Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Get Info

By clicking an icon and then choosing File→Get Info, you open an important window like the one shown in Figure 2-12. 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 (Notes on the Keyboard).

• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.

  GEM IN THE ROUGH: Opening Things in the Trash

  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 (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. ...