Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Windows that Auto-Reopen

When you open a program, the Mac reads its computer code, which lies on your hard drive’s surface, and feeds it quickly into RAM (memory). During this brief interval, the icon of the opening program jumps up and down eagerly in your Dock.

Tip

You don’t have to wait for the application to finish bouncing—you’re wasting perfectly good computing time. Just switch to another program and get back to work; the newly opened program keeps right on launching in the background. This means you, Photoshop and Final Cut nerds.

UP TO SPEED: When Programs are Actually Folders

OS X programs don’t seem to have 50,000 support files strewn across your hard drive. Most programs just sit there, naked and shivering, in your Applications folder—seemingly unaccompanied by libraries, dictionaries, foreign language components, and other support files and folders.

The question is: Where did all those support files go?

OS X features packages or bundles, which are folders that behave like single files. Every properly written OS X program looks like a single, double-clickable application icon. Yet to the Mac, it’s actually a folder that contains both the actual application icon and all its hidden support files. (Even documents can be packages, including iDVD project files, Keynote files, and some TextEdit documents.)

If you’d like to prove this to yourself, try this experiment. Choose Go→Applications. See the Calculator program? Right-click it. From the shortcut menu, choose Show Package Contents. ...