Open Applications


Mac OS X uses the Dock to manage applications, and the Dock, as you saw in Chapter 4, can also serve as a launcher to open applications. There are several ways to open applications on your Mac. Here’s a list of the different ways you can do this:

  • Click the application’s icon in the Dock. If an application icon is in the Dock, click it once to open the application. Apple includes icons in the Dock by default for some of the most commonly used applications, such as Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, and more. For more on using the Dock and placing icons there, see Chapter 4.

  • Double-click an application icon. When you double-click an application icon, the application opens and either presents its window, if it’s an application with just one window (such as iTunes, iPhoto, and so on) or opens a new document (Word, Excel, AppleWorks, and others). All your applications should be installed in the Applications folder, which you can open by clicking the Applications icon in the Finder window sidebar or by pressing z-SHIFT-A. (See Chapter 4 for more on the sidebar.) If you want to open any utilities stored in your Utilities folder, you can open this folder by double- clicking the Utilities folder icon in the Applications folder or by pressing z-SHIFT-U.

  • Double-click a file. When you double-click a file, Mac OS X looks for the application that created it and opens the file with that application. If it cannot find an application for the file, it displays a dialog asking you to choose which application you want to open the file with.

  • Open an item from the keyboard. You can open files, applications, or folders by selecting them and pressing z-O or selecting File | Open.

  • Open an item from the contextual menu. If you hold down the CONTROL key and click any item, or if you right-click with a multibutton mouse, a contextual menu displays. You can select Open from this menu to open the item, or, if the item is a file, select Open With to choose which application you want to open the file with.

  • Drag a file onto an application’s icon. Whether the application is running or not, you can drag a file icon onto its icon in the Dock. You can also drag a file onto an application’s icon in the Applications folder, or an application alias anywhere. This is especially useful when you want to open a file with an application that did not create the file. Say you want to open a plain text file in Word, or a graphic file in Photoshop; dragging the file on an application icon “forces” the application to open the file. But this only works if the application can read the file’s format.

  • Select an application from the Apple Menu | Recent Items. The Apple Menu, which is always accessible in the menu bar, contains a Recent Items submenu. (See Figure 13-1.) Select a recently used application if its icon isn’t in the Dock. This stores a list of the last five applications and documents you have used, and you can change this number in the Appearance pane of the System Preferences (see Chapter 9). If you select a document from the Documents section of this submenu, the application that created that document opens.

    click to expand
    Figure 13-1: Opening an application from the Recent Items menu is just like double-clicking its icon.

  • Double-click an application’s alias. In Chapter 5, I explained how to use aliases. When you double-click an application’s alias, it is the same as double-clicking the original application icon. You can store aliases anywhere: on the Desktop, in project folders, or in any other folder.

  • Open an application from the Applications folder in the Dock. In Chapter 4, I showed you how you could place your Applications folder in the Dock. If you do this, you can access all your applications with a click. The menu that displays shows you all the applications and folders inside your Applications folder.

  • Set an application as a Startup Item. In Chapter 8, I showed you how you could set any items—files, folders, or applications—to open automatically when you log in to your Mac. If you have certain applications you use all the time, such as your e-mail program, iChat, Safari, or a word processor, you can set them to open automatically by adding them to Startup Items.

While you definitely won’t use all of these methods for opening applications, you can see that you have a choice. The only reason I went to such detail in this section is because some of these methods are useful in specific situations: the best way to open an application when you have a file is to just double-click the file icon, but dragging a file onto an application icon can be useful for certain files. And when you don’t have a file, but want to create a new one, it is useful to know the different ways you can open applications.

It can also save you time to create aliases for certain applications, especially if for a specific project you need to use three or four programs. Rather than going to the Applications folder to open these programs, creating aliases in your project folders can save you time.

But probably one of the best ways to work with applications you use regularly is to put their icons in the Dock so you can open them with a single click. See Chapter 4 to find out how to do this.

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Did you know? Launch Bar

There are many application launchers available for Mac OS X, most as shareware, programs that you download from the Internet to try out and then pay for if you like them. I'll be totally subjective and tell you about one of them, which is a program I couldn't live without: Launch Bar. This simple utility, available at www.obdev.at/products/launchbar, displays a small bar below your menu bar when you press its hotkey: by default, this is z-Space, but you can set it to whatever you want. When this bar is visible, type the first few letters of the name of the application you want to open. Launch Bar narrows down the choices until you find the program to launch, displaying a list of all applications and files that contain the characters you typed. You can navigate with the arrow keys in its list, if your application doesn't come up at the top, and then press Enter to launch it.

The beauty of LaunchBar is that it learns from your choices. Say I type S-A-F to open Safari. Launch Bar may, at first, display a couple of other applications or files (you can use it to open any file on your Mac, in addition to applications), but when I use the arrow keys to select Safari, it remembers this, and after a couple of times, typing S-A-F shows Safari at the top of the list. Using Launch Bar, I never have to open my Applications folder.

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Voices from the Community—LaunchBar

Back in 1995, when we were developing for NEXTSTEP, we realized that we spent a considerable amount of our working time with task-switching activities—searching for the very same applications, documents, files, and folders again and again.

The better organized these items were, in hierarchical structures such as folders and subfolders, the more time it took to reveal them. Even using graphical, Dock-like utilities that let you access your frequently used items with a single mouse click weren’t much help. If you work with more than a dozen items, you have to organize them in separate hierarchical levels, and you still have to dig around for a specific item.

This led to the idea of being able to communicate with the computer in a new, simple, and efficient manner. We wanted to have a single access point for all the different kinds of information we needed to access, ask for it, and let the computer do the rest.

The first proof of concept implementation of LaunchBar was an internal project at Objective Development; we designed it just for ourselves. But the more we used it, the more it became obvious that a tool like this would be useful for many others as well. So we released the first public version of LaunchBar to the NeXT community in 1996. In 2001, we finally ported LaunchBar to Mac OS X.

Over the years, we’ve received an incredible amount of positive reactions from our users. They immediately fell in love with this utility, and many of them told us that it totally changed the way they work with their computer.

The basic concept of LaunchBar turned out to be powerful and extensible, suitable for a wide range of applications. The current implementation just scratches the surface of these possibilities. Future versions of LaunchBar are planned to provide new search and navigation capabilities as well as a much improved configuration interface with lots of new indexing options.

Norbert Heger is cofounder of Objective Development and technical director of the LaunchBar project. He started with software development in 1987, specializing in NeXT/Apple technologies (Cocoa, EOF, WebObjects) with a main focus on human interface design. Object Development’s web site is www.obdev.at.

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How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
ISBN: 007225355X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 171

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