Coming from Windows

If your exposure to computers has only been through the various flavors of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X is likely to seem strange and non-intuitive at first, even backward. However, with an introduction to a few basic concepts, you should be able to find your way around the system with ease.

The first major difference between Windows and the Mac OS is that on the Mac, applications are modal . This means that whatever application you are currently using is in the foreground, and its controls effectively take over the entire area of your screen, though you can still see everything around and behind the current application window and interact with some of it. The menu bar across the top of the screen changes to reflect the controls provided by the current application. For instance, if you are using TextEdit, the menus shown at the top of the screen are TextEdit's menus. By contrast, Windows is designed so that each application fits within a single window, which can be any size up to the full size of the screen, blocking other applications from sight. Each application window in Windows contains its own set of control menus , and nothing outside the application window applies to any given application.

KEY TERM

Modal A style of computer interface in which all of your input, using the keyboard or clicking the menu bar, is interpreted by a single application, until you switch to a different "mode" or application (using the Dock, or by clicking on another application's window). In Mac OS X, you can run dozens of applications at once if you wish, but the menus at the top of the screen all belong to whichever application is currently active in the foreground.

NOTE

Because applications in Mac OS X take over the entire screen context, there is no such thing as "full-screen mode," as Windows users are accustomed to having. All applications are effectively full-screen, even if the window you're working with is very small. This is why there is no "maximize" button in Mac OS X, but rather a Zoom button. You will learn more about the Zoom button later in this chapter.

Mac OS X has no "Start" button. How do you launch applications, then? Applications are started by double-clicking them where they reside on the hard disk, typically in the systemwide Applications folder. Because it can be time- consuming to open the Applications folder each time you want to access an application, Mac OS X provides the Dock as a shortcut. The Dock is a broad horizontal strip across the bottom of the screen that stores the icons representing commonly used applications, documents, and other items; it allows you to control these objects with a single click. You will learn more about the Dock later in this chapter.

Quitting applications is a little different in the Mac world. In Windows, you might be accustomed to quitting an application by simply closing its main window. On the Mac, however, because of its modal interface in which an application consists of the entire screen space and not just its main window, it's possible for you to close all of an application's windows and the application will still be running. When this happens, applications continue to run invisibly , taking up memory and other system resources that you might need for other tasks . The correct way to completely exit an application in Mac OS X is to choose the Quit option from the application's primary menu. See 2 Find, Launch, and Quit an Application for more details.

Finally, if you're a Windows user sitting down at a Mac for the first time, you might notice that there is only one mouse button. You might be used to two or three buttons, a scroll wheel, and other such features. However, all Macs ship with a single-button mouse. You might find this to be absurdly limiting; you might be so used to using the mouse's scroll wheel that you can't imagine computing without it. Don't worrythe good news is that Mac OS X supports scroll wheels, multiple buttons, and all the rest of the advanced mouse features. However, the Mac OS has always been designed with the new computer user in mind: a single mouse button is much easier to understand than multiple buttons . Everyone has been confused by which mouse button to use at some point in their life. Apple's solution is to stick with the one-button mouse, and to design Mac OS X and all Mac applications to use no more than one mouse button. If you have a second or third mouse button, it's a bonus, and provides shortcuts to many common tasks, as in Windows; but it's never, ever required to properly use the computer.