Mac OS X in a Nutshell

The Get Info Window

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 its keyboard shortcut,

-I. The Get Info window, shown in Figure 2-20, has six different panes, which offer different kinds of information about the file.

Figure 2-20. The Get Info window for a PDF 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:

General

This pane tells you the basics about the file, including its kind, size, where it’s located in the filesystem, and when it was created and last modified. The General section also includes two controls for attaching the following special properties to an object:

Stationary Pad

This checkbox only appears in a file’s Info window. One of the most obscurely useful Finder commands that survived the transition to Mac OS X, this checkbox signals applications to treat this file as a template instead of an editable file. If opened with an application capable of working with stationary pad files, it will copy the files’ contents into an untitled new document window, leaving the original file as ...