O'Reilly Media | Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide

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Long before releasing Mac OS X Leopard, Apple offered a preview to developers and also posted some information about Leopard's top features on the Mac OS X web site (). But just in case you missed the big list of features, here's another rundown of what's in store for you:

Time Machine provides a way for you to quickly, easily, and regularly back up all of the data on your Mac. Delete a file unintentionally? No worries—just launch Time Machine and you can get the file back from your last backup.
Mail boasts new features such as integration with iCal for to-do lists, and offers a set of email templates that you can use for the messages you send.
The new iChat features Photo Booth-like image and video features, which allow you to apply a filter to your image in video chat sessions.
Spaces adds a new dimension to your Mac by providing you with virtual desktop spaces for managing your applications and open windows.
Stacks lets you quickly look inside folders placed in the Dock.
Spotlight helps you find stuff quickly and easily by indexing and cataloging content in all of the files on your system. Spotlight's search capabilities are built into the Finder, System Preferences, and many applications, including Mail and Address Book.
iCal has received a major facelift in Leopard, and has better integration with Mail for things like To-Dos and managing appointments.
Leopard's Accessibility features continue to be refined with things like resolution independence, in which you can zoom in on something, and the image and text will look just as crisp as they did at normal size.
Core Animation is a new graphics programming layer that Apple provided for developers. Core Animation uses your Mac's graphics processor (known as the GPU, similar to your computer's CPU) to quickly render graphics in the user interface.

Some additional features you're bound to find useful include:

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Here's a quick look at some of the new features added to Mac OS X Leopard.

So, let's get right down to it: we finally get a new, improved Finder. The Finder saw some minor changes in Mac OS X Tiger, but with Leopard, it takes on a whole new look and feel. The Sidebar has changed (as shown in ), Spotlight searching has been integrated better than in the past, and new features such as Quick Look and Cover Flow have been added.

Figure : Meet Leopard's new Finder!

The new Finder is lighter, faster, better, and it totally rocks compared to the Finder in earlier versions of Mac OS X. For more information on the Finder, Quick Look, Cover Flow, and searching with Spotlight, see .

If you've been following the Mac OS X Leopard hype, you've no doubt heard lots about Time Machine, which lets you back up your Mac and retrieve files that once might have been lost. Time Machine keeps hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups until your backup disk is full. When your backup disk is full, Time Machine drops the oldest backup to free up space for a new one.

You shouldn't back up to another partition on an internal drive. If that drive fails, all of your data—and your backup from Time Machine—is lost.

To use Time Machine, first you need to turn it on and configure the settings for where your backups will be stored, and for what you would like to have backed up from your Mac. To do this, click the Time Machine icon in the Dock, or go to System Preferences → Time Machine and move the slider from Off to On, as shown in .

Figure : Turn on Time Machine in System Preferences → Time Machine

The next step in the process is to click the Choose Backup Disk button and select an external drive that you'll back up your data to, as shown in .

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If you're one of the many switchers who've come over to Mac OS X, or even if you've been using Mac OS X since the early public beta (back when Mac OS X was going through its infancy 10.0 and 10.1 phases), this chapter is for you. Here, you'll quickly get up to speed on how to use Mac OS X, from learning about the Finder to learning how to create folders (including the new Smart and Burn folders), to discovering tips, tricks, and keyboard shortcuts to make your Mac life more enjoyable.

When you first install Mac OS X Leopard (or when you boot your new Mac for the first time), you have to create at least one user for the system. You'll be asked to assign a name, short name, and password, as well as provide address information for the user. You'll also set up some very basic preferences, such as the date and time zone, and configure basic network settings.

By default, the first user you set up on your Mac is known as an "administrative user," which means that user can pretty much do whatever he wants with the system, including setting up or removing user accounts. As an admin user, you can create accounts for other users (such as your wife and kids) on your system, manage their settings, and also delete their accounts when necessary.

Having admin privileges means you have ultimate control over your Mac. It also means you can delete anything you choose, so working as an admin user means you have to use caution before you make a change to the system or delete some file.

After you create the admin user account, Mac OS X logs into that account, and then you're off and running. And every time you boot your Mac, the system automatically logs into this account unless you add another user account or change the settings in the Accounts preference panel (System Preferences → Accounts).

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When you first install Mac OS X Leopard (or when you boot your new Mac for the first time), you have to create at least one user for the system. You'll be asked to assign a name, short name, and password, as well as provide address information for the user. You'll also set up some very basic preferences, such as the date and time zone, and configure basic network settings.

By default, the first user you set up on your Mac is known as an "administrative user," which means that user can pretty much do whatever he wants with the system, including setting up or removing user accounts. As an admin user, you can create accounts for other users (such as your wife and kids) on your system, manage their settings, and also delete their accounts when necessary.

Having admin privileges means you have ultimate control over your Mac. It also means you can delete anything you choose, so working as an admin user means you have to use caution before you make a change to the system or delete some file.

After you create the admin user account, Mac OS X logs into that account, and then you're off and running. And every time you boot your Mac, the system automatically logs into this account unless you add another user account or change the settings in the Accounts preference panel (System Preferences → Accounts).

The short answer to that is no. If your Mac is set up to automatically log on to your user account, all somebody needs to do is boot your machine and he has easy access to all your information. While you might not think this is such an issue if you're using your Mac at home, think again. If someone breaks into your house or apartment and steals your beloved Mac, the thief not only has your computer, but automatic login gives him free reign over all your info.

If you're security conscious and you don't want the system to automatically log in to your account (or that of another user) at startup, you can disable this setting by going to the Accounts panel, clicking Login Options, and turning off the checkbox next to "Automatically log in as."

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Mac OS X Leopard offers some powerful built-in security features that every user should take advantage of. Regardless of whether your Mac is at work or home, or if you never, ever go online, there are some basic things you should consider setting up on your Mac to protect your user account and your precious data.

Introduced with Mac OS X Panther (version 10.3), FileVault allows you to encrypt and protect everything within your Home folder. FileVault uses a 128-bit data encryption scheme, which means it's very hard to crack. To enable FileVault for your user account, go to the FileVault tab in the Security preferences panel and click the Turn On FileVault button. FileVault uses your login password as the passkey to secure the data in your Home folder. While you're at it, you should also click the Set Master Password button to set a master password that allows you to unlock any FileVault account on your computer.

If you're going to use FileVault, you should definitely set the Master Password for your system. If you or one of the users on the system forgets their FileVault password and the Master Password hasn't been set, all of that user's information is lost (unless you want to pay a security expert thousands of dollars to crack the encryption).

The one caveat to using FileVault is that if you forget your password and you haven't set the Master Password (or if you forget both passwords), there is absolutely no way to decrypt your FileVault-protected Home folder. If you can't remember either password, all of your data is lost. If you are going to use FileVault, you should write these passwords down and hide them from plain sight (or in your bank's safety deposit box, if you have one). That way, if you ever do forget your passwords, you'll at least (hopefully) remember where you wrote them down so you can retrieve your data.

Just like the keys you carry in your pocket to unlock your house or start your car, the Mac OS X Keychain service helps you manage and keep track of all the usernames and passwords you have—for everything from your user account to the information you provide to log on to your favorite web site or network file server. Keychains have been around since Mac OS 9 and have continued to improve along with Mac OS X.

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Every now and then, it's bound to happen: you're going to be faced with what's known in Mac circles as the "spinning beach ball of death." You know, that little colored disc that spins around in circles whenever you launch an application? Well, if you're familiar with that, someday, somehow, you'll see it "hang," and just keep on spinning. When that happens, there are a variety of things that could be going on, but it usually just means that an application got stuck doing whatever it was you wanted it to. And when an application is stuck, and you're faced with the spinning beach ball of death, you're going to need to know how to force that application to quit so you can try all over again.

Fortunately, Mac OS X has something known as protected memory, which means that every application—including the actual system software—runs in its own protected space. When an application hangs, it typically won't affect the system or any other apps you're running. This is a good thing, and you have the engineers at Apple to thank for it.

There are a few ways to force quit an application, but the easiest way (especially if you aren't a Unix geek) is to use Mac OS X's Force Quit Applications window, which you open by either selecting

→ Force Quit or using its keyboard shortcut, Option-

-Esc. Once this window opens, all you need to do is select the application that's giving you grief and then click the Force Quit button.

Since you'll most likely be in the application you need to force quit, try adding the Shift key to that combination (so, Shift-Option-

-Esc). By adding the Shift key, you automatically quit the frontmost application. Just be careful when using this, because you could inadvertently quit the wrong application.

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If the Finder seems to hang on you (this can sometimes happen when trying to use the Finder to connect to an FTP site), you'll need to relaunch the Finder.

Since the mouse pointer has been replaced with the spinning beach ball of death, chances are you won't be able to click the Apple menu (

), so just use the Option-

-Esc shortcut to open the Force Quit Applications window. Select the Finder in the list and click the Relaunch button. There is a short pause as the system takes the Finder out of commission temporarily, and you'll see the Dock disappear momentarily. When the Dock pops back into place, that's your cue that the Finder has relaunched successfully and is safe to use once more.

You cannot use Shift-Option-

-Esc to relaunch the Finder. Try as you might, that shortcut just won't work. Instead, you most definitely need to use Option-

-Esc.

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On the Mac (as with Windows) you have two ways of invoking commands in the GUI: by using the menus or by issuing shortcuts for the commands on the keyboard. Not every menu item has a keyboard accelerator, but for the ones that do (the more common functions), using the keyboard shortcuts can save you a lot of time.

lists the common key commands found in Mac OS X. While most of these commands function the same way across all applications, some—such as

-B and

-I—can vary among programs, and others might work only when the Finder is active. For example,

-B in Microsoft Word turns on boldface type or makes a selection bold, but in Xcode,

-B builds your application. Likewise,

-I in Word italicizes a word or selection, but hitting

-I after selecting a file, folder, or application on the Desktop or in the Finder opens the Show Info window for the selected item.

Out of 's huge list of keyboard shortcuts, there are 10 that you'll use most often:

-Q to quit an application
-O to open a file while you're in an application
-P to print documents
-W to close windows
-C to copy something you've selected in a file to the Clipboard
-V to paste something you've copied to the Clipboard to another location
-X to cut something you've selected out of a file and move it to the Clipboard
-A to select everything in a file or folder (or all of the items on your desktop)
-S to save a file (something you should do often)
-Z to undo something you shouldn't have done

You'll quickly notice patterns when you use these shortcuts. For example, you'll find that

-C and

-V go hand in hand, as you'll often copy something first and then quickly paste it into another file, email, Sticky Note, etc. The difference between Copy (

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This part of the book introduces you to the key features of Mac OS X's interface. Here we'll cover:

The menu bar
The Dock
Window controls
The Finder
Creating new folders
The Services menu
Exposé
The Dashboard
Spotlight
Get Info and file permissions

Regardless of which application you're using, Mac OS X's menu bar is always located across the top of the screen, yet for Leopard, it takes on a new look and feel. If you take a closer look, you'll notice that the menu bar is transparent and that the Desktop image shows through. You'll also notice that all of the icons are devoid of color—only black or grayscale here—with the exception of the Input menu, if you've turned that on in the International preference panel (System Preferences → International → Input Menu).

There are some standard items you'll always find in the menu bar, but as you switch from application to application, you'll notice that the menu names and some of their options change according to which application is active. shows the menu bar as it appears when the Finder is active.

Figure : Mac OS X Leopard's menu bar (with the Finder active)

As shows, the following menus and items can be found in the menu bar; each is covered later in this chapter:

The Apple menu (1)
The Application menu (2)
A default set of application menus (3)
Menu extras (4)
The Accounts menu (5)
Spotlight's search icon (6)

The Apple menu, which is displayed as an Apple symbol (

) in the menu bar, is completely different than in earlier versions of the Mac OS; you can no longer use it to store aliases for files, folders, or applications. The following is a list of what you'll find in Mac OS X's Apple menu:

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Regardless of which application you're using, Mac OS X's menu bar is always located across the top of the screen, yet for Leopard, it takes on a new look and feel. If you take a closer look, you'll notice that the menu bar is transparent and that the Desktop image shows through. You'll also notice that all of the icons are devoid of color—only black or grayscale here—with the exception of the Input menu, if you've turned that on in the International preference panel (System Preferences → International → Input Menu).

There are some standard items you'll always find in the menu bar, but as you switch from application to application, you'll notice that the menu names and some of their options change according to which application is active. shows the menu bar as it appears when the Finder is active.

Figure : Mac OS X Leopard's menu bar (with the Finder active)

As shows, the following menus and items can be found in the menu bar; each is covered later in this chapter:

The Apple menu (1)
The Application menu (2)
A default set of application menus (3)
Menu extras (4)
The Accounts menu (5)
Spotlight's search icon (6)

The Apple menu, which is displayed as an Apple symbol (

) in the menu bar, is completely different than in earlier versions of the Mac OS; you can no longer use it to store aliases for files, folders, or applications. The following is a list of what you'll find in Mac OS X's Apple menu:

About This Mac: This option pops open a window that gives you information about your Mac. Besides telling you that you're running Mac OS X on your computer, the window shows you which version of Mac OS X is installed, how much memory you have, and the speed and type of your processor. Clicking on the More Info button launches the System Profiler (

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Windows in Mac OS X have an entirely different set of controls than those from earlier versions of the Mac OS. These new window features are highlighted in .

Figure : Standard window controls in Mac OS X

The following list identifies the controls:

Close (red), Minimize (yellow), and Zoom/Maximize (green) window buttons (1)
Proxy icon (2)
Filename (3)
Scrollbars and scroll arrows (4)
Resize window control (5)

The top part of the window is known as the title bar. The title bar is home to the three colored window-control buttons for closing (red), minimizing (yellow), and zooming (green) the window. When you move your mouse over the buttons, you'll notice that they take on a different appearance, becoming an ×, a minus sign (−), or a plus sign (+). These are visual cues indicating the function that button performs:

Clicking the × (the red button) closes the window.
Clicking the − (the yellow button) minimizes the window.
Clicking the + (the green button) makes the window bigger.

With some applications, such as TextEdit or Microsoft Word, you'll notice that the red close-window button may have a dark-colored dot in its center. This little dot means the document you're working on has unsaved changes. If you save the document by selecting File → Save (

-S), the dot disappears.

The following are tips for working with windows:

Open a new window?: File → Open (-O).
Close a window?: File → Close (-W).
Close all open windows for an application?

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The Dock in Mac OS X Leopard has received a facelift, getting a new flashy design and added features that allow you to quickly access files on your Mac. The Dock, shown in , holds application aliases, making it easy for you to quickly launch programs with a single mouse click. To launch an application in the Dock, simply click the icon. While the application is starting, its icon bounces in the Dock; after it starts, a light-blue dot appears below the icon to indicate that the application is running.

Figure : The Dock and its features

If you look closely at , you'll notice that the Dock is split into two parts by a dashed bar that looks similar to the lane markers in the road. On the left of this line, you will find application icons for the Finder, Spaces, Time Machine, Safari, Mail, iChat, Preview, iTunes, Address Book, and iCal. To the right, you'll see a quick link to the Downloads folder (which resides in your Home folder), and the Trash. If you aren't sure which application an icon relates to, simply move your mouse over the icon, and a balloon appears telling you what the application is, as shown in .

Figure : When you move your mouse over a Dock icon, a bubble appears to tell you which application the icon relates to

If you need to use an application that isn't in the Dock, open a Finder window by clicking its icon at the far left of the Dock (the blue smiley-face icon). If you're already in the Finder, you can quickly get to the Applications folder by using its keyboard shortcut, Shift-

-A, or by clicking the Applications quick link in the Places section of the sidebar. To launch the application, simply double-click the application's icon.

To add an application icon to the Dock, simply drag its icon from the Finder to the left side of the Dock's divider bar and let go. To remove an application, click on the icon and hold the mouse button down, then drag the icon away from the Dock; the icon disappears in a puff of smoke.

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Regardless of how vast and expansive you think your hard drive is, eventually you're going to run out of space. When you do, the way you get rid of any unnecessary files is by moving them to the Trash. To move a file or folder to the Trash, you can either select the item in the Finder and drag it to the Trash icon in the Dock (see ) or quickly move it to the Trash by holding down the

key and hitting the Delete key (

-Delete). To see what's in your Trash, just click on the Trash icon in your Dock and a Finder window pops open, revealing what's inside.

If you happen to move the wrong file to the Trash and catch it right away, you can use Mac OS X's Undo shortcut (

-Z) to move the file back to where it belongs. Remember, though, you'll need to do this right away, because if you do anything else in the meantime, the Undo applies to your last action.

To empty the Trash, you can either go to the Finder's application menu and select Empty Trash (Finder → Empty Trash), or you can use Shift-

-Delete from within the Finder. If you've used the Finder's application menu, you've probably noticed that there's another item there: Secure Empty Trash. If you select this item, any of the files currently residing in your Trash are permanently removed from your system. But what makes this secure? Well, it doesn't just delete the file once like the standard Empty Trash does; Secure Empty Trash deletes the file and writes over the space where the file once was—many times—making it nearly impossible for that file to ever be recovered.

Yes, this means that even when you've selected Empty Trash, there is a chance someone can recover that trashed file for you. It's not easy, but it can be done. With Secure Empty Trash, however, the chances of recovering that file are nil, so make sure you really want to trash that file before selecting Secure Empty Trash.

In Mac OS X Tiger, you had to manually choose the Secure Empty Trash menu item; however, in Leopard, you can set this as your default method of trashing files. To do this, open a Finder window and open its preferences (Finder → Preferences, or

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Mac OS X's Finder is the main program you'll use for locating files and folders on your Mac. The Finder displays the contents of drives and folders, is used for mounting networked drives, and includes Spotlight to help you quickly find what you're looking for.

Leopard's Finder includes many new features, including Quick Look, Cover Flow View, a revamped Sidebar, changes to its preferences including the option to set Secure Empty Trash as the default . . . and the list goes on. Rather than spend a bunch of time talking about what's new, let's take a look.

The Finder serves as a graphical file manager by offering four ways (or Views) to look at the files, folders, applications, and other filesystems (or volumes, such as your iDisk, a FireWire drive, or another Mac) mounted on your system. Its unique features are highlighted in .

Figure : Leopard's Finder and its features

Mac OS X's Finder has three distinct features:

Toolbar

Located across the top of the Finder window, the toolbar offers buttons that let you go back or forward to a previous folder or view, buttons for changing the four different views (Icon, List, Column, or Cover Flow), buttons for Quick Look and the Action menu, and a Spotlight Search field for quickly finding files and folders on your Mac.

Sidebar

Located on the left edge of the Finder window, the Sidebar offers a split view for accessing drives and other items on your Mac. The Finder's Sidebar in Leopard is significantly different from earlier versions of Mac OS X, and it takes on the look and feel of iTunes' sidebar.

The Sidebar is organized into the following four sections:

Devices

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Folders. Seems like a pretty simple concept, doesn't it? Well, now with Mac OS X Leopard, you have options for creating three different types of folders:

Regular folders
Smart Folders
Burn Folders

Everybody's used to creating a folder; you either select File → New Folder or use the Shift-

-N keyboard shortcut in the Finder. But now with Leopard, you have the option to create Smart Folders and Burn Folders anywhere you'd like.

Smart Folders have been around since Panther, but they've also been used in applications such as iTunes and iPhoto. To create a Smart Folder, select File → New Smart Folder (or Option-

-N). For an example of how to put Smart Folders to good use, see the section "" in Chapter 6. When you save a Smart Folder, you are also given the option of having it show up in the Finder's Sidebar, in the Search For section. If you know this is something you'll use often, make sure you click that checkbox before saving the Smart Folder.

The Smart Folders you create are saved in ~/Library/Saved Searches as files with a .savedSearch file extension. While the .savedSearch files appear as a folder in the Finder, they are merely XML files that contain a query for the search data and location.

Burn Folders offer a quick and easy way for you to burn files to CD or DVD. To create a Burn Folder, just select File → New Burn Folder (there is no keyboard shortcut), give the folder a name (such as mybitchinburnfolder.fpbf), and then start dragging files into it. The files you place in the Burn Folder are actually aliased to the original file. To burn your Burn Folder to CD or DVD, just select the Burn Folder in the Finder (you'll see a dark-gray bar appear above the filelist in the Finder, as shown in ), and then click the Burn button.

Figure : Burn Folders have an .fpbf file extension; when they're selected in the Finder, a gray bar appears below the toolbar

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The Services menu is available as a submenu in the Application menu of most Mac OS X applications. It allows the foreground application to invoke functions of other applications, usually while passing along user-selected text or objects to them.

The Services menu's contents depend on the applications installed on your Mac and the services they offer to other applications. When installed, some applications such as Mail, Safari, and BBEdit place entries in the Services menu. If an application provides more than one service, those items are placed into a submenu named after that application. For example, Mail offers two services, Send Selection and Send To, as shown in .

Figure : Mail's options in the Services menu let you send text selections in an email message

With some text selected in a TextEdit document (as shown in ), select TextEdit (the Application menu) → Services → Mail → Send Selection. Mac OS X copies that text and places it in the body of a new message in Mail. Then all you need to do is enter the email address of the person to whom you want to send the text, enter a subject line, and click the Send button. (The Services → Mail → Send To option places the selected item in an email message's To field.)

Some services also offer keyboard shortcuts, which makes it easy to send selected text to a Bluetooth device (Shift-

-B) or to create a new sticky note (Shift-

-Y).

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If you've ever wished for a quick way to get at your desktop, or just at the windows for a single application, Exposé is your answer. Exposé (shown in ) uses Quartz Extreme to make accessing windows—and your desktop—a dream come true.

Figure : Exposé in action

Exposé runs in the background and is configurable through its System Preferences panel (System Preferences → Dashboard & Exposé). The keyboard shortcuts for Exposé are listed in .

Table : Keyboard shortcuts for Exposé
Key command	Description
F9	Spreads out all open windows so they're viewable on the desktop.
F10	Separates just the application windows (not including the Finder windows) so they're viewable on the desktop.
F11	Clears all of the windows away from the desktop so you can see what's there.

After using one of Exposé's keyboard shortcuts, you can either click on the window you'd like to bring forward or use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around; to select a window, hit the Return key.

It's worth noting, however, that if you have Spaces enabled, Exposé only affects the windows in the active Space. For example, if you hit F9 to spread out the windows with Exposé in a Space that has Mail, iChat, and Address Book open (as shown in ), and you have iCal running in another Space, and Safari in a third Space, then only the Mail, iChat, and Address Book windows will spread out; you won't see the iCal or Safari windows.

Using the Dashboard & Exposé preferences panel (System Preferences → Dashboard & Exposé), you can set Hot Corners for performing the actions of the function keys, or change the key settings to some other key combination. Hot Corners allow you to set the corners of your screen as special "hot" points, which invoke some action when you move your mouse there. For example, you could set the upper-left corner to enable Exposé's All Windows option, and the lower-left corner to Show Desktop, which scoots all open windows off-screen temporarily so you can see what's on the desktop.

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The Dashboard offers a set of mini-applications, known as Widgets, that provide you with easy access to information when you need it. The beauty of Dashboard Widgets is that they're small, they don't take up very much of your Mac's system resources (memory and CPU power), and best of all, they're only in your face when you need them.

The Widgets that come preinstalled with Mac OS X Leopard include:

Address Book: Provides an interface to the contacts stored in your Address Book application.
Business: Finds local businesses and organizations. Need to find the phone number for Bill & Ted's Excellent Pizza? Let the Business Widget do the walking for you.
Calculator: Works as a simple calculator for doing basic math.
Dictionary/Thesaurus/Apple: Acts as either a dictionary, a thesaurus, or a directory to Apple terms (new for Leopard), depending on which item you select in the Widget's "title bar." To use this multifunction Widget, just select the desired function and type a word into the Search field, and you'll soon see a definition of the word and/or a list of synonyms.
ESPN: This Widget lets you quickly access game scores and the latest sports news headlines, fed from ESPN.com.
Flight Tracker: Uses the Web to help you track the progress of any flight on most major airlines around the world.
Google: This provides you with a simple Search field for searching on Google. Just type in your search string and hit Return, and the search results show up in your default web browser.

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One of the biggest innovations to hit Mac OS X has been Spotlight, and with Leopard, things have only gotten better. Spotlight combs through each and every file on your computer and creates an index not only of the filenames, but also of every single word inside the files, including words it finds tucked deep inside PDF files.

Immediately after you install Mac OS X Leopard, whenever you log in to your account, and whenever you add, change, or delete a file on your system, Spotlight jumps into action and collects information known as metadata about each and every file. And, if you've attached an external FireWire drive to your Mac, Spotlight indexes all of the information on that drive as well.

You can opt to have Spotlight exclude certain files, folders, or even data on external drives, from indexing. To configure this, go to System Preferences → Spotlight → Privacy, and click the Add (+) button to add an item to the list of things to exclude from Spotlight indexing. For example, one item you might want to exclude is Mail's Junk Mail box, which is located in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes.

The metadata collected by Spotlight includes information about the file—the date it was created or changed, where it's located in the filesystem, etc.—as well as information about the words Spotlight finds inside the file. This makes Spotlight truly amazing, because you can do keyword searches and get results for any type of file found on your system.

Spotlight does not collect metadata for Unix files found at the system level; it only indexes files you access through the Aqua interface. If you're a Unix-head and you know what somebody means when they refer to "et-cee files" (files stored in the /etc directory), then you probably already know how to search through files using find, locate, or grep.

Now that you know what Spotlight is and a little about how it works, let's put it into action and find something.

To search with Spotlight, you can either click on the little magnifying glass icon, located at the far-right edge of the menu bar, or you can hit

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Get Info gives you access to all sorts of information about the files, directories, and applications on your system. To view the information for an item, click on its icon in the Finder and either go to File → Get Info or use the keyboard shortcut

-I. The Get Info window has six different panes that each offer different kinds of information about the file. To reveal the content of one of these items, click on its disclosure triangle to expand the pane. The panes of the Get Info window include the following:

Spotlight Comments: Here you'll find an empty text field in which you can type additional information about the file (such as "This is for the Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide," or "This is for my blog"). The next time Spotlight indexes the files on your system, it picks up the information you entered in these fields and uses that as additional metadata for the file.
General: This tells you the basics about the file, including its kind, its size, where it's located in the filesystem, and when it was created and last modified. If you are looking at the Info for a file, you will see two checkboxes in the General section: Stationery Pad and Locked. If you enable these options, the file can be used as a template or is made read-only, respectively.

If you use Get Info on an Application (such as Safari), you will see that the Stationery Pad checkbox is gone. However, if you are using an Intel Mac and the application is a Universal Binary, you will see an "Open using Rosetta" checkbox as an option.

When checked, this allows you to run an application as if it were built only for a PowerPC Mac using Rosetta. Unless you really need to test out the performance of an application under Rosetta, you should leave this unchecked, because that application might run slower and take up more CPU and memory space than it should.

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Before Mac OS X came along, you'd have to fumble through the Control Panels to set up your Mac, but now, Apple has made all these "panels" self-contained in the System Preferences application. When you want to set up your Mac just for you, System Preferences is the application you're looking for. To launch the System Preferences application, simply click on its icon in the Dock (it's the one that looks like a silver window with three gears inside), and the window shown in appears.

Figure : The System Preferences window

System Preferences is home to a series of preference panels you use for configuring your Mac. For example, if you wanted to select Mac OS X Leopard's new Word of the Day screensaver, you would launch System Preferences by clicking its icon in the Dock, and then click Desktop & Screen Saver. This opens the preference panel shown in . It has two tabbed "panes," aptly named Desktop and Screen Saver. To change the settings for your screensaver, click the tab for the Screen Saver pane, then select a screensaver from the list on the lefthand side of the window.

Figure : The Desktop & Screen Saver preference panel

As you may have noticed in , the System Preferences are separated into four categories: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Network, and System. When you click one of the icons, the window changes to reflect that particular panel's settings. To go back to the main view, click the Show All button (View → Show All Preferences, or use the keyboard shortcut,

-L). You can also select View → Organize Alphabetically; this menu option changes the view of the System Preferences window to that shown in .

Figure : The System Preferences, listed alphabetically

When you've completed setting your Mac's preferences, you can quit System Preferences by selecting System Preferences → Quit (

-Q), or by simply closing the System Preferences window using Window → Close (

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If you take a close look at System Preferences' toolbar (along the top of the window), you'll notice a Search field. While the thought of having a Search field in System Preferences might seem odd, it really comes in handy for those times when you have an idea of what it is you want to do, but aren't quite sure which System Preferences panel will do the trick. When you find yourself stuck like that, the Search field quickly comes to the rescue.

To search within System Preferences, either click in the Search field in the toolbar, or use the standard Mac keyboard shortcut for "find," which is

-F. For example, if you're a former Windows user who is new to the Mac, you might not be familiar with the Mac lingo. So, when you go to System Preferences and want to set a new desktop image, you might still be thinking of "wallpaper." To help find what you're looking for, start typing "wallpaper" in System Preferences' Search field, as shown in .

Figure : Using the Search field in Leopard's System Preferences lets you quickly find the right preference panel for configuring your Mac

In this case, since you're looking for "wallpaper," you'll see that "Desktop picture" shows up as one of the options in System Preferences' search results. To open this panel, simply move your mouse down and click on "Desktop picture." The circle of light (a spotlight—cute, huh?) flashes twice on the Desktop & Screen Saver panel, which opens it up in the window.

You can also use the arrow keys to highlight items in System Preferences' search results. This can be somewhat entertaining, as pressing the Down or Up arrow keys focuses the Spotlight on the corresponding panel, giving you a Christmas tree-like effect as the glow moves around the window. Go on, give it a try—you know you want to.

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The next four sections provide an overview of the controls found in the System Preferences.

These items control the general look and feel of the Aqua interface.

Appearance: When selected, this panel lets you specify the colors used for buttons and menu items, the location of scrollbar arrows (top and bottom, or together), and how a click in the scrollbar is interpreted (scroll down one page or scroll to that location in the document). Here, you can specify the number of recent items to be remembered and listed in the → Recent Items menu for applications and documents, as well as determine which font-smoothing style and size is best for your type of display.
Dashboard & Exposé: This preference panel lets you configure the settings for Dashboard and Exposé's Hot Corners.
Desktop & Screen Saver: This panel has two panes, one you can use to set the background image for your desktop, and the other to select your screensaver. The Desktop pane lets you choose the pattern, image, or color of your desktop. If you click on the checkbox next to "Change picture" at the bottom of the window, the desktop picture changes automatically based on the timing you select in the pull-down menu.

The Screen Saver pane lets you select one of Mac OS X's default screensaver modules. Here, you can set the amount of time your system must be inactive before the screensaver kicks in, require a password to turn the screensaver off, and specify Hot Corners for enabling or disabling the screensaver. For example, you could set the upper-right corner of your display to start the screensaver and the lower-right corner to prevent the screensaver from turning on if your mouse is located there.

If you have a .Mac account, you can also choose from the .Mac Screen Effects or subscribe to another .Mac member's public slide show. To do this, click on the Configure button and enter the member's username (for example,

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What good is a computer without programs to run on it? Apple has included a set of native applications and utilities for Mac OS X, including the famous suite of iApps (iCal, iChat, iSync, and iTunes), along with a bunch of uilities to help you monitor and set up additional gear for your Mac.

There are applications for things such as viewing and printing PostScript and PDF files, basic word processing, sending and receiving email, and creating movies, as well as utilities to help you manage your system.

Use the Finder to locate the applications (/Applications) and utilities (/Applications/Utilities) on your system. You can quickly go to the Applications folder either by clicking on the Applications icon in the Sidebar or by using the Shift-

-A keyboard shortcut. If you want to be able to get to the Utilities folder quickly, you might consider dragging the Utilities folder icon to the Finder's Sidebar, or instead using its keyboard shortcut, Shift-

-U.

Following is a list of the programs found in the Applications directory:

Address Book: This is a database program you can use to store contact information for your friends and colleagues.
AppleScript: This folder contains all the tools necessary for writing AppleScripts. AppleScript is an "English-like" scripting language native to the Mac, which you can use to help automate tasks, such as renaming a bunch of files or applying a Photoshop filter to a

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