£20.95 GBP

Cover | Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Folders and Windows

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When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.4, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, liquidy blue progress bar.

Figure 1-1: Left: On Macs configured to accommodate different people at different times, this is one of the first things you see upon turning on the computer. Click your name. (If the list is long, you may have to scroll to find your name—or just type the first couple letters of it.)
Right: At this point, you're asked to type in your password. Type it and then click Log In (or press Return or Enter; pressing these keys usually "clicks" any blue, pulsing button in a dialog box). If you've typed the wrong password, the entire dialog box vibrates, in effect shaking its little dialog-box head, suggesting that you guess again. (See Chapter 11.)

What happens next depends on whether you're the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or house hold.

If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in Appendix A, no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list).
If the Mac asks for your password, type it and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 11 offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.

The desktop is the shimmering, three-dimensional Mac OS X landscape shown in Figure 1-2. If you're coming to Tiger from Mac OS 9 or Windows, don't panic. Most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of familiar elements. Here's a quick tour.

If your desktop looks even barer than 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 12.3.2.1.

Figure 1-2: The Mac OS X landscape looks like a futuristic version of Windows or the Mac OS. This is just a starting point, however. You can dress it up with a different background picture, adjust your windows in a million ways, and of course fill the Dock with only the programs, disks, folders, and files you need.

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Getting into Mac OS X

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When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.4, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, liquidy blue progress bar.

What happens next depends on whether you're the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or house hold.

If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in Appendix A, no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in Figure 1-1. Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list).
If the Mac asks for your password, type it and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. Chapter 11 offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.

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Windows and How to Work Them

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In designing Mac OS X, one of Apple's key goals was to address the window-proliferation problem. As you create more files, stash them in more folders, and launch more programs, it's easy to wind up paralyzed before a screen awash with cluttered, overlapping rectangles.

That's the problem addressed by Exposé, an innovative and useful feature that's probably worth at least $34 of Mac OS X's $130 price. It's described in detail on Section 5.3.

There are some handy clutter and navigation controls on the windows themselves, too. For example:

The Sidebar is the pane at the left side of every Finder window, unless you've hidden it (and, by the way, also at the left side of every full-sized Save and Open dialog box). It lists places where you might look for files and folders—that is, disks, folders, and network disks. Above the horizontal divider, you get the icons for your hard drives, iPods, memory cards, CDs, flash drives, and other removable goodies. Below the divider, you can stick the icons of anything else: files, programs, folders, or whatever.

Each icon is a shortcut. For example, click the Applications icon to view the contents of your Applications folder in the main part of the window (Figure 1-3). And if you click the icon of a file or program, it opens.

Figure 1-3: The Sidebar makes navigation very quick, because you can jump back and forth between distant corners of your Mac with a single click.
In column view, the Sidebar is especially handy because it eliminates all of the columns to the left of the one you want, all the way back to your hard-drive level. You've just folded up your desktop!
Good things to put here: Favorite programs; disks on the network to which you often connect; a document you're working on every day; and so on.
Folder and disk icons here work just like normal ones. You can drag a document onto a folder icon to file it there, drag a downloaded .sit file onto the StuffIt Expander icon there, and so on.
In fact, the disks and folders here are even spring-loaded (Section 2.4.5).

Section 1.2.1.1: Fine-tuning the Sidebar

The beauty of this parking lot for containers is that it's so easy to set up with

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The Three Window Views

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You can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of three ways: as icons; as a single, tidy list; or in a series of neat columns. Figure 1-12 shows the three different views.

Every window remembers its view settings independently. You might prefer to look over your Applications folder in list view (because it's crammed with files and folders), but you may prefer to view the less populated Users folder in icon view, where the larger icons are easier to double-click.

Figure 1-11: Position your mouse inside a Finder list-view window. You can scroll up and down by pressing ⌘ and Option as you drag. As you drag, the cursor changes shape, becoming a white-gloved butler's hand. Where can you get that kind of service these days?
(This trick used to work in icon views, too; it let you scroll diagonally, which was even more useful. Ah, well… Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away.)

To switch a window from one view to another, just click one of the three corresponding icons in the window's toolbar, as shown in Figure 1-12.

You can also switch views by choosing View → as Icons (or View → as Columns, or View → as List), which can be handy if you've hidden the toolbar. Or, for less mousing and more hardbodied efficiency, press ⌘-1, ⌘-2, or ⌘-3 for icon, list, or column view, respectively.

Figure 1-12: 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.
Remember that in any view (icon, list, or column), you can highlight an icon by typing the first couple letters of its name. In icon or list view, you can also press Tab to highlight the next icon (in alphabetical order), or Shift-Tab to highlight the previous one.

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Icon View

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In an icon view, every file, folder, and disk is represented by a small picture—an icon. This humble image, a visual representation of electronic bits and bytes, is the cornerstone of the entire Macintosh religion. (Maybe that's why it's called an icon.)

Mac OS X offers a number of useful icon view options, all of which are worth exploring. Start by opening any icon view window, and then choose View → Show View Options (⌘-J).

Section 1.4.1.1: Choosing icon sizes

Mac OS X draws the little pictures that represent your icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you (or the Mac) can scale them to almost any size without losing any quality or clarity. You can specify a new icon size either for a single window or for every icon view window on your machine (Figure 1-13).

Figure 1-13: Mac OS X lets you choose an icon size to suit your personality. For picture folders, it can often be very handy to pick a jumbo size, in effect creating a slide-sorter "light table" effect. Just use the slider in the View Options dialog box, shown in Figure 1-14.

In the View Options window (Figure 1-14), click one of the buttons at the top of the window—either "This window only" or "All windows"—to indicate whether you want to change the icon sizes in just the frontmost window or everywhere on the Mac.

Finally, drag the Icon Size slider back and forth until you find a size you like. (For added fun, make little cartoon sounds with your mouth.)

Section 1.4.1.2: Text size

Ring the bells! Fire the cannons! At last, Mac OS X fans can control the type size of icon names in the Finder!

In fact, if you choose "This window only" at the top of the palette, you can actually specify a different type size for every window on your machine. Neither Windows nor the Mac OS has ever offered that level of control before. (Why would you want to adjust the point size independently in different windows? Well, because you might want smaller type to fit more into a crammed list view without scrolling, while you can afford larger type in less densely populated windows.)

Your choices range only from 10 to 16 points, and you still can't choose a different font. But for people with especially big or especially small screens—or people with aging retinas—this feature is much better than nothing.

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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.

You have complete control over your columns, in that you get to decide how wide they should be, which of them should appear, and in what order (except that Name is always the first column). Here's how to master these columns.

Most of the world's list-view fans like their files listed alphabetically. It's occasionally useful, however, to view the newest files first, largest first, or whatever.

When a desktop window displays its icons in a list view, a convenient new strip of column headings appears (Figure 1-17). These column headings aren't just signposts; they're buttons, too. Click Name for alphabetical order, Date Modified to view newest first, Size to view largest files at the top, and so on.

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.

Figure 1-17: You control the sorting order of a list view by clicking the column headings (top). Click a second time to reverse the sorting order (bottom).
You'll find the identical triangle—indicating the identical information—in email programs, in iTunes, and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of the list can be useful.

When the triangle points upward, the oldest files, smallest files, or files beginning with numbers (or the letter A) appear at the top of the list, depending on which sorting criterion you have selected.

It may help you to remember that when the smallest portion of the triangle is at the top, the smallest files are listed first when viewed in size order.

To reverse the sorting order, just click the column heading a second time. Now the newest files, largest files, or files beginning with the letter Z appear at the top of the list. The tiny triangle turns upside-down.

One of the Mac's most attractive features is the tiny triangle that appears to the left of a folder's name in a list view. In its official documents, Apple calls these buttons

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Column View

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Icon view and list view should certainly be familiar to anyone who's used a personal computer before. But for many computer fans, column view is something new—and welcome.

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

The solution is shown in Figure 1-21. It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows all the icons of your disks, including your main hard drive.

When you click a disk (once), the second pane shows a list of all the folders in it. Each time you click a folder in one pane, the pane to its right shows what's inside. The other panes slide to the left, sometimes out of view. (Use the horizontal scroll bar to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you're actually looking at the file icons inside the most deeply nested folder.

Figure 1-21: 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 image 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.

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 before you on the screen. As soon as you click a different folder in one of the earlier panes, the panes to its right suddenly change, so that you can burrow down a different rabbit hole.

Furthermore, the Sidebar is always at the ready to help you jump to a new track; just click any disk or folder icon 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 ⌘-W, you can close the entire window, panes and all. Second, column view provides an excellent sense of where you are. Because your trail is visible at all times, it's much harder to get lost—wondering what folder you're in and how you got there—than in any other window view.

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Logging Out, Shutting Down

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If you're the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

If you're still shutting down your Mac after each use, you may be doing a lot more sitting around and waiting than necessary. Sleep mode consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and available, and wakes up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep, do one of the following:

Choose → Sleep.
Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12, if you don't have an Eject key). In the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23, click Sleep (or type S).
Press the Power button on your machine. On many desktop models, doing so makes it sleep immediately; on laptops, you get the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23. (Then again, if you have a laptop, just closing the lid is a much quicker way to send it to bed.)
Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting described on Section 9.13 will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.

You shouldn't have to restart the Mac very often—only in times of severe troubleshooting mystification, in fact. Here are a few ways to do it:

Choose → Restart. A confirmation dialog box appears; click Restart (or press Enter).
If you press Option as you release the mouse on the → Restart command, you won't be bothered by an "Are you sure?" confirmation box.
Press Control-⌘-Eject. (If you don't have an Eject key, substitute F12.)
Press Control-Eject to summon the dialog box shown in Figure 1-23; click Restart (or type R).

To shut down your machine completely (when you don't plan to use it for more than a couple of days, when you plan to transport it, and so on), do one of the following:

Choose → Shut Down. A simple confirmation dialog box appears; click Shut Down (or press Enter).
Once again, if you press Option as you release the mouse, no confirmation box will appear.

Figure 1-23: 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.

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Getting Help in Mac OS X

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It's a good thing you've got a book about Mac OS X in your hands, because you won't get much help from Apple. The only user manual you get with Mac OS X is the Help → Mac Help command, which you can also summon by pressing ⌘-?. You get a Web browser–like program that reads a set of help files that reside in your System → Library folder.

You're expected to find the topic you want in one of these two ways:

Drill down. The starting screen offers several "quick click" topics that may interest you (Figure 1-24). If so, keep clicking text headings until you find a topic that you want to read.
You can backtrack by clicking the Back (left-pointing arrow) button at the top of the browser window.

Figure 1-24: The Mac OS X Help system no longer bunches together the help pages from every program on your Mac, as it did in previous versions. When you're in the Finder, you get the general Macintosh help screens. When you're in iPhoto, you get only iPhoto help screens. And so on.
But using the Home pop-up menu, you can switch to another program's Help system even if that program isn't open.
Use the "Ask a Question" blank. Type the phrase you want, such as printing or switching applications, into the blank at the top of the window, and then press Return.
The Mac responds by showing you a list of help-screen topics that may pertain to what you need; see Figure 1-25 for details.

Figure 1-25: The bars indicate the Mac's "relevance" rating—how well it thinks each help page matches your search. Double-click a topic's name to open the help page. If it isn't as helpful as you hoped, click the Back button (the left-pointing arrow) at the top of the window to return to the list of relevant topics. Click the little Home button to return to the Help Center's welcome screen.

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Chapter 2: Organizing Your Stuff

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The icon for your hard drive (usually called Macintosh HD) may appear in the upper-right corner of your screen. But if you begin each morning by double-clicking it, like millions of other people who've grown used to older versions of the Mac OS, you're in for a shock: Your stuff isn't there.

All you'll find in the Macintosh HD window is a set of folders called Applications, Library, and Users—folders you didn't put there. (If you upgraded an existing Mac to Mac OS X 10.4, you'll also see all your original hard drive folders nestled among them.)

Most of these folders aren't very useful to you, the Mac's human companion. They're there for Mac OS X's own use. Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, which you'll access only for occasional administrative purposes.

Instead of setting up your nest—your files, folders, aliases, and so on—in the hard drive window, Mac OS X keeps all of it in your Home folder. That's a folder bearing your name (or whatever name you typed when you installed Mac OS X).

One way to find the Home folder is to double-click the Users folder, and then double-click the folder inside it that bears your name and looks like a house (see Figure 2-1). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.

Mac OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder:

Choose Go → Home, or press Shift-⌘-H.
In the Sidebar (Section 1.2.1), click the Home icon (the little house).
In the Dock, click the Home icon. (If you don't see one, consult Section 4.2 for instructions on how to put one there.)
Press ⌘-N, or choose File → New Finder Window. (If your Home folder doesn't open when you do that, see Section 1.2.7.)

All of these steps open your Home folder directly.

So why has Apple demoted your files to a folder three levels deep? The answer may send you through the five stages of grief—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance—but if you're willing to go through it, much of the mystery surrounding Mac OS X will fade away.

Mac OS X has been designed from the ground up for

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The Mac OS X Folder Structure

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Mac OS X is rife with shortcuts for opening this all-important folder:

Choose Go → Home, or press Shift-⌘-H.
In the Sidebar (Section 1.2.1), click the Home icon (the little house).
In the Dock, click the Home icon. (If you don't see one, consult Section 4.2 for instructions on how to put one there.)
Press ⌘-N, or choose File → New Finder Window. (If your Home folder doesn't open when you do that, see Section 1.2.7.)

All of these steps open your Home folder directly.

Mac OS X has been designed from the ground up for

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Icon Names

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Every document, program, folder, and disk on your Mac is represented by an icon: a colorful little picture that you can move, copy, or double-click to open. In Mac OS X, icons look more like photos than cartoons, and you can scale them to practically any size.

A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 255 letters and spaces. If you're accustomed to the 31-character limit of Mac OS 9, that's quite a luxurious ceiling.

If you're used to Windows, you may be delighted to discover that in Mac OS X, you can name your files using letters, numbers, punctuation—in fact, any symbol except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes. And you can't use a period to begin a file's name.

To rename a file, click its name or icon (to highlight it) and then press Return or Enter. (Or, if you have time to kill, click once on the name, wait a moment, and then click a second time.)

In any case, a rectangle now appears around the name (see Figure 2-2). At this point, the existing name is highlighted; just begin typing to replace it. If you type a very long name, the rectangle grows vertically to accommodate new lines of text.

If you simply 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.

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

When you're finished typing, press Return, Enter, or Tab—or just click somewhere else—to make the renaming rectangle disappear.

You can give more than one file or folder the same name, as long as they're not in the same folder. For example, you can have as many files named "Chocolate Cake Recipe" as you like, provided each is in a different folder. And, of course, files called Recipe. doc and Recipe.xls can co-exist in a folder, too.

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Selecting Icons

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To highlight a single icon in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once. (In a list or column view, as described in Chapter 1, you can also click on any visible piece of information about that file—its size, kind, date modified, and so on.) Both the icon and the name darken in a uniquely Tigerish way.

You can change the color of the oval highlighting that appears around the name of a selected icon. Choose

→ System Preferences, click Appearance, and use the Highlight Color pop-up menu.)

Figure 2-3: You can highlight several icons simultaneously by dragging a box around them. To do so, drag from outside of the target icons diagonally across them (right), creating a translucent gray rectangle as you go. Any icons or icon names touched by this rectangle are selected when you release the mouse. If you press the Shift or ⌘ key as you do this, any previously highlighted icons remain selected.

That much may seem obvious. But most first-time Mac users have no idea how to manipulate more than one icon at a time—an essential survival skill in a graphic interface like the Mac's.

To highlight multiple files in preparation for moving or copying, use one of these techniques:

To highlight all the icons. To select all the icons in a window, press ⌘-A (the equivalent of the Edit → Select All command).
To highlight several icons by dragging. You can drag diagonally to highlight a group of nearby icons, as shown in Figure 2-3. In a list view, in fact, you don't even have to drag over the icons themselves—your cursor can touch any part of any file's row, like its modification date or file size.
If you include a particular icon in your diagonally dragged group by mistake, ⌘-click it to remove it from the selected cluster.
To highlight consecutive icons in a list. If you're looking at the contents of a window in list view or column view, you can drag vertically over the file and folder names to highlight a group of consecutive icons, as described above. (Begin the drag in a blank spot.)
There's a faster way to do the same thing: Click the first icon you want to highlight, and then Shift-click the last file. All the files in between are automatically selected, along with the two icons you clicked. Figure 2-4 illustrates the idea.

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Moving and Copying Icons

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In Mac OS X, there are two ways to move or copy icons from one place to another: by dragging them, or by using the Copy and Paste commands.

You can drag icons from one folder to another, from one drive to another, from a drive to a folder on another drive, and so on. (When you've selected several icons, drag any one of them; the others tag along.) While the Mac is copying, you can tell that the process is still under way even if the progress bar is hidden behind a window, because the icon of the copied material shows up dimmed in its new home, darkening only when the copying process is over. (You can also tell because Tiger's progress box is a lot clearer and prettier than it used to be.) You can cancel the process by pressing either ⌘-period or the Esc key.

If you're copying files into a disk or folder that already contains items with the same names, Mac OS X asks you individually about each one. ("An older item named 'Fiddlesticks' with extension '.doc' already exists in this location.") Note that, thank heaven, Mac OS X tells you whether the version you're replacing is older or newer than the one you're moving.

Turn on "Apply to all" if all of the incoming icons should (or should not) replace the old ones of the same names. Then click Replace or Don't Replace, as you see fit, or Stop to halt the whole copying business.

Understanding when the Mac copies a dragged icon and when it just moves the icon bewilders many a beginner. However, the scheme is fairly simple (see Figure 2-5) when you consider the following:

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. (You can drag icons either into an open window or directly onto a disk or folder icon.)
If you press the Option key as you release an icon you've dragged, you copy the icon instead of moving it. Doing so within a single folder produces a duplicate of the file called "[Whatever its name was] copy."
If you press the ⌘ key as you release an icon you've dragged from one disk to another, you move the file or folder, in the process deleting it from the original disk.

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Aliases: Icons in Two Places at Once

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Highlighting an icon and then choosing File → Make Alias (or pressing ⌘-L), generates an alias, a specially branded duplicate of the original icon (see Figure 2-7). It's not a duplicate of the file—just of the icon; therefore it requires negligible storage space. When you double-click the alias, the original file opens. (A Macintosh alias is essentially the same as a Windows shortcut.)

Because you can create as many aliases as you want of a single file, aliases let you, in effect, stash that file in many different folder locations simultaneously. Double-click any one of them, and you open the original icon, wherever it may be on your system.

You can also create an alias of an icon by Option-⌘-dragging it out of its window. (Aliases you create this way lack the word alias on the file name—a distinct delight to those who find the suffix redundant and annoying.) You can also create an alias by Control-clicking a normal icon and choosing Make Alias from the shortcut menu that appears, or by highlighting an icon and then choosing Make Alias from the Action menu.

An alias takes up almost no disk space, even if the original file is enormous. Aliases are smart, too: even if you rename the alias, rename the original file, move the alias, and move the original around on the disk, double-clicking the alias still opens the original icon.

Hey! Where the heck are my Favorites?

In previous versions of Mac OS X, the File → Add to Favorites command placed the names of icons you've highlighted into a submenu of the Go → Favorites command. The Favorites scheme, in other words, was yet another mechanism of listing your favorite files, folders, programs, disks, and even network-accessible folders for quick access.

Trouble was, Mac OS X already had a number of different methods for stashing favorite icons for convenient access, like the Dock, the Finder toolbar, and the Sidebar. So Apple decided that enough was enough; it hid the Add to Favorites command. It's now in your File menu only if you press the Shift key.

There is, however, still a Favorites folder. It's sitting right there in your Home

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Color Labels

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Mac OS X 10.4 includes a welcome blast from the Macintosh past: 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 Action 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 2-8 shows the routine.

After you've applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks—in some cases, on all of them simultaneously, even if they're scattered across multiple hard drives. For example:

Round up files with Find. Using the Find command described in Chapter 3, 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.
Using labels in conjunction with Find this way is one of the most useful and inexpensive backup schemes ever devised—whenever you finish working on a document that you'd like to back up, Control-click it and apply a label called, for example, Backup. At the end of each day, use the Find command to round up all files with the Backup label—and then drag them as a group onto your backup 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 2-9.

Figure 2-8: Top: Use the File menu, Action menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons.
Bottom: Instantly, the icon's name takes on the selected shade. In a list or column view, the entire row takes on that shade, as shown in Figure 2-9. (If you choose the little X, you're removing any labels that you may have applied.)

This technique might be useful when, for example, your job is to process several different folders of documents; for each folder, you're supposed to convert graphics files, throw out old files, or whatever. As soon as you finish working your way through one folder, flag it with a label called Done. The folder jumps to the top (or bottom) of the window, safely marked for your reference pleasure, leaving the next unprocessed folder at your fingertips, ready to go.

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The Trash

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No single element of the Macintosh interface is as recognizable or famous as the Trash can, which now appears at the end of the Dock.

You can discard almost any icon by dragging it onto the Trash icon (which actually resembles a waste-basket, not a trash can, but let's not quibble). When the tip of your arrow cursor touches the Trash icon, the little wastebasket turns black. When you release the mouse, you're well on your way to discarding whatever it was you dragged. As a convenience, Mac OS X even replaces the empty-wastebasket icon with a wastebasket-filled-with-crumpled-up-papers icon, to let you know there's something in there.

Learn the keyboard alternative to dragging something to the Trash: Highlight the icon and then press ⌘-Delete. This technique is not only far faster than dragging, but requires far less precision, especially if you have a large screen. Mac OS X does all the Trash-targeting for you.

Figure 2-10: Top left: In the Labels tab of the Preferences dialog box, you can change the predefined label text. Each label can be up to 31 letters and spaces long.
Bottom right: Now your list and column views reveal meaningful text tags instead of color names.

File and folder icons sit in the Trash forever—or until you choose Finder → Empty Trash, whichever comes first.

If you haven't yet emptied the Trash, you can open its window by clicking the wastebasket icon once. Now you can review its contents: icons that you've placed on the waiting list for extinction. If you change your mind, you can rescue any of these items by dragging them out of the Trash window.

If dragging something to the Trash was the last thing you did, you can press ⌘-Z—the keyboard shortcut of the Edit → Undo command. This not only removes it from the Trash, but also returns it to the folder from which it came. This trick works even if the Trash window isn't open.

If you're confident that the items in the Trash window are worth deleting, use any of these three options:

Choose Finder → Empty Trash.
Press Shift-⌘-Delete. Or, if you'd just as soon not bother with the "Are you sure?" message, throw the Option key in there, too.

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Get Info

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By clicking an icon and then choosing File → Get Info, you open an important window like the one shown in Figure 2-11. It's a collapsible, multi-panel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. For example:

For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.
For a document icon, you see when it was created and modified, and what programs it "belongs" to.
For an alias, you learn the location of the actual icon it refers to.

Mac OS X comes with a built-in command that compresses a file or folder down to a single, smaller icon—an archive—suitable for storing or emailing.
It's just like using StuffIt in previous Mac OS versions, except for two big changes. First, Mac OS X 10.4 creates .zip files, the same compression format used in Windows. That means that you can now send .zip files back and forth to PC owners without worrying that they won't be able to open them. In Tiger, these files open even more reliably in Windows. (Pre- Panther /Tiger Mac owners can open .zip files, too. They just use the free StuffIt Expander as usual.)
Second, the software that does the compressing is built right in. Control-click a file or folder, and choose "Create Archive of [the icon's name]" from the shortcut menu. (Of course, you can use the Action menu instead.)
Mac OS X thoughtfully creates a .zip archive, but leaves the original behind so you can continue working with it.
Opening a .zip file somebody sends you is equally easy: Just double-click it. Zip!—it opens.
On the other hand, Tiger is the first Mac OS X version that does not come with StuffIt Expander, the free unstuffing program that recognizes .zip files, .sit files, and just about any other form of compressed files.
If you don't already have a copy of Expander from a previous Mac OS version, you're supposed to download and install it yourself, which is well worth doing. You can get it from, for example, this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.
If you open the Get Info window when nothing is selected, you get information about the desktop itself (or the open window), including the amount of disk space consumed by everything sitting on or in it.

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Chapter 3: Spotlight

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very computer offers a way to find files. And every system offers several different ways to open them. But Spotlight, the star feature of Tiger, combines these two functions in a way that's so fast, so efficient, so spectacular, it reduces much of what you've read in the previous chapters to irrelevance.

That may sound like breathless hype, but wait till you try it. You'll see.

See the little magnifying-glass icon in your menu bar? That's the mouse-driven way to open the Spotlight search box.

The other way is to press ⌘-Space bar. If you can memorize only one keystroke on your Mac, that's the one to learn. It works at the desktop, but also when you're working in another program.

You can designate one of your F-keys (top row of the keyboard) to open Spotlight, if you prefer. Choose

→ System Preferences, click Spotlight, and use the "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut" pop-up menu.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar.

Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you're trying to find a file called "Pokémon Fantasy League.doc," typing just pok or leag would probably work.

As you type, a menu begins to grow downward from the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find containing what you've typed so far. (This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight modifies the menu of search results as you type.) The menu lists every file, folder, program, email message, address book entry, calendar appointment, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Web bookmark, Microsoft Office document (from recent versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel), System Preferences panel, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.

Spotlight isn't just searching the names of your files and folders. It's actually searching their contents—the words inside your documents, for example. Technically speaking, Spotlight searches all your files' metadata, which Apple calls data about data: descriptive text information about what's in a file, like its height, width, size, creator, copyright holder, title, editor, created date, and last modification date.

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The Spotlight Menu

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See the little magnifying-glass icon in your menu bar? That's the mouse-driven way to open the Spotlight search box.

The other way is to press ⌘-Space bar. If you can memorize only one keystroke on your Mac, that's the one to learn. It works at the desktop, but also when you're working in another program.

You can designate one of your F-keys (top row of the keyboard) to open Spotlight, if you prefer. Choose

→ System Preferences, click Spotlight, and use the "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut" pop-up menu.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar.

Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you're trying to find a file called "Pokémon Fantasy League.doc," typing just pok or leag would probably work.

If you see the icon you were hoping to dig up, click it to open it. Or use the arrow keys to "walk down" the menu, and then press Return or Enter to open it.

Figure 3-1: Top: Press ⌘-Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search bar appear.
Bottom: As you type, Spotlight builds the list of every match it can find, neatly organized by type: programs, documents, folders, images, PDF documents, and so on. In System Preferences, you can redefine the keystroke, which folders are "peeked into," and which categories appear here (and in which order).

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The Spotlight Window

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As you may have noticed, the Spotlight menu doesn't list every match on your hard drive. Unless you own one of those extremely rare 60-inch Apple Skyscraper Displays, there just isn't room.

Instead, Spotlight uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and display the 20 most likely matches for what you typed. But at the top of the menu, you usually see that there are many other possible matches; it says something like "Show All (423)," meaning that there are 423 other candidates.

If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn't include what you're looking for, click Show All (or just press Return or Enter). You've just opened the Spotlight window, shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2: You can open this window either by choosing Show All from the Spotlight menu or by pressing Option-⌘- Space bar at any time. (You can change this keystroke, if you like; see Section 3.3.1.)

Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly organized by category. (Even this view starts out showing only the top five matches in each category. If there's more to see, click the link that says "145 more…" beneath the list.)

Choosing Show All from the Spotlight menu is one way to open the Spotlight window. But if you want to open the Spotlight window directly, using the Spotlight menu is a bit roundabout.

Instead, press the keystroke for opening the Spotlight window. It's Option-⌘-Space bar, but you can change this keystroke to just about anything you like. (See Section 3.3.1.)

When the Spotlight window opens, you can start typing whatever you're looking for into the Search box at the upper right.

As you type—or, more realistically, a second or two after you type each letter—the window changes to reveal, item by item, a list of the files and folders whose names contain what you typed.

If you're not sure about the spelling of the word you're typing, type as much as you know, and then hit Option-Esc. Tiger obligingly drops down its list of Every Word It Knows That Begins With Those Letters in a huge, scrolling menu!

If you've typed decon, for example, you see correctly spelled items for

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Customizing Spotlight

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You've just read about how Spotlight works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor its behavior, both for security reasons and to fit it to the kinds of work you do.

Here are three ways to open the Spotlight preferences center:

Choose "Spotlight preferences" at the bottom of the Spotlight menu (that is, just after you've performed a search).
Use Spotlight itself. Hit ⌘-Space, type spotl, press ⌘-Enter.
Open System Preferences. Click Spotlight.

In any case, you wind up face-to-face with the dialog box shown in Figure 3-5.

You can tweak Spotlight in three ways here, all very useful.

Figure 3-5: Here's where you can specify what categories of icons you want Spotlight to search, which order you want them listed in the Spotlight menu, and what keystroke you want to use for highlighting the Spotlight bar.

Turn off categories. The list of checkboxes identifies all the kinds of things that Spotlight tracks. If you find that Spotlight uses up valuable menu space listing, say, Web bookmarks or fonts—stuff you don't need to find very often—turn off their checkboxes. Now the Spotlight menu's precious 20 slots will be allotted to icon types you care more about.
Prioritize the categories. This dialog box also lets you change the order of the category results; just drag an individual list item up or down to change where it appears in the Spotlight menu.
The factory setting is for Applications to appear first in the menu. That makes a lot of sense if you use Spotlight as a quick program launcher (which is a great idea, by the way). But if you're a party planner, and you spend all day on the phone, and the most important Spotlight function for you is its ability to look up someone in your address book, then drag Contacts to the top of the list. You'll have fewer arrow-key presses to perform once the results menu appears.
Change the keystroke. Ordinarily, pressing ⌘-Space highlights the Spotlight search box in your menu bar, and Option-⌘-Space opens the Spotlight window described above. If these keystrokes clash with some other key assignment in your software, though, you can reassign them to almost any other keystroke you like. (For starters, this is also the time-honored Mac OS X keystroke for switching keyboard layouts, if you're an international kind of person.)

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The Find Command

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How did anyone ever find anything before Spotlight? By relying one of these two techniques:

Using ⌘-F. That's the keystroke for the File → Find command, which, for years of Macintosh history, has opened up a Find dialog box.
Using the Search box. That's the round-ended text box at the top of every Finder window, which, until Tiger came along, could search only within that window. See the box below for details.

In Tiger, ⌘-F still opens up a Search dialog box, and there's still a Search bar at the top of every folder window. Both of these, though, are still more entry points for Spotlight.

The File → Find command (⌘-F) opens the Search window shown in Figure 3-7. It's a lot more powerful (and complex) than the basic Spotlight menu, because it can hunt down icons using extremely specific criteria. If you spent enough time setting up the search, you could use this feature to find a document whose name begins with the letters Cro, is over one megabyte in size, was created after 6/1/05 but before the end of the year, was changed within the last week, has the file name suffix .doc, and contains the phrase "attitude adjustment." (Of course, if you knew that much about a file, you'd probably know where it is without having to use the Search window. But you get the picture.)

Figure 3-7: Unless you've first opened a folder or disk window, the new Search dialog box opens up ready to search your entire hard drive (except other people's Home folders), regardless of file type. But don't settle—Spotlight has many mor