OS X Mountain Lion Bible

Opening Applications

When you want to work with an application, you start, or open, the program. This process also is known as launching an application. When you open an application, you can view or edit compatible contents, or you can create new content from scratch.

Often, the content you create in an application can be saved as a document. For example, you can open an application like TextEdit and use it to write a letter; then you can save that letter as a document. You can close the application, shut down the Mac, and then come back another day and reopen the document to continue working on it. (Chapter 8 explains how to work with documents.)

You can launch an application via many different methods:

• (Apple) menu: Choose ⇒Recent Items, and choose an item from the Applications section of the menu. Applications you've opened recently appear, but not others, so this option is limited. Likewise, you can choose a document from the Recent Items submenu to launch its application and then open the document in it.

• Applications folder: Locate the program's icon in the Applications folder. Double-click it to launch the application. Alternatively, right-click or Control+click the icon and choose Open from the contextual menu, or you can select the icon and choose File⇒Open or press