By David Pogue
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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 10.5, 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.

Thedesktop 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.

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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 10.5, 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.

Thedesktop 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.

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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, a useful feature that's probably worth at least $34 of Mac OS X's $130 price, and Spaces, which is easily worth another $17.35. They're described in detail on pages and .

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 Open dialog box and full-sized Save dialog box).

The Sidebar has been overhauled in Leopard. Now this list has as many as four different sections, each preceded by a collapsible heading:

• Devices. This section lists every storage device connected to, or installed inside, your Mac: hard drives, CDs, DVDs, iPods, memory cards, USB flash drives, and so on. The removable ones (CDs, DVDs, iPods, and so on) bear a little gray logo, which you can click to eject that disk.
• Shared. It took 20 years for an operating system to list all the other computers on the home or small-office network, right there in every window, without any digging, connecting, button-clicking, or window-opening. But here it is: a complete list of the other computers on your network whose owners have turned on File Sharing, ready for access. See for complete details.
• Places. This primary section of the sidebar lists places (in this case, folders) where you might look for files and folders. Into this list, you can stick the icons of anything at all—files, programs, folders, disks, or whatever—for easy access.
  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 (). And if you click the icon of a file or program, it opens.
• Searches. The "folders" in this new Sidebar section are actually canned searches that execute instantly when you click one. If you click Today, for example, the main window fills with all files and folders on your computer that you've changed today. Yesterday and Past Week work the same way.

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The Four Window Views

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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—new in Leopard—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.

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.

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 .

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.

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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).

Always open in icon view

In Mac OS X Leopard, it's easy—almost scarily 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 "Always open in icon view" 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 "Always open in icon view." 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.)

Figure : 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 slidesorter "light table" effect. Just use the slider in the View Options dialog box, shown here.

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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. 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.

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 point supward, 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 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 disclosure triangles; internally, the programmers call them flippy triangles.

Either way, these triangles are very useful: When you click one, the list view turns into an outline, which displays the contents of the folder in an indented list, as shown in . Click the triangle again to collapse the folder listing. You're saved the trouble and clutter of opening a new window just to view the folder's contents.

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Column View

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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.

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.

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.

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 ⌘-J to open the View Options dialog box, and then choose the sorting criterion you want from the "Arrange by" pop-up menu (like Size, Date Created, or Label).

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Cover Flow View

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The new, fourth view in Leopard is one of Apple's favorites; it's one of the handful of Leopard features that gets the most play in Apple's advertising and demos.

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.

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.

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.

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.
  

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

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Quick Look

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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, new in Leopard (and very welcome), 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 do one of these things:

• Press the Space bar. This is by far the best technique to learn. After all, unless you're editing a file's name, what's the Space bar ever done for you in the Finder? Nothing. But in Mac OS X Leopard, you can highlight any icon and then tap the Space bar for an instant preview.
• Press ⌘-Y. Another keystroke for the same function. The Space bar is still better, though.
• Click the eyeball icon at the top of the window. If you don't see the big eyeball icon, you probably upgraded your Mac from an earlier version of Mac OS X. But you can add the eyeball to the toolbar easily enough, as described on .
• Choose File→Quick Look.
• Choose Quick Look from the Action menu () at the top of every Finder window.
• Control-click (or right-click) an icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Quick Look.

You exit Quick Look in any one of these same ways.

Whenever Quick Look appears in a menu or a shortcut menu, its wording changes to reflect the name of the icon. For example, it might say, "Quick Look ‘Secret Diary.doc.'"

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

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.

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Logging Out, Shutting Down

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If you're the only person who uses your Mac,finishing up awork 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 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:

• Close the lid. (Hint: This tip works primarily on laptops.)
• Choose →Sleep.
• Press Control-Eject (or Control-F12, if you don't have an Eject key). In the dialog box shown in , click Sleep (or type S).
• Press the Power button on your machine. On desktop models, doing so makes it sleep immediately; on laptops, you get the dialog box shown in .
• Hold down the Play/Pause button on your remote control for three seconds. All current Mac models except the Mac Pro come with Apple's tiny white remote control.
  

  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.
• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver setting described on 285 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 ; 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 appears.

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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 the only user manual you get with Mac OS X is the Help menu. You get a Web browser–like program that reads a set of help files that reside in your System→Library folder.

In fact, you may not even be that lucky. In Leopard, the general-information Help page about each topic is on your Mac, but thousands of more nichey or more technical pages actually reside online, and require an Internet connection to read.

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

• Use the new Search box.When you click the Help menu , a tiny search box appears just beneath your cursor (). You can type a few words here to specify what you want help on: "setting up printer," "disk space," whatever.
  You can also hit ⌘-Shift-/ (that is, ⌘-?) to open the Help search box. And you can change that keystroke, if you like, in System Preferences→Keyboard & Mouse.
  

  Figure : In Leopard, you don't have to open the Help program to begin a search. No matter what program you're in, typing a search phrase into the box shown here produces an instantaneous list of help topics, ready to read.
  The menu now becomes a list of Apple help topics pertaining to your search. Click one to open the Help browser described next; you've just saved some time and a couple of steps.
  The results menu does not, however, show all of Help's results—only the ones Apple thinks are most relevant. If you choose Show All Results at the bottom of the menu, the Help browser opens (described below). It shows a more complete list of Help-search results.
• Drill down. Alternatively, you can begin your quest for assistance the old-fashioned way:by opening the Help browser first.To do that,choose Help→MacHelp.(This works only in the Finder, and only when nothing is typed in the Search box. To empty the Search box, click the button at the right end.)
  After a moment, you arrive at the Help browser program shown in . The starting screen offers several "quick click" topics that may interest you. If so, keep clicking text headings until you find a topic that you want to read.

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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 10.5, 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 (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.

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 ). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.

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

• Choose Go→Home, or press Shift-⌘-H.
• In the Sidebar (), click the Home icon (the little house).
• In the Dock, click the Home icon.(If you don't see one, consult 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 .)

All of these steps open your Home folder directly.

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.

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The Mac OS X Folder Structure

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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 10.5, 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 (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.

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 ). Here, at last, is the window that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.

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

• Choose Go→Home, or press Shift-⌘-H.
• In the Sidebar (), click the Home icon (the little house).
• In the Dock, click the Home icon.(If you don't see one, consult 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 .)

All of these steps open your Home folder directly.

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.

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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 or even 8-character limits of older computers, 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 (). 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 : Click an icon's name (top left) to produce the renaming rectangle (top right), in which you can edit the file's name. Leopard is kind enough to highlight only the existing name, and not the suffix (like .jpg or .doc).
Now just begin typing to replace the existing name (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 coexist 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 , 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 Leopardish 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 : 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 . 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. 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 Leopard'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 moves it bewilders many a beginner. However, the scheme is fairly simple (see ) 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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Color Labels

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Mac OS X 10.5 includes a welcome blast from the Mac's distant 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 menu, or the shortcut menu that appears when you Control-click/right-click the icons). There, under the heading Color Label, you'll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven different labels you can use. 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:

Figure : Use the File menu, menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons.
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 . (If you choose the little X, you're removing any labels that you may have applied.)

• Round up files with Find. Using the Find command described in , you can round up all icons with a particular label. Thereafter, moving these icons atonce 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 withineach label grouping, as shown in .
  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 (actually a wastebasket, 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.

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.
• Control-click the wastebasket icon (or right-click it, or just click it and hold the mouse button down for a moment); choose Empty Trash from the shortcut menu.

This last method has two advantages. First, the Mac doesn't bother asking "Are you sure?" (If you're clicking right on the Trash and choosing Empty Trash from the pop-up menu, it's pretty darned obvious you

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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 . It's a collapsible, multipanel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. For example:

• 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.
• For a program, you see whet her or not it's been updated to run on Intel-based Macs. If so, the Get Info window says Kind: Universal. If not, it says Kind: PowerPC, and will probably run slower than you'd like because it must be translated by Rosetta ().
• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.
  Now and then, it's very useful to see what some document in the Trash is before committing it to oblivion—and the only way to do that is to open it.

  Trouble is, you can't open it by double-clicking; you'll get nothing but an error message.

  Or at least that's what Apple wants you to think.

  There is, of course, a workaround or two. First of all, you can use Quick Look () to inspect something in the Trash.

  Or, if Quick Look can't open the file–or if you want to edit it instead of just reading it–drag the document onto the icon of a program that can open it. That is, if a file called Don't Read Me.txt is in the Trash, you can drag it onto, say, the Word or TextEdit icon in your Dock.

  The document dutifully pops open on the screen. Inspect, close, and then empty the Trash (or rescue the document).
• 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.
• If you highlight 11 icons or more simultaneously, the Get Info window shows you how many you highlighted, breaks it down by type ("23 documents, 3 folders," for example), and adds up the total of their file sizes. That's a great opportunity to change certain file characteristics on numerous files simultaneously, such as locking or unlocking them, hiding or showing their filename extensions (), changing their ownership or permissions (), and so on.

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Chapter 3: Spotlight

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Every computer offers a way to find files. And every system offers several different ways to open them. But Spotlight, a star feature of Mac OS X (and beefed up in Leopard), 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 both at the desktop and in other programs.

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 suffice. (Spotlight doesn't find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

A menu immediately appears below 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 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Entourage) document, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, Web site in your History list, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.

Figure : Left: Press ⌘-Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search bar appear.
Right: 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.

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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 both at the desktop and in other programs.

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 suffice. (Spotlight doesn't find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

A menu immediately appears below 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 (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Entourage) document, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, Web site in your History list, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.

Figure : Left: Press ⌘-Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search bar appear.
Right: 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.

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

If you click an application, it pops onto the screen. If you select a System Preferences panel, System Preferences opens and presents that panel. If you choose an appointment, the iCal program opens, already set to the appropriate day and time. Selecting an email message opens that message in Mail or Entourage. And so on.

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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," meaning that there are other candidates. (Mac OS X no longer tells you how many other results there are.)

There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that's to use the Spotlight window, shown in .

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.

Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly listed in what appears to be a standard Finder window.

You can also open the Spotlight window directly, without using the Spotlight menu as a trigger.

Actually, there are three ways to get to the Spotlight window ():

• ⌘-F (for Find, get it?). When you choose File→Find (or press ⌘-F), you get an empty Spotlight window, ready to fill in for your search.
• Option-⌘-Space bar. This keystroke opens the same window. But instead of starting empty and filling up, this window starts with a list of every single thing on your Mac and winnows down as you type a search query.
  You can change this keystroke to just about anything you like. See .
• Open any desktop window, and type something into the Search box at upper-right. Presto—the mild-mannered folder window turns into the Spotlight window, complete with search results.

Once you type something to search for, the results are identical.

Figure : The Spotlight window either lists nothing (top)—or everything on your hard drive (bottom), depending on how you open it. Either way, it's ready to search your entire hard drive (except other people's Home folders). But Spotlight has many tricks up its software sleeve.

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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 just after you've performed a search.
• Use Spotlight itself.Hit ⌘-Space bar, type spotl, and press Enter.
• Choose → System Preferences. Click Spotlight.

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

Figure : Here's where you can specify what categories of icons you want Spotligh