As described in Chapter 4, most big- name programs are sold in both Mac and Windows flavors, and the documents they create are freely interchangeable.
Files in program- agnostic , standard exchange formats don't need conversion either. These formats include JPEG (the photo format used on Web pages), GIF (the cartoon/ logo format used on Web pages), PNG (a newer image format used on Web pages), HTML (raw Web-page documents), Rich Text Format (a word-processor exchange format that maintains bold, italic, and other formatting), plain text (no formatting at all), QIF (Quicken Interchange Format), MIDI files (for music), and so on.
UP TO SPEED Moving Data Within the Mac |
Most of this chapter concerns the act of moving files between machines . Once you've settled in on the Mac, though, you'll frequently want to move data between documents . Fortunately, the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands work almost exactly as they do in Windows. You still can't paste a Web page into your image editor, and you can't paste MIDI music information into your word processor. But you can put graphics into your word processor, paste movies into your database, insert text into Photoshop Elements, and combine a surprising variety of seemingly dissimilar kinds of data. All you have to do is get used to the Macintosh keyboard shortcuts, which use the key instead of the Ctrl key: -X for Cut, -C for Copy, and -V for paste. You can also drag highlighted text or graphics to another place in the document, into a different window, or into a different application, as shown herea satisfyingly direct feature that works in even more Macintosh programs than Windows programs. Just note that in some Mac OS X programs ( Cocoa programs; see Section 4.8), you must press the mouse button for half a second before beginning to drag. You can also drag text, graphics, sounds, and even movie clips out of your document windows and directly onto the desktop . Once there, your dragged material generally becomes an icon called a clipping file . (In Windows, it's called a Scrap file.) Later, when you drag a clipping from your desktop back into an application window, the material in that clipping reappears. Drag-and-drop, in other words, lets you treat your desktop itself as a giant, computer-wide pasteboardan area where you can temporarily stash pieces of text or graphics as you work. |
Part of this blessing stems from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X use file name extensions to identify documents. ("Letter to the Editor.doc", for example, is a Microsoft Word document on either operating system.) Common suffixes include:
Kind of document | Suffix | Example |
---|---|---|
Microsoft Word | .doc | Letter to Mom.doc |
text | .txt | Database Export.txt |
Rich Text Format | .rtf | Senior Thesis.rtf |
Excel | .xls | Profit Projection.xls |
PowerPoint | .ppt | Slide Show.ppt |
FileMaker Pro | .fp5, fp6, fp7 | Recipe file.fp7 |
JPEG photo | .jpg | Baby Portrait.jpg |
GIF graphic | .gif | Logo.gif |
PNG graphic | .png | Dried fish.png |
Web page | .htm | Index.htm |
The beauty of Mac OS X is that most Mac programs add these file name suffixes automatically and invisiblyand recognize such suffixes from Windows with equal ease. You and your Windows comrades can freely exchange documents without ever worrying about this former snag in the Macintosh/Windows relationship.
You may, however, encounter snags in the form of documents made by Windows programs that don't exist on the Mac, such as Microsoft Access. Chapter 7 tackles these special cases one by one.
FireWire Disk Mode is by far the fastest method yet for transferring a lot of dataeven faster than copying files over a networkbut it works only between two Macs, which is why it occupies this lonely spot at the end of this chapter. FireWire Disk Mode is extremely useful in any of these situations:
You're traveling with a laptop . You want to copy your life onto it from your main Mac, including your entire 2 GB email folder and project files, before taking it on a trip, and then unload it when you return.
You have a new Mac . You want to copy everything off the old one, without having to wait all night.
One Mac won't start up . You want to repair it, using another Mac as a "front end."
In the following steps, suppose your main Mac is an iMac, and you want to use a PowerBook as an external hard drive for it.
Using a FireWire cable, connect the FireWire jacks of both computers .
For this trick, you need a 6-pin FireWire cable not the one that connects a camcorder to a Mac. The one you need has the same, large connector on both ends.
On the PowerBook, choose System Preferences. Click Startup Disk .
The bottom of this screen is all new in Tiger, including the button you're about to click.
Click Target Disk Mode. In the confirmation box, click Restart .
The PowerBook turns off, then on again. A giant, yellow, Y-shaped FireWire icon bounces around the laptop screen.
Now take a look at the iMac's screen: Sure enough, there's the PowerBook's hard drive icon on the desktop. You're ready to copy files onto or off of it, at extremely high speeds, and go on with your life.
When you're finished working with the PowerBook, eject it from the iMac's screen as you would any disk. Then turn off the laptop by pressing the power button .
The next time you turn on the PowerBook, it will start up from its own copy of Mac OS X, even if the FireWire cable is still attached. (You can disconnect the cable whenever.)