A Tour of the Mac OS X Applications Folder

This section lists the applications you can find in the Applications folder and briefly describes them and their use or points you to another Chapter where we cover the application in greater detail.

Address Book

The Mac OS X Address Book, shown in Figure 19-1, not only functions as a personal card file, but it is integrated with the Mail application. Read about how Address Book works with Mail, iCal, and iSync, as well as the .Mac service, in Chapter 20.

Figure 19-1: A big step forward from the traditional little black book.

AppleScript (folder)

AppleScript can record your actions into a script that can be run in the future to automate the same tasks. The AppleScript folder contains four applications with self-explanatory names: Folder Actions Setup, Install Script Menu, Remove Script Menu, and Script Editor. A folder of example AppleScripts is also provided. Refer to Chapter 23 for complete coverage of these items, and all about AppleScript.

Calculator

This spiffy onscreen calculator has a Basic mode for the most commonly used functions. The Advanced button adds a wide range of advanced math functions, and the Paper Tape button produces a separate window emulating a scrolling paper tape, which can be printed. Figure 19-2 shows the expanded version of the Calculator.

Figure 19-2: The Calculator shows off its Advanced functions and Tape window.

Calculator’s frequently overlooked measurement conversion functions are nicely implemented and very helpful. Under the Convert menu, you will find a list of conversion categories: Area, Currency, Energy or Work, Temperature, Length, Speed, Pressure, Weights and Masses, Power, and Volume. Selecting any one brings up a sheet which allows you to select the units of measurement you are converting from and to. First, enter the “from” value into the calculator; then choose your category and the “from” and “to” units. Click OK, and the answer appears on the display. You can even update the currency exchange rates, and read when the last update was performed.

If you think that’s cool, check out Calculator’s Speech menu. You can turn on Speak Button Pressed and Speak Total. As you press each key, you will hear the voice confirm it; when you press the equals sign key, the voice will speak the result. This is especially helpful if you are entering figures from a printed document, because there is no need to keep looking to see that you have entered the right number. It also impresses kids.

Chess

Panther comes with a newly refurbished chess program, with features that will interest avid players. The default onscreen chess set now looks something like a ritzy wooden Jaques Staunton set, complete with algebraic notation along the edge. You can rotate the board in any direction, or view it from any angle, by dragging an edge, as shown in Figure 19-3.

Figure 19-3: The Chess program showing a grass board, fur pieces, the Speech bug, the Game Log, a saved game file, and how to drag an edge.

If you don’t like wood, in Preferences you may choose to have the board appear in metal, marble, or even restful grass. The pieces can appear in wood, metal, marble, or — get this — fur! Also in Preferences, you can set a slider to make the computer play faster or stronger.

Chess can read the computer’s moves out loud (it does this by default) and also obey your voice commands. You can turn either capability on or off in Preferences. The Speech bug appears onscreen by default to allow you to hold down the Escape key, speak your move, and see if it was understood. With some practice, you can usually get the computer to accept your diction. We are getting perilously close here to the spoken chess scene with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Preferences, you can also set the last move to appear in the title bar.

If you like to keep track of your moves to review and study games, Chess will record each move in its Game Log, which is shown by choosing Game Game Log. Games can be exported by choosing Game Export; they are saved as .png files that can be opened in another chess program that supports coordinate notation imports.

DVD Player

If your Mac has an optical drive that can read DVDs, you can use the Mac OS X DVD Player to watch DVD video discs on your computer screen. Newly redesigned for Panther, the DVD player is covered in Chapter 20.

Font Book

Font Book (shown in Figure 19-4) is a new application, included with Panther for the first time. It allows you to search for, find, view, turn on or off, and organize your fonts, without depending on a third-party application. Font Book is described in detail in Chapter 12.

Figure 19-4: The Font Book interface.

iCal

Shown in Figure 19-5, iCal is a calendar application that lets you enter appointments, view multiple calendars at the same time, and share you calendar information with others. You can invite anyone in your Address Book to an iCal event, and set iCal to automatically send them an email invitation via the Mail application. If you use Apple’s .Mac service, you can have iCal publish your calendar over the Internet, so other people can use a standard Web browser to view it. You can subscribe to calendars that have been published over the Internet. By using iCal with iSync, you can synchronize your calendars on several computers. iCal is covered in detail in Chapter 18.

Figure 19-5: iCal’s week view.

iChat AV

iChat AV is an Instant Messaging client which can be used with AOL’s AIM service, or with Apple’s .Mac chat service. If you use .Mac, and connect a webcam such as Apple’s iSight, you can have face-to-face video chats with any Mac user who has the same setup, provided you have a broadband Internet connection. Finally, your futuristic videophone has arrived! If you only have a dial-up connection, you can still have an audio chat with any Mac user with a built-in or USB microphone. iChat AV is described in detail in Chapter 18.

iMovie

Use iMovie to turn raw video footage from a digital camcorder into a movie by removing unwanted footage, rearranging scenes, and adding titles, transitions, visual effects, sound effects, and other audio. We describe iMovie in more detail in Chapter 20. Figure 19-6 shows iMovie’s easy to use interface.

Figure 19-6: Amaze your friends and influence people with the movies you create using iMovie and a digital camcorder.

iSync

iSync synchronizes information between applications on your Mac and devices such as a Bluetooth mobile phone, an iPod, or a Palm OS device (see Figure 19-7). ISync compares your Address Book contacts, your iCal calendar and to do list, and your Web bookmarks in Safari to the information on your devices, and then updates everything to have the same information. If you have a .Mac account, iSync will synchronize this information across multiple computers. iSync is examined in Chapter 19.

Figure 19-7: Devices can be added to the iSync interface.

Image Capture

You can use Image Capture to download pictures from your digital camera to your disk, scaling to particular sizes if desired. Image Capture can automatically create a Web page of these photos via an AppleScript. You can transfer images from a Kodak Picture CD.

But wait — can’t you do basically the same thing with iPhoto? Indeed you can. Why then does Apple include Image Capture? Because many people, especially professional photographers, do not need the extra features of iPhoto. They do not need iPhoto’s image database because they use other methods of archiving their work. For them, Image Capture is more convenient. It may be for you also. Using Image Capture, you can transfer only some of the pictures from your camera, instead of all of them as iPhoto does.

Image Capture’s Preferences window is where you tell Mac OS X what to do when you connect a digital camera: open Image Capture, open iPhoto, open no application, or open another application of your choice (see Figure 19-8).

Figure 19-8: Image Capture’s Preferences window.

Although not all USB camera models are recognized (according to reports on the Internet and Apple’s Web-based user forums), Image Capture will recognize mainstream cameras that store their images in an accepted format such as JPEG. Plug your USB camera into the Mac, turn it on if necessary, and its icon appears in the Finder like the icon of a removable disk.

Image Capture can also work with a scanner. You can set Image Capture to open when you press the scan-and-save button that many scanners feature, to open another application of your choice, or to not open any application at all. You can also set Image Capture to use TWAIN software with the scanner wherever possible. You can preview and crop the image before scanning.

Via Image Capture, you can now share cameras and scanners over a local network using Rendezvous (as long as they are on the same subnet). If you have a certain type of digital camera connected to a remote Mac using Image Capture to share images, you can control it over the Internet to monitor an area photographically every 60 seconds. If your camera records video clips, or records sounds as MP3 files, Image Capture can transfer them to your computer.

Internet Connect

If you have a dial-up connection to the Internet, or even if you use PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) on a DSL connection, Internet Connect is the tool to use to initiate, control, and monitor your connection. You can also use it to connect to an Airport network or to have your AirPort base station connect to the Internet. Refer to Chapter 6 for detailed coverage of Internet Connect.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s Web browser, is included with your Mac OS X software. Version 5.2.3 was shipped with Mac OS X for 10.3. Internet Explorer is still useful even in the age of Safari because every once in a while, you may encounter a Web page that does not work with Safari; if so, try Internet Explorer.

iPhoto

iPhoto lets you import pictures from a digital camera into your Mac and then view, organize, label, edit, and categorize the images. You can easily create albums, onscreen slideshows, Mail messages, Desktop backgrounds, prints, and Webpage slide galleries. Please turn to Chapter 20 to learn more about iPhoto.

iTunes

With iTunes, you can manage and listen to digital audio from many sources, including audio CDs, MP3files from the Internet or from your own CDs, an MP3 player, or Internet radio stations. ITunes provides the interface for browsing and purchasing music over the Internet from the Apple iTunes Music Store. You can create your own playlists of songs from CD and MP3, and if your Mac has a CD recorder, you can use iTunes to burn audio CDs. If you have an Apple iPod, you can copy songs to it and organize songs on it. Chapter 20 covers iTunes in detail.

Mail

Mac OS X’s Mail application is a very capable and flexible email program. It offers excellent integration with the “iApps,” handles multiple mailboxes including your .Mac email account, and lets you define rules for the automatic processing of incoming mail. The Panther version of Mail adds Safari-speed HTML rendering, addresses that are now objects, and the ability to manage email threads. We cover more details of Mail in Chapter 6.

Preview

Preview enables you to view and convert any QuickTime-readable graphics file, including JPEG, TIFF, GIF, PICT, PNG, and others, as well as PDF (Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document Format) files. As described in Chapter 9, Preview is integrated into the printing process, enabling you to preview any Mac OS X print job, and save it as a PDF. Choosing the File Export command enables you to save a graphics file in TIFF format or any other graphics format QuickTime recognizes. Preview can also zoom in and out, rotate the image to left and right, or flip it. The version of Preview installed with Panther has been dramatically improved. Apple claims Preview is now the fastest PDF reader. Searching for text within a PDF document is fast and easy, with a search field that almost instantly finds all matching text as you type each letter. You can now use Preview to read PostScript and EPS files.

Multi-page PDF files can now be viewed with their table of contents, as shown in Figure 19-9 This works only if the document contains a table of contents; otherwise, thumbnails of the pages are shown in the drawer.

Figure 19-9: The Preview application with a PDF document open. On the right, the cursor points to the button that displays the document’s table of contents, shown below it.

Also new to Preview is the ability use links in a PDF file to go to a new location in the document, or open a Web page. Text in a PDF file can now be saved, even with paragraph breaks.

Preview has a new toolbar that is customizable. Choose View Customize Toolbar to drop down a sheet displaying your choices, shown in Figure 19-10.

Figure 19-10: Preview’s Customize Toolbar sheet, showing the Customize tool being dragged to the toolbar.

Note that with Panther, Apple no longer includes Adobe Acrobat Reader in the Applications Folder. Although you may download and use Acrobat Reader for Mac OS X, Apple feels that it has improved Preview to the point where it is all you need.

Tip

If an image or PDF does not look clear in Preview, choose View Actual Size. This shows the image pixel for pixel instead of reducing it to fit your display. If you do this a lot, you can change Preview’s setting by choosing Preferences Images and choosing the Actual Size radio button.

QuickTime Player

QuickTime is Apple’s award-winning cross-platform multimedia technology. The QuickTime Player application plays digital movie files, QuickTime TV and other streaming QuickTime media from the Internet, QuickTime VR (virtual reality) panoramas and objects, and MP3 and other audio files. Apple provides QuickTime Player and the technology behind it with Mac OS X and as a free download for any interested Mac or Windows user. You can read all about QuickTime and QuickTime Player in Chapter 20. The QuickTime Player interface is shown in Figure 19-11.

Figure 19-11: The QuickTime Player interface.

Safari

Safari is Apple’s new Web browser for Mac OS X, introduced in beta form in January of 2003, and in version 1.0 the following June. Safari utilizes the resources of Mac OS X better than any other browser to date, giving it superior performance. Safari’s interface can be set to show Web pages in tabs, which many feel is more convenient than opening window after window. Read more about Safari in Chapter 6.

Sherlock

Sherlock helps you search the Internet for useful information, and organizes it in a more useful way than a Web browser can. It features “channels” to help you find Web pages, pictures, stock quotes, movie times and locations, airline flight information, AppleCare Knowledge Base articles, and the like. Sherlock can also help you track eBay auctions. The “channels” are downloaded from Apple when you first open Sherlock. Chapter 7 details what Sherlock can do — check it out.

Stickies

Stickies is the digital equivalent of the ubiquitous Post-it Note. Stickies supports multiple fonts and styles and can even contain embedded graphics, and be made transparent. Best of all, they lend themselves to Cocoa applications as a Service. The welcome notes you see when you first launch Stickies are shown in Figure 19-12. In the figure, the bottom note has been made transparent, and the cursor points to the drag bar at the top of a note, revealing an info box containing its creation and modified dates.

Figure 19-12: The Stickies welcome notes contain basic information about using the application.

System Preferences

Chapter 13 is devoted to covering this essential application, which allows you to have control over Mac OS X’s many system settings. The System Preferences pane is shown in Figure 19-13.

Figure 19-13: The System Preferences pane showing the default icons.

TextEdit

TextEdit is a text editor, as its name implies. When you double-click a Mac OS X ReadMe file, this is the application set by default to open it. Most people only use TextEdit for this purpose, as they may have used Mac OS 9’s SimpleText, or, if they are old enough, the ancient TeachText used by prehistoric versions of the Mac OS.

But TextEdit is also a simple but effective word-processor. No, it’s not competitive with Microsoft Word or with AppleWorks, but it is all the word-processor many people ever need, and it has the distinct advantage of being free.

TextEdit is a Cocoa application, and can do many tricks. You can create a document in multiple languages, use Unicode fonts such as Zapfino, with advanced typographic features, and view HTML code as text or as it appears in a Web browser. Text in TextEdit can be read aloud by your computer.

Perhaps the coolest tricks TextEdit can now do are open and create files in Microsoft Word format. Yes, you no longer need Microsoft Word to open any file with a .doc extension. (However, not all features in a Microsoft Word file are supported; for instance, you cannot view tables properly.) TextEdit also opens and creates plain text files (.txt), and Rich Text Format (.rtf) files.

The Text Edit ruler, shown in Figure 19-14, provides a quick means of controlling text styles, alignment, line spacing, and tab stops.

Figure 19-14: The TextEdit interface, showing the ruler.

TextEdit’s Preferences, shown in Figure 19-15 and outlined in the following list, give an idea of its flexibility.

Figure 19-15: TextEdit’s Preferences window, showing the default settings.

• New Document Attributes: Allows you specify whether the default document format is in plain text or rich text (which includes formatting information). There is also a check box, Wrap to Page, where you can specify that the window’s contents will rewrap when the length matches that of a printed page. The default setting (off) has TextEdit wrapping at the window’s width, somewhat like a Web page. All of these settings are adjustable on a document-by-document basis.

• Default Fonts: Allows you to establish the default font to use for both rich text and plain text documents. Initially, TextEdit defaults to 12-point Helvetica for rich text and 10-point Monaco for plain text documents.

• Rich text processing: Allows you to tell TextEdit to ignore embedded Rich Text commands in opened HTML or RTF files. Ignoring these commands results in plain text being read and figures ignored.

• Default Plain Text Encoding: Allows you to specify the text encoding (character set mapping) for files you open or save. Automatic is the default choice for both, but can be changed. When Automatic is chosen, TextEdit uses either Unicode or the default encoding for your System, depending upon the document’s contents.

• Editing: Lets you turn on spell-checking-as-you-type. When you type a word that the spell-checker doesn’t recognize, the word is underlined with small red dots. Control-click on the word, and the contextual menu, shown in Figure 19-16, gives you a choice of possible corrections as well as the opportunity to have the word added to your dictionary or for the spelling to be ignored for this instance only. These options are also available from the Spelling window, opened by choosing Edit Spelling Spelling.

  
  Figure 19-16: Use the contextual menu to correct s pelling errors in TextEdit.

• Saving: Lets you set preferences for actions to be taken when you save a document. Delete backup file tells TextEdit not to save the previous version as a backup file. Save files writable sets write privileges on for everyone, not just the owner or group. Overwrite read-only files reverses the standard behavior of not letting you edit and save changes to read-only files. Appending the “.txt” extension to plain text files tells TextEdit to put the extension on the file name for plain text files. Although not necessary for Mac OS X users, this option comes in handy for cross-platform users and is a good visual clue as to the file’s character.

• Revert to Default Settings: The button at the bottom of the dialog that sets all preferences back to their defaults.