OS X Mountain Lion Portable Genius

Working with the Finder

After your Mac boots or when you first log in, take a look at that smiley-face guy grinning at you near the bottom-left corner of your screen. That’s the Finder (see Figure 1.1), and it’s one of the most important items in all of OS X Mountain Lion.

The Finder is an application that always runs in Mountain Lion and it has been a part of Mac OS since its inception. The Finder is what Mac fans have used for decades to browse their computer drives and discs.

It has evolved into a great tool that I can’t imagine not having (especially as you can’t view the contents of your hard drive without it). For Windows converts, think of the Finder as the OS X equivalent to Windows Explorer. In this section, I show you how to use the basic features in Finder, and I also give you tips that I’ve learned to make it even easier and more productive to use.

1.1 The Finder icon.

The Mountain Lion desktop at a glance

The desktop is what you see when you first start up or log in to your Mac. This is where all the action in your applications takes place. The desktop is a major part (and actually, the starting point) of the Finder.

Figure 1.2 should mirror your own Mac screen very closely after you log in. It shows the major parts that you see when the Finder first comes up.

Now that you know the names of the items you see in the Finder, you can use Table 1.2 to decipher what ...