Cover | Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: How the Mac Is Different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can get terrific mileage out of

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

Power On, Dude

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

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

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

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

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

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

That One-Button Mouse

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

You can get terrific mileage out of shortcut menus on the Mac, just as in Windows ().

Figure : After years of resisting, Apple now includes a two-button mouse with every iMac and Mac Pro (although the right button is invisible). You can right-click on laptop trackapds, too, even though they appear to have only a single button. It's worth learning how to right-click, though, because shortcut menus, shown here in Windows (left) and on the Mac (right), are so handy.

But for years, it took two hands to open a Mac shortcut menu. You did it by Control-clicking something on the screen—and you can still do that. But Windows veterans have always preferred the one-handed method: right-clicking. That is, clicking something by pressing the right mouse button on a two-button mouse.

"Ah, but that' s what's always driven me nuts about Apple," goes the common refrain. "Their refusal to get rid of their stupid one-button mouse!"

Well, not so fast.

First of all, you can attach any old $6 USB two-button mouse to the Mac, and it'll work flawlessly.

Furthermore, if you bought a desktop Mac since late 2005, you probably already have a two-button mouse—but you might not realize it. Take a look: Is it a white shiny plastic capsule with tiny, gray, scrolling track-pea on the far end? Then you have a Mighty Mouse, and it has a secret right mouse button. It doesn't work until you ask for it.

To do that, choose →System Preferences. Click Keyboard & Mouse. Click the Mouse tab. There, in all its splendor, is a diagram of the Mighty Mouse. (There's a picture in .)

Your job is to choose Secondary Button from the pop-up menu that identifies the right side of the mouse. (The reason it's not called "right button" is because left-handers might prefer to reverse the right and left functions.)

From now on, even though there aren't two visible mouse buttons, your Mighty Mouse does, in fact, register a left-click or a right-click depending on which side of the mouse you push down. It works a lot more easily than it sounds like it would.

The old Control-clicking technique still works. But in this book, you'll be instructed to "right-click" things, since that's probably what you're used to.

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

On, Off, and Sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Menu Bar

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

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

Out of the box, Leopard's menu bar is slightly transparent. If that drives you crazy, in .

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

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

Finder = Windows Explorer

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

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

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

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

Dock = Taskbar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menulets = Tray

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

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

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

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

Figure : These little guys are the direct descendants of the controls once found on the Mac OS 9 Control Strip or the Windows system tray.

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

Here's a rundown of the most useful Apple menulets, complete with instructions on where to find this magic on/off checkbox for each.

The following descriptions indicate the official, authorized steps for installing a menulet. There is, however, a folder on your hard drive that contains 25 of them in a single window, so that you can install one with a quick double-click. To find them, open your hard drive→System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder.

• AirPort lets you turn your AirPort card on or off, join existing AirPort wireless networks, and create your own private ones. To find the "Show" checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. From the "Show" pop-up menu, choose AirPort.
• Battery shows how much power remains in your laptop's battery. To find the "Show" checkbox: Open System Preferences→Energy Saver→Options tab.
• Bluetooth connects to Bluetooth devices, "pairs" your Mac with a cellphone, and so on.

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

Keyboard Differences

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

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

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

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

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

Disk Differences

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

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

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

If you prefer the Windows look, in which no disk icons appear on the desktop, it's easy enough to re-create it on the Mac; choose Finder→Preferences and turn off the four checkboxes you see there ("Hard disks," "External disks," "CDs, DVDs, and iPods," and "Connected servers."

Figure : You may see all kinds of disks on the Mac OS X desktop (shown here: hard drive, CD, iPod, iDisk)—or none at all, if you've chosen to hide them using the Finder→Preferences command. But chances are pretty good you won't be seeing many floppy disk icons. If you do decide to hide your disk icons, you can always get to them as you do in Windows: by opening the Computer window (Go→Computer).

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

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

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

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

Where Your Stuff Is

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

The icon for your hard drive (usually called Macintosh HD) generally appears in the upper-right corner of your screen. If you double-click it, all you'll find in the Macintosh HD window is a set of folders called Applications, Library, and Users.

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 (which is why the Finder→Preferences dialog box offers a checkbox that hides their icons entirely). Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, which you'll access only for occasional administrative purposes.

In fact, the folders you really do care about boil down to these:

Applications is Apple's word for programs.

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

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

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

Figure : This is it: the folder structure of Mac OS X. It's not so bad, really. For the most part, what you care about are the Applications folder in the main hard drive window and your own Home folder. You're welcome to save your documents and park your icons almost anywhere on your Mac (except inside the System folder or other people's Home folders). But keeping your work in your Home folder makes backing up and file sharing easier.

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

Window Controls

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a nifty keyboard shortcut with no Windows equivalent: You can cycle through the different open windows in one program without using the mouse. Just press -` (that's the tilde key, to the left of the number 1 key). With each press, you bring a different window forward within the current program. It works both in the Finder and in your programs.

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

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

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

Figure : Right-click (or -click) a Finder window's title bar to summon the hidden folder hierarchy menu. This trick also works in most other Mac OS X programs. For example, you can

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

Terminology Differences

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2: Folders, Dock, & Windows

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

When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.5, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, rotating "Please wait" gear cursor—and then you're in. No progress bar, no red tape.

Figure : 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 few 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 .)

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 household.

• If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in , 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 . 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. 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 . On a new Mac, it's covered by a starry galaxy photo that belongs to Leopard's overall outer-space graphic theme.

If you've ever used a computer before, most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of familiar elements. Here's a quick tour.

Figure : The Mac OS X landscape looks like a more futuristic version of the operating systems you know and love. 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.

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

Getting into Mac OS X

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

When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.5, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, rotating "Please wait" gear cursor—and then you're in. No progress bar, no red tape.

Figure : 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 few 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 .)

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 household.

• If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in , 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 . 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. 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 . On a new Mac, it's covered by a starry galaxy photo that belongs to Leopard's overall outer-space graphic theme.

If you've ever used a computer before, most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of familiar elements. Here's a quick tour.

Figure : The Mac OS X landscape looks like a more futuristic version of the operating systems you know and love. 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.

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

The Four Window Views

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

You can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of four ways: as icons; as a single, tidy list; in a series of neat columns; or as giant document icons that you flip through like they're CDs in a record-store bin (called Cover Flow view). shows the four 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 Pictures folder in icon or Cover Flow view, where the larger icons serve as previews of the photos.

To switch a window from one view to another, just click one of the four corresponding icons in the window's toolbar, as shown in .

Figure : From the top: The same window in icon view, list view, column, and Cover Flow views. Very full folders are best navigated in list or column views, but you may prefer to view emptier folders in icon or Cover Flow views, because larger icons are easier to preview and click. Remember that in any view (icon, list, column, or Cover Flow), you can highlight an icon by typing the first few letters of its name. In icon, list, or Cover Flow view, you can also press Tab to highlight the next icon (in alphabetical order), or Shift-Tab to highlight the previous one.

You can also switch views by choosing View→as Icons (or View→as Columns, or View→as List, or View→as Cover Flow), which can be handy if you've hidden the toolbar. Or, for less mousing and more hardbodied efficiency, press -1, -2, -3, or -4 for icon, list, column, or Cover Flow view, respectively.

The following pages cover each of these views in greater detail.

One common thread in the following discussions is the availability of the View Options palette, which lets you set up the sorting, text size, icon size, and other features of each view, either one window at a time or for all windows.

Apple gives you a million different ways to open View Options. You can choose View→Show View Options, or press -J, or choose Show View Options from the menu at the top of every window.

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

Icon View

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

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).

Always open in icon view

In Mac OS X Leopard, it's easy to set up your preferred look for all folder windows on your entire system. With one click on the "Use as Defaults" button (described below), you can change the window view of 20,000 folders at once—to icon view, list view, or whatever you like.

The "" option lets you override that master setting, just for this window.

For example, you might generally prefer a neat list view with large text. But for your Pictures folder, it probably makes more sense to set up icon view, so you can see a thumbnail of each photo without having to open it.

That's the idea here. Open Pictures, change it to icon view, and then turn on "." Now every folder on your Mac is in list view except Pictures.

The wording of this item in the View Options dialog box changes according to the view you're in at the moment. In a list-view window, for example, it says "Always open in list view." In a Cover Flow-view window, it says "Always open in Cover Flow." And so on. But the function is the same: to override the default (master) setting.

Icon size

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.

In the View Options window (), 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.)

Grid spacing

You can control how closely spaced icons are in a window. If you want see a lot of them without making the window bigger, you can pack 'em in like sardines. shows all.

Figure : Drag the "Grid spacing" slider to specify how tightly packed you want your icons to be. At the minimum setting (top), they're so crammed that it's almost ridiculous; you can't even see their names. But sometimes, you don't really need to. At more spacious settings (bottom), you get a lot more "white space."

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

List View

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

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. In Leopard, alternating blue and white background stripes help you read across the columns in a list-view window.

You have a great deal of 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 (). 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.

Figure : 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 ▴ or ▾ triangle—indicating the identical information—in email programs, in iTunes, and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of the list can be useful.

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.

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, 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

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

Column View

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

The goal of column view is simple: to let you burrow down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.

The solution is shown in . It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows whatever disk or folder you first opened.

Figure : If the rightmost folder contains pictures, sounds, Office documents, or movies, you can look at them or play them, right there in the Finder. You can drag this jumbo preview icon anywhere—into another folder or the Trash, for example.

When you click a disk or folder in this list (once), the second pane shows a list of everything 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.

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.

In Leopard, for the first time, you can change how Column view is sorted; it doesn't have to be alphabetical. Press

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

Cover Flow View

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

As you can sort of see from , Cover Flow is a visual display that Apple stole from its own iTunes software, where Cover Flow simulates the flipping "pages" of a jukebox, or the CDs in a record-store bin. There, you can flip through your music collection, marveling as the CD covers flip over in 3-D space while you browse.

The idea is the same in Mac OS X, except that now it's not CD covers you're flipping; it's gigantic file and folder icons.

To fire up Cover Flow, open a window. Then click the Cover Flow button identified in , or choose View→as Cover Flow, or press -4.

Figure : The bottom half of a Cover Flow window is identical to list view. The top half, however, is an interactive, scrolling "CD bin" full of your own stuff. It's especially useful for photos, PDF files, Office documents, and text documents. And when a movie comes up in this virtual data jukebox, you can point to the little ▸ button and click it to play the video, right in place.

Now the window splits. On the bottom: a traditional list view, complete with sortable columns, exactly as described above.

On the top: the gleaming, reflective, black Cover Flow display. Your primary interest here is the scroll bar. As you drag it left or right, you see your own files and folders float by and flip in 3-D space. Fun for the whole family!

The effect is spectacular, sure. It's probably not something you'd want to set up for every folder, though, because browsing is a pretty inefficient way to find something. But in folders containing photos or movies (that aren't filled with hundreds of files), Cover Flow can be a handy and satisfying way to browse.

And now, notes on Cover Flow:

• You can adjust the size of Cover Flow display (relative to the list-view half) by dragging up or down on the grip strip area just beneath the Cover Flow scroll bar.
• Multipage PDF documents are special. When you point to one, circled arrow buttons appear on the jumbo icon. You can click them to page through the document—without even opening it for real ().
  

  Figure : When you point to a PDF file without clicking, you get special arrow buttons that let you turn pages.

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

Quick Look

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

As the preceding several thousand pages make clear, there are lots of ways to view and manage the seething mass of files and folders on a typical hard drive. Some of them actually let you see what's in a document without having to open it—the Preview column in column view, the giant icons in Cover Flow, and so on.

Quick Look, a star feature of Leopard, takes this idea to another level. It lets you open and browse a document nearly at full size—without switching window views or opening any new programs. You highlight an icon (or several), and then press the Space bar (or click the eyeball icon at the top of the window).

Figure : Once the Quick Look window is open, you can play the file (movies and sounds), study it in more detail (most kinds of graphics files), or even read it (PDF, Word, and Excel documents). You can also click another icon, and another, and another, without ever closing the preview; the contents of the window simply change to reflect whatever you've just clicked. Supertip: Quick Look even works on icons in the Trash, too, so you can figure out what something is before you nuke it forever.

The Quick Look window now opens, showing a nearly full-size preview of the document (). Rather nice, eh?

The idea here is that you can check out a document without having to wait for it to open in the traditional way. For example, you can find out what's in a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document without actually having to open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, which saves you about 45 minutes.

You might wonder: How, exactly, is Quick Look able to display the contents of a document without opening it? Wouldn't it have to somehow understand the internal file format of that document type?

Exactly. And that's why Quick Look doesn't recognize all documents. If you try to preview, for example, a Final Cut Pro video project, a sheet-music file, a .zip archive, or a database file, all you'll see is a six-inch-tall version of its generic icon. You won't see what's inside.

Over time, people will write plug-ins for those nonrecognized programs. Already, plug-ins that let you see what's inside folders and .zip files await at

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

The Dock

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

For years, most operating systems maintained two different lists of programs. One listed unopened programs until you needed them, like the Start menu in Windows. The other kept track of which programs were open at the moment for easy switching, like the Windows taskbar.

In Mac OS X, Apple combined both functions into a single strip of icons called the Dock.

Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you'll enjoy: Dashboard, QuickTime Player, iTunes, iChat, Mail, the Safari Web browser, and so on. But using your Mac without putting your own favorite icons in the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the Dock your own.

The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it () is installed there as a button.)

A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, programs, and Internet bookmarks that you access frequently.

Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:

• It has two sides. See the whitish dotted line running down the Dock? That's the divider (). Everything on the left side is an application—a program. Everything else goes on the right side: files, documents, folders, disks, and minimized windows.
  It's important to understand this division. If you try to drag an application to the right of the line, for example, Mac OS X teasingly refuses to accept it. (Even aliases observe that distinction. Aliases of applications can go only on the left side, and vice versa.)
  

  Figure : To add an icon to the Dock, simply drag it there. You haven't moved the original file; when you release the mouse, it remains where it was. You've just installed a pointer—like a Macintosh alias or Windows shortcut.
  Divider
  ←Programs side Everything else→
  Open programs
  Minimized document windows
• Its icon names are hidden. To see the name of a Dock icon, point to it without clicking. You'll see the name appear above the icon.
  When you're trying to find a certain icon in the Dock, run your cursor slowly across the icons without clicking; the icon labels appear as you go. You can often identify a document just by looking at its icon.

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

The Finder Toolbar

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

At the top of every Finder window is a small set of function icons, all in a gradient-gray row (). The first time you run Mac OS X 10.5, you'll find only these icons on the toolbar:

• Back, Forward. The Finder works something like a Web browser. Only a single window remains open as you navigate the various folders on your hard drive.
  The Back button (◂) returns you to whichever folder you were just looking at. (Instead of clicking ◂, you can also press -[, or choose Go→Back—particularly handy if the toolbar is hidden, as described below.)
  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.
  

  Figure : If you -click the upper-right toolbar button repeatedly, you cycle through six combinations of large and small icons and text labels. (Three examples are shown here.) Tip: This same -clicking business cycles through the same toolbar variations in Mail, Preview, and other programs that have toolbars.
• View controls. The four tiny buttons next to the ▸ button switch the current window into icon, list, column, or Cover Flow view, respectively. And remember, if the toolbar is hidden, you can get by with the equivalent commands in the View menu at the top of the screen—or by pressing -1, -2, -3, or -4 (for icon, list, column, and Cover Flow view, respectively).
• Quick Look. The eyeball icon opens the Quick Look preview for a highlighted icon (or group of them).
• Action (). This little pop-up menu contains the same commands you'd see if you right-clicked something.
• Search bar. This little round-ended text box is yet another entry point for the Spotlight feature described in .

Between the toolbar, the Dock, the Sidebar, and the large icons of Mac OS X, it almost seems like there's an Apple conspiracy to sell big screens.

Fortunately, the toolbar doesn't have to contribute to that impression. You can hide it by choosing View→Hide Toolbar or pressing Option--T. (The same keystroke, or choosing View→Show Toolbar, brings it back.)

But you don't have to do without the toolbar altogether. If its consumption of screen space is your main concern, you may prefer to collapse it—to delete the pictures but preserve the text buttons; 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!

Getting Help in Mac OS X

Content preview·Buy PDF of this chapter|