The Nickel Tour of Mac OS X


Switch on your Mac. The first thing you will noticeapart from the musical chime that tells you the system is starting upis that unlike Windows , Mac OS X is graphical from the very first moment the computer begins to boot . A gray screen with the Apple logo signifies the first phase of booting, in which Mac OS X examines the computer and its devices, makes sure that they're all in working order, and prepares to start. After this phase is complete, the Mac OS X logo screen appears with a progress bar, along with informative statements about which parts of the operating system are being started. Finally, depending on whether you have enabled automatic login or not, you will either be presented with the Login Window or be taken directly to the Desktop of your account.

KEY TERMS

Boot The process of starting up your computer. The term comes from the early tongue-in-cheek concept of the computer "pulling itself up by its own bootstraps."

Login or Log in Mac OS X is a multiuser operating system. This means that each person (or user ) can start a session with the computer with personalized settings and security privileges. Starting one of these sessions is known as logging in , and the window from which you begin a session (by picking a username from a list and typing in a password) is the Login Window.


NOTES

If this is the first time you have started your Mac, after it finishes booting, you are guided through a one-time initial personalization process. Enter your name , address, and other personal information into the system for use in many of Mac OS X's convenience features. If you're worried about your personal data being collected by Apple or third-party companies, don't; Apple has one of the best track records in the industry for treating its customers' private information with confidentiality.

During initial setup, if you're using a brand-new computer, you may also be given the opportunity to upgrade from an older Mac. If you want to move your documents and settings from an older computer to the new one, be sure that both computers are equipped with FireWire, and that you have a FireWire cable handy (6-pin to 6-pin). The instructions on the screen will guide you through the process of transferring your data.


The Desktop

As has become traditional in the computer world, your entire screen area is known as the Desktop. This virtual work area contains files (usually referred to as documents ) and folders, which can be scattered anywhere on the screen, as is true with a real-life desktop. However, Mac OS X's Desktop has numerous features that aren't likely to be found on any office desk.

The Mac OS X Desktop is your virtual work area.

In Mac OS X, the Desktop contains nothing but the files and folders you choose to put there. There are no "standard" fixed items, as with My Computer in Windows or the hard disks in Mac OS 9. (Disks may appear there, depending on the settings you choose.) The whole Desktop area is yours to scatter with documents and folders; however, considering the ways Mac OS X provides for you to organize your stuff, you shouldn't have to keep documents on the Desktop except for those files you're currently working on.

The Menu Bar

The permanent bar across the top of the screen is the menu bar; it contains all the menus for whatever application is currently active, as well as the Apple menu at the far left and the Spotlight Search icon at the far right.

The menu bar changes based on the application that's currently open .

The Apple menu contains global options and controls for the entire system; these options are always the same no matter what application is in the foreground. Its contents include general information about your Mac, shortcuts to the controls for the Dock and the System Preferences , and controls for shutting down or sleeping the computer.

Next to the Apple menu is a menu in bold, labeled with the name of the current application. This menu always contains certain controls for the application, such as the application's Preferences, the "About" information, and the Quit function.

NOTE

The rest of the menus are defined by the application and can vary a great deal; usually there are File and Edit menus, dealing respectively with file management and manipulation of text and data. At the far right is typically the Help menu, which contains the application's documentation.


The System Menus

The right side of the menu bar is taken up with the system menus. These are a series of specialized informational icons, each conveying some useful piece of data about the system, and each containing a menu with further information or options.

Shown here are only a few of the possible system menus that can be displayed by the various parts of Mac OS X. Each can be turned on or off at its appropriate place in the System Preferences or the application associated with it.

The system menus are iconized to give you visual cues about what functions each controls.

The Dock

At the bottom of the screen is the Dock, a unique feature of Mac OS X. The Dock is a flexible combination of taskbar and document holder. Items in the Dock are all shortcuts or representations that point to real itemsapplications, documents, or foldersresiding anywhere on your disks. You can place anything you like into the Dock by dragging it into place; applications go on the left side of the vertical dividing line, and documents and folders go on the right side. The Dock is anchored on the left by the icon for the Finder , which is how you navigate the Mac OS X system; the rightmost icon is the Trash can.

NOTE

You can place as many applications or documents in the Dock as you want. As you put more items in the Dock, it expands in width until it fills the entire screen. If you add even more items, the Dock shrinks vertically so that all the icons scale to fit.


The Dock contains whatever you want it to; applications go on the left and files and folders go on the right.

When an application is running, a black triangle appears underneath its icon in the Dock. You can launch an application from the Dock by clicking its icon once; after the application is running, clicking its icon switches you from whatever else is in the foreground to that application.

On the right side of the Dock are the documents and other items you place there. If you click a document in the Dock, the document's designated opener application launches and opens that document. Click and hold on a folder in the Dock to see a list of the folder's contents from which you can open individual documents.

You can remove any document or any non-running application from the Dock by simply clicking its icon, holding, and dragging it off the Dock. The item disappears in a puff of smoke when it is successfully removed from the Dock; however, this does not mean the item is deleted from the system. It's just no longer shown in the Dock. Think of the Dock as your quick-access system, a collection of shortcuts to whatever resources you use frequently.

NOTE

Hold the Control key and click the vertical divider line in the Dock; from the menu that pops up, select Dock Preferences . With the dialog box that opens, you can play with some of the Dock's coolest featuressize, position on the screen, automatic hiding, and magnification.


The smiley-faced Finder icon at the far left of the Dock is what you click to open a new Finder window, with which you can navigate your Mac's disks and the surrounding network.

On the far right, the Trash can is where you put items you want to delete. Drag documents, folders, and other items from the Desktop or Finder windows into the Trash to throw them away; you can retrieve these items by clicking the Trash and dragging them out of the window that appears. You can retrieve thrown-away items until you empty the Trash (using the Finder menu at the top of the Desktop). After you empty the Trash (which you should do periodically to regain disk space), the items in the Trash are gone for good.

TIP

Items from different disks can be in your Trash. Until you empty the Trash, thrown-away items will still take up space on whatever disks they're stored on. If you need to free up space on a hard disk, it isn't enough to merely throw unneeded items into the Trashyou also need to empty the Trash before the space is recovered.


The Trash icon is also used for ejecting removable disks, burning writable CDs or DVDs, and disconnecting from remote servers. When you drag one of these items to the Trash , the Trash icon changes to an Eject symbol or a Burn symbol as appropriate to the kind of item you are dropping onto it.

The Finder

The Finder is the built-in application that allows you to navigate through the disks in your Mac. If you click the Finder icon at the left end of the Dock, you will get a window that shows you the items in your Home folder.

A Finder window.

Clicking the folder icons in the Finder allows you to move from one part of the system to another, or from one disk to another, and to view and manipulate your documents. More on navigating the disk later in this chapter.

The Finder window shown here exhibits a crucial part of Mac OS X: the window control buttons. These three buttons , colored like a traffic light (red, yellow, and green), appear on every window of every Mac OS X application:

NOTE

If a window exhibits the colored control buttons in the top left, it's the foremost, or active window, of which there can only be one at a time in the system. Other windows, floating in the background, have their control buttons grayed-out to indicate that the window is not active. However, you can click the control buttons to manipulate even an inactive windowthe buttons' colors appear when you move the mouse over them, and the buttons can be used to close, minimize, or zoom the window.


  • Clicking the red Close button closes any window. If the window contains a document that has been changed (such as a text file in TextEdit), and therefore cannot be closed without either saving the changes or discarding them, a dot appears in the middle of the close button to show that if you click it, you will be prompted for what to do.

  • Clicking the yellow Minimize button sends the window to the Dock, getting it off your screen so that you can retrieve it later.

  • Clicking the green Zoom button, in any window, causes the window to automatically size itself to the most efficient size possiblethe smallest it can be while showing all the contents of the window, if possible.

Your Disks

Disks, including the built-in hard disk inside your Mac, appear in the upper-right corner of the Desktop. When you mount any new disk on the system (a CD-ROM, or an external hard disk, for instance), the new disk's icon appears on the Desktop as well. Double-click any disk to open a Finder window showing the disk's contents.

KEY TERMS

Mount When a disk is connected to the system and can be opened up for navigation, it is mounted . Remote network servers can also be mounted by connecting to them as described in Chapter 4, "Networking Your Mac." External storage devices, such as USB memory card readers, typically mount automatically and appear on the Desktop when connected and powered on.

Eject The opposite of mount ; ejecting a CD-ROM is the same as "unmounting" it. Remote network servers and external storage devices must be properly ejected before disconnecting them to avoid the risk of data loss.


When you insert a disk, such as a CD-ROM, it appears on the Desktop. To eject the disk, you drag it to the Trash , which appears at the right end of the Dock. While you're dragging a removable disk, the Trash can icon turns into an Eject icon to show that the disk will be ejected when you release the disk icon on top of it.

TIP

If you don't want to see your disks on your Desktop, you can customize their behavior in the Finder Preferences . From the Finder menu at the left end of the menu bar, choose Preferences ; under the General tab, enable the topmost check boxes to select which kinds of mountable items to show on the Desktop.


Your Home Folder

When you open a Finder window, it opens by default to your Home folder. This folder has the same name as your account's "short name," and it resides in the Users folder at the top level of your startup hard disk. To learn more about the Home folder, see 118 Add a New User .

Your Home folder is where you spend the majority of your time when organizing and navigating your documents and folders. Inside your Home folder are several more folders, each with its own special purpose. Many of these folders are used by applications to store documents of the appropriate types for your quick access.

NOTE

There's nothing stopping you from putting , for instance, a Word document in your Movies folder, or an MP3 file in the Pictures folder. The folders are intended to help you keep your different kinds of data organized, but they don't force you to do so.


  • Desktop . This special folder is an alias to your actual Desktop space; any documents or folders that appear on the Desktop are actually stored in this folder.

  • Documents . Any saved files from applications, such as word processing or text documents, project files, spreadsheets, and HTML or PDF files, can be stored in this folder. Many applications default to this folder for saving documents.

  • Library . The special Library folder contains items you install to enhance the system, such as fonts, screen savers, System Preferences panes, and plugins for applications; it also stores automatically generated items such as application Preferences (in the Preferences subfolder), web bookmarks, and logs.

  • Movies . Keep your video files in this folder.

  • Music . Store digital audio files here, such as MP3 and AAC files. iTunes keeps your music files organized within this folder.

  • Pictures . Image files are typically stored in this folder; iPhoto keeps its photo collections here.

  • Public . Place files in this folder that you want to share with other users over a network.

  • Sites . Files placed in this folder are accessible to remote Web users accessing your computer through Personal Web Sharing.

Applications

The Applications folder sits at the top level of your startup disk and contains all the applications you have installed. Applications in Mac OS X are nearly always single objects, like folders or documents, and can be moved to any place in the system without any ill effects; however, it is usually best to keep all your applications in their designated folder. You can quickly access your applications from the icon directly below your Home folder in the Sidebar of any Finder window.

KEY TERMS

Application Also known as a program , an application is any piece of software you run within Mac OS X. Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, any game, and the Finder are all applications.

Utility An application designed for a small, specific purpose. Often, when you close a utility's single window, the entire application quits.


The Applications and Utilities folders contain all the programs installed on your Mac.

Within the Applications folder is a folder called Utilities . Tools essential for the management of Mac OS X are kept in this location. Over the course of this book, you will become familiar with many of the utilities in this folder.

The Library

There is a Library folder at the top level of the disk, as well as one inside your Home folder. You have two Library folders because of the hierarchical, multiuser nature of Mac OS X. The global and user-level Library folders contain much the same sort of items, but the difference is that items installed in the global Library apply to all users, whereas the ones in your Home folder apply only to you. For instance, you can install a new font in the global Library folder, and all users in the system can access it; but if you place the font in your own personal Library folder, only you will be able to use it.

A third Library folder exists in the System folder; this folder's contents apply only to Mac OS X itself, and should not be tampered with (it could destabilize the operating system).

NOTE

Generally speaking, you will not need to manually work with the files in either Library folder. These folders are mostly maintained by the applications you run. Some items in these folders, such as the WebServer folder (the document root for the included Web server), are intended for modification by advanced users.


System Preferences

The central control system for Mac OS X is an application called System Preferences . The quickest way to access System Preferences is to select it from the Apple menu, which is available no matter what application you are currently running.

The System Preferences application is the control center for managing how your Mac looks and acts.

System Preferences is subdivided into a number of sections, each of which controls a certain area of system configuration, such as Network , Appearance , CDs & DVDs , and so on. In this book, according to Mac OS X convention, the individual sections of the System Preferences application are referred to as panes . Subdivisions of a single pane, which are accessed by clicking a labeled tab at the top of the window, are referred to in this book as pages .

KEY TERM

Pane A conceptual section of a Preferences window, with its own specialized icon, which controls a certain area of configuration for the system or an application.


NOTE

Most applications also have Preferences windows that you can summon to control how the application behaves; these windows are often divided into panes just as System Preferences is. An application's Preferences window is always accessible under the application's primary menu.


The "preference panes" that make up System Preferences are grouped into conceptual arrangements. Some preferences apply only to you and the customizations you want to apply to your own login sessions; other preferences apply to the entire system. Some preferences control how certain hardware components will behave, such as the sound system and the display hardware; others manage networking and Internet access.

TIP

Feel free to explore the many preference panes and see what kinds of options are available to you; this book explores nearly all of them in the course of explaining the myriad specific tasks that Mac OS X enables you to do.




MAC OS X Tiger in a Snap
Mac OS X Tiger in a Snap
ISBN: 0672327066
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 212
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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