Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Windows and How to Work Them

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.

Mac OS X 10.3 takes a giant leap into the realm of tidiness by introducing Exposé, an innovative and useful feature that’s probably worth at least $34 of Mac OS X’s $130 price. It’s described in detail in Section 4.3

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

The Sidebar

Man, if this new Panther feature didn’t hit you in the first 30 seconds, then your monitor must not be on.

The Sidebar is the pane at the left side of every Finder window (and, as you’ll find out in Chapter 4, also at the left side of every full-sized Save and Open dialog box). It lists places where you might look for files and folders—that is, disks, folders, and network disks. Above the horizontal divider, you get the icons for your hard drives, iPods, memory cards, CDs, and other removable goodies. Below the divider, you can stick the icons of anything else: files, programs, folders, or whatever.

Figure 1-3. The Sidebar makes navigation very quick, because you can jump back and forth between distant corners of your Mac with a single click. In column view, the Sidebar is ...