Mac OS X Leopard Phrasebook

Chapter 1. The Structure of Mac OS X

The Mac, first and foremost, is a computer designed—as the ads used to say—“for the rest of us,” meaning those of us who aren’t so technologically inclined as to dream in C++ code and write our own device drivers for the mysterious gadgets we pick up from yard sales at houses with bats flying in and out of upstairs windows. That generally means that the user experience of the Mac is intentionally limited only to those functions that the average, casual, novice computer user might require of it. It’s a mistake, however, to think that the shiny, colorful buttons and menus you see in the translucent Aqua interface represent all there is to the Mac. There’s more—far more—under the hood; just because you don’t see ...