Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter I.3. Getting Acquainted with the Mac User Interface

In This Chapter

• Using the mouse and keyboard

• Acquainting yourself with the Mac user interface

• Working with icons in the Dock and in the Finder

• Getting help

Theoretically, using a computer is simple. In practice, using a computer can cause people to suffer a wide range of emotions from elation to sheer frustration and despair.

The problem with using a computer stems mostly from two causes:

• Not knowing what the computer can do

• Not knowing how to tell the computer what you want it to do

In the early days of personal computers, this communication gap between users and computers arose mostly from ordinary people trying to use machines designed by engineers for other engineers. If you didn't understand how a computer engineer thinks (or doesn't think), computers seemed nearly impossible to understand.

Fortunately, Apple has solved this problem with the Mac. Instead of designing a computer for other computer engineers, Apple designed a computer for ordinary people. And what do ordinary people want? Here's the short (but definitely important) list:

• Reliability

• Ease of use

From a technical point of view, what makes the Mac reliable is its operating system, Mac OS X. An operating system is nothing more than a program that makes your computer actually work.

An operating system works in the background. When you use a computer, you don't really notice the operating system, but you do see its user interface. The user interface is like a clerk at the ...