Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger 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.

That's the problem addressed by 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 on Section 5.3.

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

The Sidebar

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 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, flash drives, and other removable goodies. Below the divider, you can stick the icons of anything else: files, programs, folders, or whatever.

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 (Figure 1-3). And if you click the icon of a file or program, it opens.

Figure 1-3. The Sidebar makes navigation very quick, because you can jump back and forth ...