Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Graphics in OS X

Everywhere you look in OS X, you’ll find visual effects that would make any other operating system think about early retirement.

For example: Menus are transparent. You can set Excel 3D graphs to be slightly transparent so they don’t block other bars in a 3D graph. When you paste files into windows in icon view, their icons fade into view. When you open an especially long message in Mail, its text fades in from white. When you use Launchpad, it fades in and out. And when you switch accounts using fast user switching, your work environment slides off the screen as though it’s pasted on the side of an animated cube.

All these visual goodies owe their existence to Quartz (or its enhanced successor, Quartz Extreme, which is not available on older Macs).

Graphics Formats on the Mac

OS X understands dozens of Mac and Windows graphics file formats. Better yet, its Preview program can open such graphics and export them in a different format, making it an excellent file-conversion program. You can confidently double-click graphics files—from a digital camera, scanner, or web download, for example—in any of these formats:

• PICT files. For almost 20 years, the PICT file was the graphics format Mac fans were most familiar with. It was the graphics format used by the Mac Clipboard, and it was the format created by the Shift-⌘-3 keystroke (see Screen-Capture Keystrokes). Unfortunately, no other kinds of computers could open these files. The Preview program can no longer save graphics ...