By David Pogue
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: How the Mac Is Different

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When you get right down to it, the job description of every operating system is pretty much the same. Whether it's Mac OS X, Windows Vista, or Billy Bob's System-Software Special, any OS must serve as the ambassador between the computer and you, its human operator. It must somehow represent your files and programs on the screen so that you can open them; offer some method of organizing your files; present onscreen controls that affect your speaker volume, mouse speed, and so on; and communicate with your external gadgets, like disks, printers, and digital cameras.

In other words, Mac OS X offers roughly the same features as recent versions of Windows. That's the good news.

The bad news is that these features are called different things and parked in different spots. As you could have predicted, this rearrangement of features can mean a good deal of confusion for you, the Macintosh foreigner. For the first few days or weeks, you may instinctively reach for certain familiar features that simply aren't where you expect to find them, the way your tongue keeps sticking itself into the socket of the newly extracted tooth.

To minimize the frustration, therefore, read this chapter first. It makes plain the most important and dramatic differences between the Windows method and the Macintosh way.

As a critic might say, Apple is always consistent with its placement of the power button: It's different on every model.

On iMacs and Mac Minis, the power button is on the back panel. On tower Macs (Mac Pro, Power Mac), it's on the front panel. And on laptop Macs, the button is near the upper-right corner of the keyboard. (Then again, if you have a laptop, you should get into the habit of just closing the lid when you're done working, and opening it to resume; the power button rarely plays a role in your life.)

In every case, though, the power button looks the same (): it bears the logo.

Figure : Every Mac's power button looks like this, although it might be hard to find. The good news: Once you find it, it'll pretty much stay in the same place.

You can get terrific mileage out of

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Power On, Dude

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As a critic might say, Apple is always consistent with its placement of the power button: It's different on every model.

On iMacs and Mac Minis, the power button is on the back panel. On tower Macs (Mac Pro, Power Mac), it's on the front panel. And on laptop Macs, the button is near the upper-right corner of the keyboard. (Then again, if you have a laptop, you should get into the habit of just closing the lid when you're done working, and opening it to resume; the power button rarely plays a role in your life.)

In every case, though, the power button looks the same (): it bears the logo.

Figure : Every Mac's power button looks like this, although it might be hard to find. The good news: Once you find it, it'll pretty much stay in the same place.

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That One-Button Mouse

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You can get terrific mileage out of shortcut menus on the Mac, just as in Windows ().

Figure : After years of resisting, Apple now includes a two-button mouse with every iMac and Mac Pro (although the right button is invisible). You can right-click on laptop trackapds, too, even though they appear to have only a single button. It's worth learning how to right-click, though, because shortcut menus, shown here in Windows (left) and on the Mac (right), are so handy.

But for years, it took two hands to open a Mac shortcut menu. You did it by Control-clicking something on the screen—and you can still do that. But Windows veterans have always preferred the one-handed method: right-clicking. That is, clicking something by pressing the right mouse button on a two-button mouse.

"Ah, but that' s what's always driven me nuts about Apple," goes the common refrain. "Their refusal to get rid of their stupid one-button mouse!"

Well, not so fast.

First of all, you can attach any old $6 USB two-button mouse to the Mac, and it'll work flawlessly.

Furthermore, if you bought a desktop Mac since late 2005, you probably already have a two-button mouse—but you might not realize it. Take a look: Is it a white shiny plastic capsule with tiny, gray, scrolling track-pea on the far end? Then you have a Mighty Mouse, and it has a secret right mouse button. It doesn't work until you ask for it.

To do that, choose →System Preferences. Click Keyboard & Mouse. Click the Mouse tab. There, in all its splendor, is a diagram of the Mighty Mouse. (There's a picture in .)

Your job is to choose Secondary Button from the pop-up menu that identifies the right side of the mouse. (The reason it's not called "right button" is because left-handers might prefer to reverse the right and left functions.)

From now on, even though there aren't two visible mouse buttons, your Mighty Mouse does, in fact, register a left-click or a right-click depending on which side of the mouse you push down. It works a lot more easily than it sounds like it would.

The old Control-clicking technique still works. But in this book, you'll be instructed to "right-click" things, since that's probably what you're used to.

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On, Off, and Sleep

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If you're the only person who uses your Mac, finishing up a work session is simple. You can either turn off the machine or simply let it go to sleep, in any of several ways.

It's clear that Apple expects its customers not to shut down their machines between sessions, because the company has gone to great lengths to make doing so inconvenient. (For example, you have to save your work in all open programs before you can shut down.)

That's OK. Sleep mode (called Standby on the PC) consumes very little power, keeps everything you were doing open and in memory, and wakes the Mac up almost immediately when you press a key or click the mouse. To make your machine sleep, use any of these techniques:

• Choose →Sleep. (The menu, available no matter what program you're using, is at the upper-left corner of your screen.)
• Press the Power button on your machine—or, if you don't have one easily accessible, press Control- key. On some models, doing so makes the Mac sleep immediately; on others, you have to click Sleep in the dialog box that appears ().
• Just walk away, confident that the Energy Saver control panel described in will send the machine off to dreamland automatically at the specified time.
  

  Figure : Once the Shut Down dialog box appears, you can press the S key instead of clicking Sleep, R for Restart, Esc for Cancel, or Enter for Shut Down.

You shouldn't have to restart the Mac very often. But on those rare occasions, including severe troubleshooting mystification, here are a few ways to do it:

• Choose →Restart. Click Restart (or press Enter) in the confirmation dialog box.
• Press the Power button or Control- to summon the dialog box shown in , if your Mac doesn't automatically go to sleep. Click Restart (or type R).
• If all else fails, press Control--Power key. (On newer keyboards that lack a power key, use Control-- instead.) That restarts the Mac instantly, but you lose any chance to save changes in your open documents.

To shut down your machine completely (when you don't plan to use it for more than a couple of days or when you plan to transport it, for example), do one of the following:

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The Menu Bar

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It won't take you long to discover that on the Macintosh, there's only one menu bar. It's always at the top of the screen. The names of these menus, and the commands inside them, change to suit the window you're currently using. That's different from Windows, where a separate menu bar appears at the top of every window.

Out of the box, Leopard's menu bar is slightly transparent. If that drives you crazy, see page 447.

Mac and Windows devotees can argue the relative merits of these two approaches until they're blue in the face. All that matters, though, is that you know where to look when you want to reach for a menu command. On the Mac, you always look upward.

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Finder = Windows Explorer

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In Mac OS X, the "home base" program—the one that appears when you first turn on the machine and shows you the icons of all your folders and files—is called the Finder. This is where you manage your folders and files, throw things away, manipulate disks, and so on. (You may also hear it called the desktop, since the items you find there mirror the files and folders you might find on a real-life desktop.)

Getting used to the term Finder is worthwhile right up front, because it comes up so often. For example, the first icon on your Dock is labeled Finder, and clicking it always takes you back to your desktop.

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Dock = Taskbar

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At the bottom of almost every Mac OS X screen sits a tiny row of photorealistic icons. This is the Dock, a close parallel to the Windows taskbar. (As in Windows, it may be hidden or placed on the left or right edge of the screen instead—but those are options primarily preferred by power users and eccentrics.)

The Dock displays the icons of all your open windows and programs, which are denoted by small glowing dots beneath their icons. Clicking these icons opens the corresponding files, folders, disks, documents, and programs. If you click and hold (or right-click) an open program's icon, you'll see a pop-up list of the open windows in that program, along with Quit and a few other commands.

When you close a program, its icon disappears from the Dock (unless you've secured it there for easy access, as described in ).

You can cycle through the various open programs on your Mac by holding down the key and pressing Tab repeatedly. (Sound familiar? It's just like Alt-Tabbing in Windows.) And if you just tap -Tab, you bounce back and forth between the two programs you've used most recently.

What you may find confusing at first, though, is that the Dock also performs one function of the Windows Start menu: It provides a "short list" of programs and files that you use often, for easy access. To add a new icon to the Dock, just drag it there (put programs to the left of the divider line; everything else goes on the right). To remove an icon from the Dock, just drag the icon away from the Dock. As long as that item isn't actually open at the moment, it disappears from the Dock with a little animated puff of smoke when you release the mouse button.

The bottom line: On the Mac, a single interface element—the Dock—exhibits characteristics of both the Start menu (it lists frequently used programs) and the taskbar (it lists currently open programs and files).

If you're still confused, should help clear things up.

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Menulets = Tray

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Most Windows fans refer to the row of tiny status icons at the lower-right corner of the screen as the tray, even though Microsoft's official term is the notification area. (Why use one syllable when eight will do?)

Macintosh fans wage a similar battle of terminology when it comes to the little menu-bar icons shown in . Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans prefer to call them menulets.

In any case, these menu-bar icons are cousins of the Windows tray—that is, each is both an indicator and a menu that provides direct access to certain settings in System Preferences. One menulet lets you adjust your Mac's speaker volume, another lets you change the screen resolution, another shows you the remaining power in your laptop battery, and so on.

Figure : These little guys are the direct descendants of the controls once found on the Mac OS 9 Control Strip or the Windows system tray.

Making a menulet appear usually involves turning on a certain checkbox. These checkboxes lurk on the various panes of System Preferences (), which is the Mac equivalent of the Control Panel. (To open System Preferences, choose its name from the menu, or click the gears icon on the Dock.)

Here's a rundown of the most useful Apple menulets, complete with instructions on where to find this magic on/off checkbox for each.

The following descriptions indicate the official, authorized steps for installing a menulet. There is, however, a folder on your hard drive that contains 25 of them in a single window, so that you can install one with a quick double-click. To find them, open your hard drive→System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder.

• AirPort lets you turn your AirPort card on or off, join existing AirPort wireless networks, and create your own private ones. To find the "Show" checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. From the "Show" pop-up menu, choose AirPort.
• Battery shows how much power remains in your laptop's battery. To find the "Show" checkbox: Open System Preferences→Energy Saver→Options tab.
• Bluetooth connects to Bluetooth devices, "pairs" your Mac with a cellphone, and so on.

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Keyboard Differences

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Mac and PC keyboards are subtly different, too. Making the switch involves two big adjustments: Figuring out where the special Windows keys went (like Alt and Ctrl)—and figuring out what to do with the special Macintosh keys (like and Option).

Here's how to find the Macintosh equivalents of familiar PC keyboard keys:

• Ctrl key. The Macintosh offers a key labeled Control (or, on laptops, "ctrl"), but it isn't the equivalent of the PC's Ctrl key. The Mac's Control key is primarily for helping you "right-click" things, as described earlier.
  Instead, the Macintosh equivalent of the Windows Ctrl key is the key. It's right next to the Space bar, bearing the cloverleaf symbol and, on older Macs, the logo. It's pronounced "command," although novices can often be heard calling it the "pretzel key," "Apple key," or "clover key."
  Most Windows Ctrl-key combos correspond perfectly to key sequences on the Mac. The Save command is now -S instead of Ctrl-S, Open is -O instead of Ctrl-O, and so on.
  Mac keyboard shortcuts are listed at the right side of each open menu, just as in Windows. Unfortunately, they're represented in the menu with goofy symbols instead of their true key names. Here's your cheat sheet to the menu keyboard symbols: represents the Shift key, means the Option key, and refers to the Control key.
• Alt key. On most Mac keyboards, a key on the bottom row of the Macintosh keyboard is labeled both Alt and Option (at least on Macs sold in the U.S.). This is the closest thing the Mac offers to the old Alt key.
  In many situations, keyboard shortcuts that involve the Alt key in Windows use the Option key on the Mac. For example, in Microsoft Word, the keyboard shortcut for the Split Document Window command is Alt-Ctrl-S in Windows, but Option--T on the Macintosh.
  Still, these two keys aren't exactly the same. Whereas the Alt key's most popular function is to control the menus in Windows programs, the Option key on the Mac is a "miscellaneous" key that triggers secret functions and secret characters.
  For example, when you hold down the Option key as you click the Close or Minimize button on a Macintosh window, you close or minimize

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Disk Differences

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Working with disks is very different on the Mac. Whereas Windows is designed to show the names (letters) and icons for your disk drives, the Mac shows you the names and icons of your disks. You'll never, ever see an icon for an empty drive, as you do on Windows.

As soon as you insert, say, a CD, you see its name and icon appear on the screen. In fact, every disk inside, or attached to, a Macintosh is represented on the desktop by an icon (see ). That's why the icon for your primary hard drive has been sitting in the upper-right corner of your screen since the first time you turned on the Mac. (It's usually named Macintosh HD.)

If you prefer the Windows look, in which no disk icons appear on the desktop, it's easy enough to re-create it on the Mac; choose Finder→Preferences and turn off the four checkboxes you see there ("Hard disks," "External disks," "CDs, DVDs, and iPods," and "Connected servers."

Figure : You may see all kinds of disks on the Mac OS X desktop (shown here: hard drive, CD, iPod, iDisk)—or none at all, if you've chosen to hide them using the Finder→Preferences command. But chances are pretty good you won't be seeing many floppy disk icons. If you do decide to hide your disk icons, you can always get to them as you do in Windows: by opening the Computer window (Go→Computer).

Ejecting a disc from the Mac is a little bit different, too, whether it's a CD, DVD, USB flash drive, shared network disk, iDisk, iPod, or external hard drive. You can go about it in any of these ways:

• Hold down the key on your keyboard (CDs and DVDs only).
• Right-click the disk's desktop icon. From the shortcut menu that appears, choose "Eject [whatever the disk's name is]."
• Click the disk's icon and then choose File→"Eject [disk's name]" (or press -E).
• Drag the icon of the disk onto the Trash icon at the end of the Dock. (You'll see its icon turn into a giant symbol, the Mac's little acknowledgment that it knows what you're trying to do.)

For you, the Windows veteran, the main thing to remember here is that you never eject a Macintosh disk by pushing the Eject button

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Where Your Stuff Is

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The icon for your hard drive (usually called Macintosh HD) generally appears in the upper-right corner of your screen. If you double-click it, all you'll find in the Macintosh HD window is a set of folders called Applications, Library, and Users.

Most of these folders aren't very useful to you, the Mac's human companion. They're there for Mac OS X's own use (which is why the Finder→Preferences dialog box offers a checkbox that hides their icons entirely). Think of your main hard drive window as storage for the operating system itself, which you'll access only for occasional administrative purposes.

In fact, the folders you really do care about boil down to these:

Applications is Apple's word for programs.

When it comes to managing your programs, the Applications folder (which you can open by choosing Go→Applications) is something like the Program Files folder in Windows—but without the worry. You should feel free to open this folder and double-click things. In fact, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. This is your complete list of programs. (What's on your Dock is more like a Greatest Hits subset.)

Better yet, on the Mac, programs bear their real, plain-English names, like Microsoft Word, rather than eight-letter abbreviations, like WINWORD.EXE. Most are self- contained in a single icon, too (rather than being composed of hundreds of little support files), which makes copying or deleting them extremely easy.

Your documents, files, and preferences, meanwhile, sit in an important folder called your Home folder. Inside () are folders that closely resemble the My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music folders on Windows—except that on the Mac, they don't say "My."

Figure : This is it: the folder structure of Mac OS X. It's not so bad, really. For the most part, what you care about are the Applications folder in the main hard drive window and your own Home folder. You're welcome to save your documents and park your icons almost anywhere on your Mac (except inside the System folder or other people's Home folders). But keeping your work in your Home folder makes backing up and file sharing easier.

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Window Controls

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As in Windows, a window on the Mac is framed by an assortment of doodads and gizmos (). You'll need these to move a window, close it, resize it, scroll it, and so on. But once you get to know the ones on a Macintosh, you're likely to be pleased by the amount of thought those fussy perfectionists at Apple have put into their design.

Figure : When Steve Jobs unveiled Mac OS X at a Macworld Expo in 1999, he said that his goal was to oversee the creation of an interface so attractive, "you just want to lick it." Desktop windows, with their juicy, fruit-flavored controls, are a good starting point.

Here's an overview of the various Mac OS X window-edge gizmos and what they do.

When several windows are open, the darkened window name and colorful upper-left controls tell you which window is active (in front). Windows in the background have gray, dimmed lettering and gray upper-left control buttons. As in Windows, the title bar also acts as a handle that lets you move the entire window around on the screen.

Here's a nifty keyboard shortcut with no Windows equivalent: You can cycle through the different open windows in one program without using the mouse. Just press -` (that's the tilde key, to the left of the number 1 key). With each press, you bring a different window forward within the current program. It works both in the Finder and in your programs.

Perhaps more usefully, you can use Control-F4 to cycle through the open windows in all programs.

After you've opened one folder inside another, the title bar's secret folder hierarchy menu is an efficient way to backtrack—to return to the enclosing window. reveals everything about the process after this key move: pressing the key as you click the name of the window. (You can release the key immediately after clicking.)

Instead of using this title bar menu, you can also jump to the enclosing window by pressing -up arrow. Pressing -down arrow takes you back into the folder you started in. (This makes more sense when you try it than when you read it.)

Figure : Right-click (or -click) a Finder window's title bar to summon the hidden folder hierarchy menu. This trick also works in most other Mac OS X programs. For example, you can

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Terminology Differences

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There are enough other differences between Mac and Windows to fill 15 pages. Indeed, that's what you'll find the end of this book: an alphabetical listing of every familiar Windows feature and where to find its equivalent on the Mac.

As you read both that section of the book and the chapters that precede it, however, you'll discover that some functions are almost identical in Mac OS X and Windows, but have different names. Here's a quick-reference summary:

Windows term	Macintosh term
Control Panel	System Preferences
Gadget	Widget
Drop-down menu	Pop-up menu
Program	Application
Properties	Get Info
Recycle Bin	Trash
Search command	Spotlight
Shortcuts	Aliases
Sidebar	Dashboard
Taskbar	Dock
Tray (notification area)	Menulets
Windows Explorer	Finder
Windows folder	System folder

With that much under your belt, you're well on your way to learning the ways of Mac OS X.

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Chapter 2: Folders, Dock, & Windows

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When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.5, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, rotating "Please wait" gear cursor—and then you're in. No progress bar, no red tape.

Figure : Left: On Macs configured to accommodate different people at different times, this is one of the first things you see upon turning on the computer. Click your name. (If the list is long, you may have to scroll to find your name—or just type the first few letters of it.) Right: At this point, you're asked to type in your password. Type it, and then click Log In (or press Return or Enter; pressing these keys usually "clicks" any blue, pulsing button in a dialog box). If you've typed the wrong password, the entire dialog box vibrates, in effect shaking its little dialog-box head, suggesting that you guess again. (See .)

What happens next depends on whether you're the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or household.

• If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in , no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
• If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in . Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list).

If the Mac asks for your password, type it and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.

The desktop is the shimmering, three-dimensional Mac OS X landscape shown in . On a new Mac, it's covered by a starry galaxy photo that belongs to Leopard's overall outer-space graphic theme.

If you've ever used a computer before, most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of familiar elements. Here's a quick tour.

Figure : The Mac OS X landscape looks like a more futuristic version of the operating systems you know and love. This is just a starting point, however. You can dress it up with a different background picture, adjust your windows in a million ways, and, of course, fill the Dock with only the programs, disks, folders, and files you need.

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Getting into Mac OS X

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When you first turn on a Mac that's running Mac OS X 10.5, an Apple logo greets you, soon followed by an animated, rotating "Please wait" gear cursor—and then you're in. No progress bar, no red tape.

Figure : Left: On Macs configured to accommodate different people at different times, this is one of the first things you see upon turning on the computer. Click your name. (If the list is long, you may have to scroll to find your name—or just type the first few letters of it.) Right: At this point, you're asked to type in your password. Type it, and then click Log In (or press Return or Enter; pressing these keys usually "clicks" any blue, pulsing button in a dialog box). If you've typed the wrong password, the entire dialog box vibrates, in effect shaking its little dialog-box head, suggesting that you guess again. (See .)

What happens next depends on whether you're the Mac's sole proprietor or have to share it with other people in an office, school, or household.

• If it's your own Mac, and you've already been through the Mac OS X setup process described in , no big deal. You arrive at the Mac OS X desktop.
• If it's a shared Mac, you may encounter the Login dialog box, shown in . Click your name in the list (or type it, if there's no list).

If the Mac asks for your password, type it and then click Log In (or press Return). You arrive at the desktop. offers much more on this business of user accounts and logging in.

The desktop is the shimmering, three-dimensional Mac OS X landscape shown in . On a new Mac, it's covered by a starry galaxy photo that belongs to Leopard's overall outer-space graphic theme.

If you've ever used a computer before, most of the objects on your screen are nothing more than updated versions of familiar elements. Here's a quick tour.

Figure : The Mac OS X landscape looks like a more futuristic version of the operating systems you know and love. This is just a starting point, however. You can dress it up with a different background picture, adjust your windows in a million ways, and, of course, fill the Dock with only the programs, disks, folders, and files you need.

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The Four Window Views

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You can view the files and folders in a desktop window in any of four ways: as icons; as a single, tidy list; in a series of neat columns; or as giant document icons that you flip through like they're CDs in a record-store bin (called Cover Flow view). shows the four different views.

Every window remembers its view settings independently. You might prefer to look over your Applications folder in list view (because it's crammed with files and folders), but you may prefer to view the Pictures folder in icon or Cover Flow view, where the larger icons serve as previews of the photos.

To switch a window from one view to another, just click one of the four corresponding icons in the window's toolbar, as shown in .

Figure : From the top: The same window in icon view, list view, column, and Cover Flow views. Very full folders are best navigated in list or column views, but you may prefer to view emptier folders in icon or Cover Flow views, because larger icons are easier to preview and click. Remember that in any view (icon, list, column, or Cover Flow), you can highlight an icon by typing the first few letters of its name. In icon, list, or Cover Flow view, you can also press Tab to highlight the next icon (in alphabetical order), or Shift-Tab to highlight the previous one.

You can also switch views by choosing View→as Icons (or View→as Columns, or View→as List, or View→as Cover Flow), which can be handy if you've hidden the toolbar. Or, for less mousing and more hardbodied efficiency, press -1, -2, -3, or -4 for icon, list, column, or Cover Flow view, respectively.

The following pages cover each of these views in greater detail.

One common thread in the following discussions is the availability of the View Options palette, which lets you set up the sorting, text size, icon size, and other features of each view, either one window at a time or for all windows.

Apple gives you a million different ways to open View Options. You can choose View→Show View Options, or press -J, or choose Show View Options from the menu at the top of every window.

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Icon View

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In an icon view, every file, folder, and disk is represented by a small picture—an icon. This humble image, a visual representation of electronic bits and bytes, is the cornerstone of the entire Macintosh religion. (Maybe that's why it's called an icon.)

Mac OS X offers a number of useful icon-view options, all of which are worth exploring. Start by opening any icon view window, and then choose View→Show View Options (-J).

Always open in icon view

In Mac OS X Leopard, it's easy to set up your preferred look for all folder windows on your entire system. With one click on the "Use as Defaults" button (described below), you can change the window view of 20,000 folders at once—to icon view, list view, or whatever you like.

The "carview.php?tsp=" option lets you override that master setting, just for this window.

For example, you might generally prefer a neat list view with large text. But for your Pictures folder, it probably makes more sense to set up icon view, so you can see a thumbnail of each photo without having to open it.

That's the idea here. Open Pictures, change it to icon view, and then turn on "." Now every folder on your Mac is in list view except Pictures.

The wording of this item in the View Options dialog box changes according to the view you're in at the moment. In a list-view window, for example, it says "Always open in list view." In a Cover Flow-view window, it says "Always open in Cover Flow." And so on. But the function is the same: to override the default (master) setting.

Icon size

Mac OS X draws the little pictures that represent your icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you (or the Mac) can scale them to almost any size without losing any quality or clarity.

In the View Options window (), drag the Icon Size slider back and forth until you find a size you like. (For added fun, make little cartoon sounds with your mouth.)

Grid spacing

You can control how closely spaced icons are in a window. If you want see a lot of them without making the window bigger, you can pack 'em in like sardines. shows all.

Figure : Drag the "Grid spacing" slider to specify how tightly packed you want your icons to be. At the minimum setting (top), they're so crammed that it's almost ridiculous; you can't even see their names. But sometimes, you don't really need to. At more spacious settings (bottom), you get a lot more "white space."

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List View

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In windows that contain a lot of icons, the list view is a powerful weapon in the battle against chaos. It shows you a tidy table of your files' names, dates, sizes, and so on. In Leopard, alternating blue and white background stripes help you read across the columns in a list-view window.

You have a great deal of control over your columns, in that you get to decide how wide they should be, which of them should appear, and in what order (except that Name is always the first column). Here's how to master these columns:

Most of the world's list-view fans like their files listed alphabetically. It's occasionally useful, however, to view the newest files first, largest first, or whatever.

When a desktop window displays its icons in a list view, a convenient new strip of column headings appears (). These column headings aren't just signposts; they're buttons, too. Click Name for alphabetical order, Date Modified to view newest first, Size to view largest files at the top, and so on.

Figure : You control the sorting order of a list view by clicking the column headings (top). Click a second time to reverse the sorting order (bottom). You'll find the identical ▴ or ▾ triangle—indicating the identical information—in email programs, in iTunes, and anywhere else where reversing the sorting order of the list can be useful.

It's especially important to note the tiny, dark gray triangle that appears in the column you've most recently clicked. It shows you which way the list is being sorted.

When the triangle points upward, the oldest files, smallest files, or files beginning with numbers (or the letter A) appear at the top of the list, depending on which sorting criterion you have selected.

It may help you to remember that when the smallest portion of the triangle is at the top (▴), the smallest files are listed first when viewed in size order.

To reverse the sorting order, click the column heading a second time. Now the newest files, largest files, or files beginning with the letter Z appear at the top of the list. The tiny triangle turns upside-down.

One of the Mac's most attractive features is the tiny triangle that appears to the left of a folder's name in a list view. In its official documents, Apple calls these buttons

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Column View

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The goal of column view is simple: to let you burrow down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.

The solution is shown in . It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows whatever disk or folder you first opened.

Figure : If the rightmost folder contains pictures, sounds, Office documents, or movies, you can look at them or play them, right there in the Finder. You can drag this jumbo preview icon anywhere—into another folder or the Trash, for example.

When you click a disk or folder in this list (once), the second pane shows a list of everything in it. Each time you click a folder in one pane, the pane to its right shows what's inside. The other panes slide to the left, sometimes out of view. (Use the horizontal scroll bar to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you're actually looking at the file icons inside the most deeply nested folder.

If you discover that your hunt for a particular file has taken you down a blind alley, it's not a big deal to backtrack, since the trail of folders you've followed to get here is still sitting before you on the screen. As soon as you click a different folder in one of the earlier panes, the panes to its right suddenly change, so that you can burrow down a different rabbit hole.

Furthermore, the Sidebar is always at the ready to help you jump to a new track; just click any disk or folder icon there to select a new first-column listing for column view.

The beauty of column view is, first of all, that it keeps your screen tidy. It effectively shows you several simultaneous folder levels, but contains them within a single window. With a quick -W, you can close the entire window, panes and all. Second, column view provides an excellent sense of where you are. Because your trail is visible at all times, it's much harder to get lost—wondering what folder you're in and how you got there—than in any other window view.

In Leopard, for the first time, you can change how Column view is sorted; it doesn't have to be alphabetical. Press

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Cover Flow View

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As you can sort of see from , Cover Flow is a visual display that Apple stole from its own iTunes software, where Cover Flow simulates the flipping "pages" of a jukebox, or the CDs in a record-store bin. There, you can flip through your music collection, marveling as the CD covers flip over in 3-D space while you browse.

The idea is the same in Mac OS X, except that now it's not CD covers you're flipping; it's gigantic file and folder icons.

To fire up Cover Flow, open a window. Then click the Cover Flow button identified in , or choose View→as Cover Flow, or press -4.

Figure : The bottom half of a Cover Flow window is identical to list view. The top half, however, is an interactive, scrolling "CD bin" full of your own stuff. It's especially useful for photos, PDF files, Office documents, and text documents. And when a movie comes up in this virtual data jukebox, you can point to the little ▸ button and click it to play the video, right in place.

Now the window splits. On the bottom: a traditional list view, complete with sortable columns, exactly as described above.

On the top: the gleaming, reflective, black Cover Flow display. Your primary interest here is the scroll bar. As you drag it left or right, you see your own files and folders float by and flip in 3-D space. Fun for the whole family!

The effect is spectacular, sure. It's probably not something you'd want to set up for every folder, though, because browsing is a pretty inefficient way to find something. But in folders containing photos or movies (that aren't filled with hundreds of files), Cover Flow can be a handy and satisfying way to browse.

And now, notes on Cover Flow:

• You can adjust the size of Cover Flow display (relative to the list-view half) by dragging up or down on the grip strip area just beneath the Cover Flow scroll bar.
• Multipage PDF documents are special. When you point to one, circled arrow buttons appear on the jumbo icon. You can click them to page through the document—without even opening it for real ().
  

  Figure : When you point to a PDF file without clicking, you get special arrow buttons that let you turn pages.

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Quick Look

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As the preceding several thousand pages make clear, there are lots of ways to view and manage the seething mass of files and folders on a typical hard drive. Some of them actually let you see what's in a document without having to open it—the Preview column in column view, the giant icons in Cover Flow, and so on.

Quick Look, a star feature of Leopard, takes this idea to another level. It lets you open and browse a document nearly at full size—without switching window views or opening any new programs. You highlight an icon (or several), and then press the Space bar (or click the eyeball icon at the top of the window).

Figure : Once the Quick Look window is open, you can play the file (movies and sounds), study it in more detail (most kinds of graphics files), or even read it (PDF, Word, and Excel documents). You can also click another icon, and another, and another, without ever closing the preview; the contents of the window simply change to reflect whatever you've just clicked. Supertip: Quick Look even works on icons in the Trash, too, so you can figure out what something is before you nuke it forever.

The Quick Look window now opens, showing a nearly full-size preview of the document (). Rather nice, eh?

The idea here is that you can check out a document without having to wait for it to open in the traditional way. For example, you can find out what's in a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document without actually having to open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, which saves you about 45 minutes.

You might wonder: How, exactly, is Quick Look able to display the contents of a document without opening it? Wouldn't it have to somehow understand the internal file format of that document type?

Exactly. And that's why Quick Look doesn't recognize all documents. If you try to preview, for example, a Final Cut Pro video project, a sheet-music file, a .zip archive, or a database file, all you'll see is a six-inch-tall version of its generic icon. You won't see what's inside.

Over time, people will write plug-ins for those nonrecognized programs. Already, plug-ins that let you see what's inside folders and .zip files await at

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The Dock

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For years, most operating systems maintained two different lists of programs. One listed unopened programs until you needed them, like the Start menu in Windows. The other kept track of which programs were open at the moment for easy switching, like the Windows taskbar.

In Mac OS X, Apple combined both functions into a single strip of icons called the Dock.

Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you'll enjoy: Dashboard, QuickTime Player, iTunes, iChat, Mail, the Safari Web browser, and so on. But using your Mac without putting your own favorite icons in the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the Dock your own.

The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it () is installed there as a button.)

A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, programs, and Internet bookmarks that you access frequently.

Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:

• It has two sides. See the whitish dotted line running down the Dock? That's the divider (). Everything on the left side is an application—a program. Everything else goes on the right side: files, documents, folders, disks, and minimized windows.
  It's important to understand this division. If you try to drag an application to the right of the line, for example, Mac OS X teasingly refuses to accept it. (Even aliases observe that distinction. Aliases of applications can go only on the left side, and vice versa.)
  

  Figure : To add an icon to the Dock, simply drag it there. You haven't moved the original file; when you release the mouse, it remains where it was. You've just installed a pointer—like a Macintosh alias or Windows shortcut.
  Divider
  ←Programs side Everything else→
  Open programs
  Minimized document windows
• Its icon names are hidden. To see the name of a Dock icon, point to it without clicking. You'll see the name appear above the icon.
  When you're trying to find a certain icon in the Dock, run your cursor slowly across the icons without clicking; the icon labels appear as you go. You can often identify a document just by looking at its icon.

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The Finder Toolbar

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At the top of every Finder window is a small set of function icons, all in a gradient-gray row (). The first time you run Mac OS X 10.5, you'll find only these icons on the toolbar:

• Back, Forward. The Finder works something like a Web browser. Only a single window remains open as you navigate the various folders on your hard drive.
  The Back button (◂) returns you to whichever folder you were just looking at. (Instead of clicking ◂, you can also press -[, or choose Go→Back—particularly handy if the toolbar is hidden, as described below.)
  The Forward button (▸) springs to life only after you've used the Back button. Clicking it (or pressing -]) returns you to the window you just backed out of.
  

  Figure : If you -click the upper-right toolbar button repeatedly, you cycle through six combinations of large and small icons and text labels. (Three examples are shown here.) Tip: This same -clicking business cycles through the same toolbar variations in Mail, Preview, and other programs that have toolbars.
• View controls. The four tiny buttons next to the ▸ button switch the current window into icon, list, column, or Cover Flow view, respectively. And remember, if the toolbar is hidden, you can get by with the equivalent commands in the View menu at the top of the screen—or by pressing -1, -2, -3, or -4 (for icon, list, column, and Cover Flow view, respectively).
• Quick Look. The eyeball icon opens the Quick Look preview for a highlighted icon (or group of them).
• Action (). This little pop-up menu contains the same commands you'd see if you right-clicked something.
• Search bar. This little round-ended text box is yet another entry point for the Spotlight feature described in .

Between the toolbar, the Dock, the Sidebar, and the large icons of Mac OS X, it almost seems like there's an Apple conspiracy to sell big screens.

Fortunately, the toolbar doesn't have to contribute to that impression. You can hide it by choosing View→Hide Toolbar or pressing Option--T. (The same keystroke, or choosing View→Show Toolbar, brings it back.)

But you don't have to do without the toolbar altogether. If its consumption of screen space is your main concern, you may prefer to collapse it—to delete the pictures but preserve the text buttons; see .

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Getting Help in Mac OS X

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It's a good thing you've got a book about Mac OS X in your hands, because the only user manual you get with Mac OS X is the Help menu. You get a Web browser-like program that reads a set of help files that reside in your System→Library folder.

In fact, you may not even be that lucky. In Leopard, the general-information Help page about each topic is on your Mac, but thousands of more nichey or more technical pages actually reside online, and require an Internet connection to read.

You're expected to find the topic you want in one of these three ways:

• Use the new Search box. When you click the Help menu, a tiny search box appears just beneath your cursor (). You can type a few words here to specify what you want help on: "setting up printer," "disk space," whatever.
  You can also hit -Shift-/ (that is, -?) to open the Help search box.
  

  Figure : In Leopard, you don't have to open the Help program to begin a search. No matter what program you're in, typing a search phrase into the box shown here produces an instantaneous list of help topics, ready to read.
  Mac OS X Leopard contains a weird, wonderful little enhancement to its online help system. It helps you find menu commands you can't find.

  You're floundering in some program. You're sure there's a Page Numbering command in those menus somewhere. But there are 11 menus and 143 submenus hiding in those menus, and you haven't got time for the pain.

  

  That's when you should think of using the Help menu. When you type page number (or whatever) into its Search box, the results menu lists, at the top, the names of any menu commands in that program that contain the words you typed. Better still, it actually opens that menu for you, and displays a big, blue, animated, floating arrow pointing to the command you wanted. You'd have to have your eyes closed to miss it.

  Slide your cursor over, click the menu command, and get on with your life.

  Supertip: This feature is especially helpful in Web browsers like Safari and Firefox, because it even finds entries in your Bookmarks and History menus!

  In Safari, for example, you can pluck a recently visited site out of the hundreds in the daily History submenus, like the "Wednesday, January 9" submenu. You've just saved yourself a

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Chapter 3: Files, Icons, & Spotlight

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Every document, program, folder, and disk on your Mac is represented by an icon: a colorful little picture that you can move, copy, or double-click to open. In Mac OS X, icons look more like photos than cartoons, and you can scale them to practically any size.

This chapter is all about manipulating those icons—that is, your files, folders, and disks. It's all about naming them, copying them, deleting them, labeling them—and then, maybe most important of all, finding them, using the Mac's famous Spotlight instant-search feature.

A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 255 letters and spaces. If you're accustomed to the 31-character or even 8-character limits of older computers, that's quite a luxurious ceiling.

As a Windows veteran, futhermore, you may be delighted to discover that in Mac OS X, you can name your files using letters, numbers, punctuation—in fact, any symbol except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes. And you can't use a period to begin a file's name.

To rename a file, click its name or icon (to highlight it) and then press Return or Enter. (Or, if you have time to kill, click once on the name, wait a moment, and then click a second time.)

In any case, a rectangle now appears around the name (). At this point, the existing name is highlighted; just begin typing to replace it. If you type a very long name, the rectangle grows vertically to accommodate new lines of text.

If you simply want to add letters to the beginning or end of the file's existing name, press the left or right arrow key immediately after pressing Return or Enter. The insertion point jumps to the corresponding end of the file name.

When you're finished typing, press Return, Enter, or Tab—or just click somewhere else—to make the renaming rectangle disappear.

As you edit a file's name, remember that you can use the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in the Edit menu to move selected bits of text around, just as though you're word processing. The Paste command can be useful when, for instance, you're renaming many icons in sequence (

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Renaming Icons

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A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 255 letters and spaces. If you're accustomed to the 31-character or even 8-character limits of older computers, that's quite a luxurious ceiling.

As a Windows veteran, futhermore, you may be delighted to discover that in Mac OS X, you can name your files using letters, numbers, punctuation—in fact, any symbol except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes. And you can't use a period to begin a file's name.

To rename a file, click its name or icon (to highlight it) and then press Return or Enter. (Or, if you have time to kill, click once on the name, wait a moment, and then click a second time.)

In any case, a rectangle now appears around the name (). At this point, the existing name is highlighted; just begin typing to replace it. If you type a very long name, the rectangle grows vertically to accommodate new lines of text.

If you simply want to add letters to the beginning or end of the file's existing name, press the left or right arrow key immediately after pressing Return or Enter. The insertion point jumps to the corresponding end of the file name.

When you're finished typing, press Return, Enter, or Tab—or just click somewhere else—to make the renaming rectangle disappear.

As you edit a file's name, remember that you can use the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands in the Edit menu to move selected bits of text around, just as though you're word processing. The Paste command can be useful when, for instance, you're renaming many icons in sequence (Quarterly Estimate 1, Quarterly Estimate 2, and so on).

Figure : Click an icon's name (top left) to produce the renaming rectangle (top right), in which you can edit the file's name. Leopard is kind enough to highlight only the existing name, and not the suffix (like .jpg or .doc). Now just begin typing to replace the existing name (bottom left). When you're finished typing, press Return, Enter, or Tab to seal the deal, or just click somewhere else.

And now, a few tips about renaming icons:

• When the Finder sorts files, a space is considered alphabetically

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Selecting Icons

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To highlight a single icon in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once. Both the icon and the name darken in a uniquely Leopardish way.

You can change the color of the oval highlighting that appears around the name of a selected icon. Choose →System Preferences, click Appearance, and use the Highlight Color pop-up menu.)

That much may seem obvious. But lots of people have no idea how to manipulate more than one icon at a time—an essential survival skill. These techniques are essentially the same as in Windows, except that the keys you hold down are different.

To highlight multiple files in preparation for moving or copying, use one of these techniques:

• To highlight all the icons. To select all the icons in a window, press -A (the equivalent of the Edit→Select All command).
• To highlight several icons by dragging. You can drag diagonally to highlight a group of nearby icons, as shown in . In a list view, in fact, you don't even have to drag over the icons themselves—your cursor can touch any part of any file's row, like its modification date or file size.
  If you include a particular icon in your diagonally dragged group by mistake, -click it to remove it from the selected cluster.
  

  Figure : You can highlight several icons simultaneously by dragging a box around them. To do so, drag from outside of the target icons diagonally across them (right), creating a translucent gray rectangle as you go. Any icons or icon names touched by this rectangle are selected when you release the mouse. If you press the Shift or key as you do this, any previously highlighted icons remain selected.
  Start dragging here
• To highlight consecutive icons in a list. If you're looking at the contents of a window in list view or column view, you can drag vertically over the file and folder names to highlight a group of consecutive icons, as described above. (Begin the drag in a blank spot.)
  There's a faster way to do the same thing: Click the first icon you want to highlight, and then Shift-click the last file, just as in Windows. All the files in between are automatically selected, along with the two icons you clicked.

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Moving and Copying Icons

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In Mac OS X, there are two ways to move or copy icons from one place to another: by dragging them, or by using the Copy and Paste commands.

You can drag icons from one folder to another, from one drive to another, from a drive to a folder on another drive, and so on. (When you've selected several icons, drag any one of them; the others tag along.) While the Mac is copying, you can tell that the process is still under way even if the progress bar is hidden behind a window, because the icon of the copied material shows up dimmed in its new home, darkening only when the copying process is over. (You can also tell because Leopard's progress box is a lot clearer and prettier than it used to be.) You can cancel the process by pressing either -period or the Esc key.

If you're copying files into a disk or folder that already contains items with the same names, Mac OS- X asks you individually about each one. ("An older item named 'Fiddlesticks' with extension '.doc' already exists in this location.") Note that, thank heaven, Mac OS X tells you whether the version you're replacing is older or newer than the one you're moving.

Turn on "Apply to all" if all of the incoming icons should (or should not) replace the old ones of the same names. Then click Replace or Don't Replace, as you see fit, or Stop to halt the whole copying business.

Understanding when the Mac copies a dragged icon and when it moves it bewilders many a beginner. However, the scheme is fairly simple when you consider the following:

• Dragging from one folder to another on the same disk moves the icon.
  Mac OS X offers a glorious assortment of predefined keystrokes for jumping to the most important locations on your Mac: your Home folder, the Applications folder, the Utilities folder, the Computer window, your iDisk, the Network window, and so on.

  Better yet, the keystrokes are incredibly simple to memorize: Just press Shift- and the first letter of the location you want. Shift--H opens your Home folder, Shift--A opens the Applications folder, and so on. You learn one, you've learned 'em all.

  The point here is that Shift-

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Aliases: Icons in Two Places at Once

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Highlighting an icon and then choosing File→Make Alias (or pressing -L), generates an alias, a specially branded duplicate of the original icon (). It's not a duplicate of the file—just of the icon; therefore it requires negligible storage space. When you double-click the alias, the original file opens. A Macintosh alias, in other words, is essentially the same as a Windows shortcut.

Because you can create as many aliases as you want of a single file, aliases let you, in effect, stash that file in many different folder locations simultaneously. Double-click any one of them, and you open the original icon, wherever it may be on your system.

You can also create an alias of an icon by Option--dragging it out of its window. (Aliases you create this way lack the word alias on the file name—a distinct delight to those who find the suffix redundant and annoying.) You can also create an alias by right-clicking a normal icon and choosing Make Alias from the shortcut menu that appears, or by highlighting an icon and then choosing Make Alias from the menu.

Figure : Top: You can identify an alias by the tiny arrow badge on the lower-left corner. (Longtime Mac fans should note that the name no longer appears in italics.) Bottom: If the alias can't find the original file, you're offered the chance to hook it up to a different file.

An alias takes up almost no disk space, even if the original file is enormous. Aliases are smart, too: even if you rename the alias, rename the original file, move the alias, and move the original around on the disk, double-clicking the alias still opens the original icon.

Here are a few ways you can put aliases to work:

• You may want to file a document you're working on in several different folders, or place a particular folder in several different locations.
• You can use the alias feature to save you some of the steps required to access another hard drive on the network. (Details on this trick in .)

Mac OS X makes it easy to find the file to which an alias "points" without actually having to open it. Just highlight the alias and then choose File→Show Original (

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Color Labels

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This feature lets you tag selected icons with one of seven different labels, each of which has both a text label and a color associated with it.

To do so, highlight the icons. Open the File menu (or the menu, or the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click the icons). There, under the heading Color Label, you'll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven different labels you can use. shows the routine.

After you've applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks—in some cases, on all of them simultaneously, even if they're scattered across multiple hard drives. For example:

Figure : Use the File menu, menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons. Instantly, the icon's name takes on the selected shade. In a list or column view, the entire row takes on that shade, as shown in . (If you choose the little X, you're removing any labels that you may have applied.)

Mac OS X comes with a built-in command that compresses a file or folder down to a single, smaller icon—an archive—suitable for storing or emailing.

It's just like using StuffIt in previous Mac OS versions, except for two big changes. First, Mac OS X creates .zip files, the same compression format used in Windows. That means that you can now send .zip files back and forth to PC owners without worrying that they won't be able to open them. In Leopard, these files open even more reliably in Windows. (Pre-Panther/Tiger/Leopard Mac owners can open .zip files, too. They just use the free StuffIt Expander as usual.)

Second, the software that does the compressing is built right in. Right-click a file or folder, and choose "Compress [the icon's name]" from the shortcut menu. (Of course, you can use the File menu or menu instead.)

Mac OS X thoughtfully creates a .zip archive, but leaves the original behind so you can continue working with it.

Opening a .zip file somebody sends you is equally easy: Just double-click it. Zip!—it opens.

On the other hand, Leopard does not come with StuffIt Expander, the free unstuffing program that recognizes .zip files, .sit files, and just about any other form of compressed files.

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The Trash

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No single element of the Macintosh interface is as recognizable or famous as the Trash can, which now appears at the end of the Dock. It is, of course, the inspiration for Windows's own Recycle Bin.

You can discard almost any icon by dragging it onto the Trash icon (actually a wastebasket, not a trash can, but let's not quibble). When the tip of your arrow cursor touches the Trash icon, the little wastebasket turns black. When you release the mouse, you're well on your way to discarding whatever it was you dragged. As a convenience, Mac OS X even replaces the empty-wastebasket icon with a wastebasket-filled-with-crumpled-up-papers icon, to let you know there's something in there.

Learn the keyboard alternative to dragging something to the Trash: Highlight the icon, and then press -Delete. This technique is not only far faster than dragging, but requires far less precision, especially if you have a large screen. Mac OS X does all the Trash-targeting for you.

File and folder icons sit in the Trash forever—or until you choose Finder→Empty Trash, whichever comes first.

If you haven't yet emptied the Trash, you can open its window by clicking the wastebasket icon once. Now you can review its contents: icons that you've placed on the waiting list for extinction. If you change your mind, you can rescue any of these items by dragging them out of the Trash window.

If you're confident that the items in the Trash window are worth deleting, use any of these three options:

• Choose Finder→Empty Trash.
• Press Shift--Delete. Or, if you'd just as soon not bother with the "Are you sure?" message, throw the Option key in there, too.
• Right-click the wastebasket icon; choose Empty Trash from the shortcut menu.

This last method has two advantages. First, the Mac doesn't bother asking "Are you sure?" (If you're clicking right on the Trash and choosing Empty Trash from the pop-up menu, it's pretty darned obvious you are sure.) Second, this method nukes any locked files without making you unlock them first.

If you use either of the first two methods, the Macintosh asks you to confirm your decision. Click OK. ( shows both this message and the secret for turning it off forever.)

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Get Info

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By clicking an icon and then choosing File→Get Info, you open an important window like the one shown in . It's a collapsible, multipanel screen that provides a wealth of information about a highlighted icon. In essence, this is the Properties window for the icon. For example:

• For a document icon, you see when it was created and modified, and what programs it "belongs" to.
• For an alias, you learn the location of the actual icon it refers to.
• For a program, you see whether or not it's been updated to run on Intel-based Macs. If so, the Get Info window says Kind: Universal. If not, it says Kind: PowerPC, and will probably run slower than you'd like because it must be translated by Rosetta (page 145).
• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its capacity and how much of it is full.
• If you open the Get Info window when nothing is selected, you get information about the desktop itself (or the open window), including the amount of disk space consumed by everything sitting on or in it.
• If you highlight 11 icons or more simultaneously, the Get Info window shows you how many you highlighted, breaks it down by type ("23 documents, 3 folders," for example), and adds up the total of their file sizes. That's a great opportunity to change certain file characteristics on numerous files simultaneously, such as locking or unlocking them, hiding or showing their filename extensions (page 131), changing their ownership or permissions (page 418), and so on.
  If you highlight fewer than 11 icons, Mac OS X opens up individual Get Info windows for each one.

Apple built the Get Info window out of a series of collapsed "flippy triangles," as shown in . Click a triangle to expand a corresponding information panel.

Depending on whether you clicked a document, program, disk, alias, or whatever, the various panels may include the following:

Figure : Top: The Get Info window can be as small as this, with all of its information panes collapsed. Bottom: Or it can be as huge as this—it's shown here split in two because the book isn't tall enough to show the whole thing—if you click each flippy triangle to open its corresponding panel of information. The resulting dialog box can easily grow taller than your screen, which is a good argument for either (a) closing the panels you don't need at any given moment or (b) running out to buy a really gigantic monitor. And as long as you're taking the trouble to read this caption, here's a tasty bonus: There's a new, secret command in Leopard called Get Summary Info. Highlight a group of icons, press Control-

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The Spotlight Menu

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Every computer offers a way to find files. And every system offers several different ways to open them. But Spotlight, a star feature of Mac OS X, combines these two functions in a way that's so fast, so efficient, so spectacular, it reduces much of what you've read in the previous chapters to irrelevance.

That may sound like breathless hype, but wait till you try it. You'll see.

See the little magnifying-glass icon in your menu bar? That's the mouse-driven way to open the Spotlight search box.

The other way is to press -Space bar. If you can memorize only one keystroke on your Mac, that's the one to learn. It works both at the desktop and in other programs.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar ().

Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you're trying to find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League.doc, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice. (Spotlight doesn't find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

Figure : Left: Press -Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the search bar appear. Right: As you type, Spotlight builds the list of every match it can find, neatly organized by type: programs, documents, folders, images, PDF documents, and so on.

A menu immediately appears below the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find containing what you've typed so far. (This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight modifies the menu of search results as you type.) The menu lists every file, folder, program, email message, address book entry, calendar appointment, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Web bookmark, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Entourage) document, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, Web site in your History list, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.

If you see the icon you were hoping to dig up, just click it to open it. Or use the arrow keys to "walk down" the menu, and then press Return or Enter to open it.

If you click an application, it pops onto the screen. If you select a System Preferences panel, System Preferences opens and presents that panel. If you choose an appointment, the iCal program opens, already set to the appropriate day and time. Selecting an email message opens that message in Mail or Entourage. And so on.

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The Spotlight Window

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As you may have noticed, the Spotlight menu doesn't list every match on your hard drive. Unless you own one of those extremely rare 60-inch Apple Skyscraper Displays, there just isn't room.

Instead, Spotlight uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and display the 20 most likely matches for what you typed. But at the top of the menu, you usually see that there are many other possible matches; it says something like "Show All," meaning that there are other candidates. (Mac OS X no longer tells you how many other results there are.)

There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that's to use the Spotlight window, shown in .

If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn't include what you're looking for, click Show All. You've just opened the Spotlight window.

Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly listed in what appears to be a standard Finder window.

When you're in the Finder, you can also open the Spotlight window directly, without using the Spotlight menu as a trigger.

Actually, there are three ways to get to the Spotlight window ():

• -F (for Find, get it?). When you choose File→Find (or press -F), you get an empty Spotlight window, ready to fill in for your search.
• Option--Space bar. This keystroke opens the same window. But instead of starting empty and filling up, this window starts with a list of every single thing on your Mac and winnows down as you type a search query.
• Open any desktop window, and type something into the Search box at upper-right. Presto—the mild-mannered folder window turns into the Spotlight window, complete with search results.

Once you type something to search for, the results are identical.

When the Spotlight window opens, you can start typing whatever you're looking for into the Search box at the upper right.

As you type—or, more realistically, a second or two after you type each letter—the window changes to reveal a list of the files and folders whose names contain what you typed. It's just like the Spotlight menu, but in a window with no 20-item results limit (, bottom).

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Customizing Spotlight

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You've just read about how Spotlight works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor its behavior, both for security reasons and to fit it to the kinds of work you do.

Here are three ways to open the Spotlight preferences center:

• Choose Spotlight Preferences at the bottom of the Spotlight menu just after you've performed a search.
• Use Spotlight itself. Hit -Space bar, type spotl, and press Enter.
• Choose→System Preferences. Click Spotlight.

In any case, you wind up face-to-face with the dialog box shown in . You can tweak Spotlight in three ways here, all very useful:

• Turn off categories. The list of checkboxes identifies all the kinds of things that Spotlight tracks. If you find that Spotlight uses up valuable menu space listing, say, Web bookmarks or fonts—stuff you don't need to find very often—turn off their checkboxes. Now the Spotlight menu's precious 20 slots are allotted to icon types you care more about.
• Prioritize the categories. This dialog box also lets you change the order of the category results; just drag an individual list item up or down to change where it appears in the Spotlight menu.
• Change the keystroke. Ordinarily, pressing -Space bar highlights the Spotlight search box in your menu bar, and Option--Space bar opens the Spotlight window described above. If these keystrokes clash with some other key assignment in your software, though, you can reassign them to almost any other keystroke you like.
  Click inside the white box that lists the keystroke and then press any key combination—Control-S, for example—to choose something different. Whatever keystroke you choose must include at least one of the modifier keys (Option, Control, or or one of the F-keys (such as F4).

Figure : Here's where you can specify what categories of icons you want Spotlight to search, which order you want them listed in the Spotlight menu, and what keystroke you want to use for highlighting the Spotlight bar.

Apple assumes no responsibility for your choosing a keystroke that messes up some other function on your Mac. -S, for example, would not be a good choice.

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Smart Folders

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You may remember from (or from staring at your own computer) that the Sidebar at the left side of every Leopard desktop window contains a set of little folders under the Searches heading. Each is actually a smart folder—a self-updating folder that, in essence, performs a continual, 24/7 search for the criteria you specify. (Smart folders are a lot like smart albums in iPhoto and iTunes, smart mailboxes in Mail, and so on.)

In truth, the smart folder performs a search for the specified criteria at the moment you open it. But because it's so fast, and because it's always up to date, it feels as though it's been quietly searching all along.

As it turns out, the ones installed there by Apple are meant to serve as inspiration for you to create your own smart folders. The key, as it turns out, is the little Save button in the upper-right corner of the Spotlight window.

Here's a common example of how you might use it. You choose File→Find. You set up the pop-up menus to say "last opened date" and "this week." You click Save. You name the smart folder something like Current Crises, and you turn on "Add to Sidebar" ().

From now on, whenever you click that smart folder, it reveals all of the files you've worked on in the last week or so. The great part is that these items' real locations may be all over the map, scattered in folders all over your Mac and your network. But through the magic of the smart folder, they appear as though they're all in one neat folder.

If you decide your original search criteria need a little fine-tuning, click the smart folder. From the Action menu, choose Show Search Criteria. You're back on the original setting-up-the-search window. Use the pop-up menus and other controls to tweak your search setup, and then click the Save button once again.

To delete a smart folder, just drag its icon out of the Sidebar. (Or if it's anywhere else, like on your desktop, drag it to the Trash like any other folder.)

Figure : Mac OS X can preserve your search as a smart folder listed in the Sidebar (lower left)—at least, it does as long as "Add To Sidebar" is turned on. You can stash a smart folder in your Dock, too, although it doesn't display a stack of its contents, as normal folders do.

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Chapter 4: Documents, Programs, & Spaces

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The beauty of life in the Era of Switchers is that most of the big-boy programs are available in nearly identical versions for both the Mac and Windows. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign; FileMaker Pro; Dreamweaver; and many other programs are available for both Mac and Windows. Sometimes you have to buy the Mac version separately; sometimes it's on the same CD.

The best part: The documents you create with the Mac versions are generally identical in format to the ones created in Windows. A Microsoft Word document, for example, requires no conversion when transferred from a Mac to a PC or vice-versa. It is what it is—a .doc or .docx file.

There are two chief kinds of Mac OS X-compatible programs, known by the geeks as Carbon and Cocoa programs. These terms refer to the programming tools that were used to create them, which also have a small effect on how well they run in Mac OS X. Page 141 covers them in more detail, but the point is that this chapter describes how Carbon and Cocoa programs work—these are true Mac OS X programs.

Now, until Leopard came along, there was a third software category. Older Macs (pre-Intel Macs) could also run the very old, pre-2001 operating system known as Mac OS 9, and all of its programs. Mac OS X came with a built-in Mac OS 9 simulator called Classic.

Now, a handful of G4 Leopard-capable Mac models can still restart into Mac OS 9, which is better than nothing.

But Classic is gone. Leopard is all Mac OS X, all the time, making life simpler for Apple—and more complicated for anyone who used to rely on some of those older programs.

Same thing with Excel spreadsheets (.xls), PowerPoint slideshows (.ppt), Photoshop documents (.psd), and on and on. You may occasionally encounter a tiny formatting difference—a line thickness change, a movie file that requires a plug-in—but most documents open flawlessly when moved between Macs and PCs. ( offers more detail on finding Mac versions of your favorite PC programs.)

But even if switching to the Mac OS X versions of your programs is relatively easy, learning how Mac OS X programs

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Opening Mac OS X Programs

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Many of the techniques for launching (opening) a program work just as they do in Windows. For example:

• Click a program's icon on the Dock, the Sidebar, or the Finder toolbar.
• Use Spotlight. Hit -Space bar, type the first letters of the program's name, and then press Return or Enter.
• Double-click an application's icon in the Finder.
• Highlight an application icon and then press -O (short for File→Open) or -down arrow.
• Use the submenus of the menu's Recent Items→Applications command.
• Open a document icon in any of these ways, or drag a document onto the icon of a program that can open it (whether in the Dock, the Finder toolbar, the Sidebar, or in a folder window).

So, I've just installed Leopard, I'm all excited, and I double-click an Excel document. And now the Mac asks me: "You are opening Microsoft Excel for the first time. Do you want to continue?" Well, HELLO! I double-clicked the icon, didn't I? Does Apple think I'm some kind of idiot?

It's not you Apple's worried about. It's the silent parade of evil hackers, lurking out there in Internet Land, waiting for the right moment to bring down the Mac.

See, in the Windows world, spyware authors have to be sneaky about how they install their stuff on your PC. You wouldn't be so stupid as to double-click an application called Spyware Installer™, of course. So the spyware tricks you into running its installer. It commandeers a certain document type (like MP3 or JPEG), reassigning it to its installer. You innocently double-click some document, but an unanticipated program opens—and you've just opened Pandora's box.

In Mac OS X, that can't happen. When double-clicking some document opens a program for the first time, this dialog box appears, just to let you know what's about to happen. If the program that's about to open isn't the one you were expecting, well, you've got a chance to back out of it.

And if it is the program you were expecting, click Continue. You won't be asked again about this version of this particular program.

If you press Option as you open an application (or anything else) in the Finder, you automatically close the window that contains its icon. Later, when you return to the Finder, you'll find a neat, clean desktop—no loitering windows.

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The New, Improved "Alt-Tab"

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Only one program can be in front, or active, at a time. Just as in Windows, there's a handy keystroke for switching from one to another; it's the -Tab keystroke (see ).

Figure : Apple calls this row of open program icons a "heads-up display," named after the projected data screens on a Navy jet windshield that lets pilots avoid having to look down at their instruments.

You can use this feature in three different ways, which are well worth learning:

• If you keep the key pressed, each press of the Tab key highlights the Dock icon of another program, in left-to-right Dock order. Release both keys when you reach the one you want. Mac OS X brings the corresponding program to the front. (To move backward through the open programs, press Shift--Tab.)
• If you leave the key pressed, you can choose a program by clicking its icon with your mouse.
• A single press of -Tab takes you to the program you used most recently, and another, separate -Tab bounces back to the program you started in.
  Imagine that, for example, you're doing a lot of switching between two programs—your Web browser and your email program, for example. If you have five other programs open, you don't waste your time -Tabbing your way through all open programs just to "get back" to your Web browser.

Here's a related keystroke, equally awesome. If you press -tilde (the ~ key next to the 1 key), you switch to the next window in the same program.

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Exposé: Death to Window Clutter

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In its day, the concept of overlapping windows on the screen was brilliant, innovative, and extremely effective. (Apple borrowed this idea from a research lab called Xerox PARC.) In that era before digital cameras, MP3 files, and the Web, managing your windows was easy this way; after all, you had only about three of them.

These days, however, managing all the open windows in all the open programs can be like herding cats. Off you go, burrowing through the microscopic pop-up menus of your taskbar buttons (Windows) or the Dock (Mac OS X 10.5), trying to find the window you want. And heaven help you if you need to duck back to the desktop—to find a newly downloaded file, for example, or eject a disk. You'll have to fight your way through 50,000 other windows on your way to the bottom of the "deck."

Do you have the superthin aluminum Apple keyboard (the wireless one, or the aluminum iMac one)? If so, the keystrokes described in this chapter don't not work.

On that keyboard, the F9, F10, and F11 keys—the keys you need for Exposé—are mapped to the Mac's speaker volume!

Fortunately, the most often used Exposé function, the one that exposes all open windows at once, has its own special key on this keyboard: the F3 key.

So you're covered there: press F3 instead of F9. But what about the other two Exposé functions, normally triggered by F10 and F11?

Method 1: Add the Control key (to Exposé one application's windows only) or the key (to see the desktop). That is, instead of F11 to expose the desktop, you should press -F3.

Method 2: Hold down the Fn key. If you do that, then you can use the F9, F10, and F11 keys like everybody else. (Lots of Fn details are on page 9.)

Kind of a drag, right?

Method 3: Actually, there's a final twist to all this. In System Preferences → Keyboard & Mouse, you'll find a checkbox that reverses this logic. It's called "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys."

If that checkbox is on, then you can use F9, F10, and F11 to trigger Exposé exactly as described in this chapter. Now you need the Fn key only when you want those keys to adjust the volume

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Spaces: Your Free Quad-Display Mac

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Exposé is pretty darned cool. But Leopard offers another radical step forward in window management that you may even come to prefer. It's called Spaces.

This feature gives you two, four, six, eight, or even sixteen full-size monitors. Ordinarily, of course, attaching so many screens to a single computer would be a massively expensive proposition, not to mention the number it would do on your living space and personal relationships.

But the bonus monitors that Spaces gives you are virtual. They exist only in the Mac's little head. You can look at only one at a time; you switch using a keystroke, a menu, or the mouse. Instead of shuffling through your windows using Exposé, you can now leave them all spread out over a much larger virtual desktop.

Just because the Spaces screens are simulated doesn't mean they're not useful, though. You can dedicate each one to a different program or kind of program. Screen 1 might contain your email and chat windows, arranged just the way you like them. Screen 2 can hold Photoshop, with an open document and the palettes carefully arrayed. On Screen 3: your Web browser in full-screen mode.

You can also have the same program running on multiple screens—but different documents or projects open on each one.

Now, virtual screens aren't a new idea—this sort of software has been available for the Mac and Windows for years. But it's never before been a standard feature of an operating system, and rarely executed with such finesse.

To "install" your new monitors, start by choosing →System Preferences. Click the Exposé & Spaces icon, then click the Spaces tab. You see something like .

The setup ritual goes like this:

• Turn Spaces on. The "Enable Spaces" checkbox is the master on/off switch.
• Add the menulet. Turn on "Show Spaces in menu bar" to make a menu of your virtual screens appear in the menu bar. It not only lets you switch screens, but the numeral on it also reminds you which screen you're on.
  Consider turning on this option, if only at first, as a safety net. Otherwise, if you don't remember the keystroke for switching screens, you might lose one of your programs on another screen and not be able to find it!

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Hiding Programs the Old-Fashioned Way

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When it comes to getting windows out of your way, nothing can touch Exposé and Spaces for speed and entertainment value. Once you've mastered those features, the traditional rituals of hiding windows will seem charmingly quaint. "When I was your age," you'll tell your grandchildren, "we used to have to hold down the Option key to hide windows!"

But you know the drill at software companies: They addeth, but they never taketh away. All of the old techniques are still around.

For the purposes of this discussion, when a program is hidden, all of its windows, tool palettes, and button bars disappear. You can bring them back only by bringing the program to the front again (by clicking its Dock icon again, for example).

If your aim is to hide only the program you're currently using, Mac OS X offers a whole raft of approaches to the same problem. Many of them involve the Option key, as listed here:

• Option-click any visible portion of the desktop. The program you were in vanishes, along with all of its windows.
• Option-click any other program's icon on the Dock. You open that program (or bring all of its windows to the front) and hide all the windows of the one you were using.
• Option-click any visible portion of another program's windows. Once again, you switch programs, hiding the one you were using at the time.
• From the Application menu, choose Hide iPhoto (or whatever the program is). The Application menu is the boldfaced menu that bears the program's name.
• When you've highlighted a Dock icon by pressing -Tab to rotate through the running programs, press the letter H key. The program hides itself instantly. Leave the key down the whole time, and after pressing the H, press Tab again to move on to the next program. If you release the keys while "stopped" on the program instead, you'll bring it forward rather than hiding it.
• Press -H. This may be the easiest and most useful trick of all (although it doesn't work in every program). Doing so hides the program you're in; you then "fall down" into the next running program.

To un-hide a program and its windows, click its Dock icon again, choose the Show All command in the Application menu, or press

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How Documents Know Their Parents

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Every operating system needs a mechanism to associate documents with the applications that created them. When you double-click a Microsoft Word document icon, for example, it's clear that you want Microsoft Word to launch and open the document.

So how does Mac OS X know how to find a document's mommy?

It actually has four different mechanisms.

• Your preferences. If you've used the "Always Open with" command to specify a program (page 132), that's the one that opens.
• Type/Creator codes. First, it checks to see if the document has an invisible, four-letter Type code and Creator code. It does that because that's how Mac OS 9 used to recognize documents, and Mac OS X wants to ensure compatibility. (Apple used to monitor and track these four-letter codes, in conjunction with the various Mac software companies, so that no two creator codes were alike.)
  The Creator code is the same for a program and the documents it creates—MSWD for Microsoft Word, FMP7 for FileMaker Pro, and so on. That's the entire point: The creator code tells the Mac which program to open when you double-click a particular document.
  The Type code, meanwhile, specifies the document's file format: GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and so on.
  When you double-click a document, Mac OS X checks to see if it has a creator code. If so, it then consults an invisible database of icons and codes, the master index that lists the correspondence between creator codes and the applications that generate them.
  If the desktop file discovers a match, then the corresponding program opens the document, which now appears on your screen.
• Unix database. If the document doesn't have Type or Creator codes (and documents created by Cocoa programs—see page 141—generally don't), Mac OS X consults a second internal Mac OS X database, one that's inherited from Unix systems. The only real interaction you have with it is when you change a document's parent to a different program, as described on the following pages. (Actually, you can open and examine the database—if you're a programmer/geek.)
  The Mac is smart about the relationship between documents and applications. If you double-click a TextEdit document icon, for example, TextEdit opens automatically and shows you the document.

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Keyboard Control

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In Windows, of course, you can operate every menu in every program from the keyboard—and every control in every dialog box—thanks to the power of the Alt key.

Mac OS X offers full keyboard control, too. You can operate every control in every dialog box from the keyboard, including pop-up menus and checkboxes. And you can even redefine many of the keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS X and even your programs. In short, if you were a keyboard power-user in Windows, you'll feel right at home in Mac OS X.

Here are some of the ways you can control your Mac mouselessly. In the following descriptions, you'll encounter the factory settings for the keystrokes that do the magic—but as you'll note in a moment, you can change these key combos to anything you like. (That's fortunate, since many of them, out of the box, conflict with canned brightness and volume keystrokes for laptops.)

When you press Control-F2, the menu is highlighted. At this point, you can "walk" to another menu by pressing the or keys (or Tab and Shift-Tab). When you reach the menu you want, open it by pressing , Space, Return, or Enter.

Walk down the commands in the menu by pressing or , or jump directly to a command in the menu by typing the first couple letters of its name. Finally, "click" a menu command by pressing Enter, Return, or the Space bar.

You can also close the menu without making a selection by pressing Esc or -period.

Once you've pressed Control-F3, you can highlight any icon on the Dock by pressing the appropriate arrow keys (or, once again, Tab and Shift-Tab).

Then, once you've highlighted a Dock icon, you "click it" by pressing Enter or the Space bar. Again, if you change your mind, press Esc or -period.

Once you've highlighted a disk or folder icon, you can press the or keys to make its shortcut menu appear. (If you've positioned the Dock vertically, use the left or right arrow instead!)

Every time you press Control-F4, you bring the next window forward, eventually cycling through every window in every open program. Add the Shift key to cycle through them in the opposite order.

You may remember that Mac OS X offers a different keystroke for cycling through the different windows in your

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The Save and Open Dialog Boxes

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When you choose File→Save, you're asked where you want the new document stored on your hard drive. The resulting dialog box is crystal-clear—more than ever, it's a miniature Finder. All of the skills you've picked up working at the desktop come into play here.

To give it a try, launch any Mac OS X program that has a Save or Export command—TextEdit, for example. Type a couple of words, and then choose File→Save. The Save sheet appears ().

In Mac OS X, a quick glance at the Close button in the upper-left corner of a document window tells you whether it's been saved. When a small dot appears in the red button, it means you've made changes to the document that you haven't saved yet. (Time to press -S!). The dot disappears as soon as you save your work.

Figure : Top: The Save dialog box, or sheet, often appears in its compact form. Right (inset): If you open the Where pop-up menu, you'll find that Mac OS X lists all the places it thinks you might want to save your new document: on the hard drive or iDisk, in a folder that you've put into your Sidebar (page 21), or into a folder you've recently opened. Bottom: If you want to choose a different folder or create a new folder, click the ▾ button shown above to expand the dialog box. Here, you see the equivalent of the Finder—with a choice of icon, list, or column view. Even the Sidebar is here, complete with access to other disks on the network. Supertip: Even in the Save or Open dialog box, you can highlight an icon (or several) and then press -I. You switch back to the Finder, where the Get Info box is waiting with the date, size, and other details about the selected icons.

Compact Save sheet

Computer places

Sidebar places

Recent places

Expanded Save sheet

The big triangle button

In the days of operating systems gone by, the Save dialog box appeared dead center on the screen, where it commandeered your entire operation. Moreover, because it seemed stuck to your screen rather than to a particular document, you couldn't actually tell which document you were saving—a real problem when you quit out of a program that had three unsaved documents open.

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Two Kinds of Programs: Cocoa and Carbon

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Mac OS X was supposed to make life simpler. It was supposed to eliminate the confusion and complexity that the old Mac OS had accumulated over the years—and replace it with a smooth, simple, solid system.

Someday, that's exactly what Mac OS X will be. For the moment, however, you're stuck with running two different kinds of programs, each with different characteristics: Cocoa and Carbon.

The explanation involves a little bit of history and a little bit of logic. To take full advantage of Mac OS X's considerable technical benefits, software companies must write new programs for it from scratch. So what should Apple do—send out an email to the authors of the 18,000 existing Mac programs, suggesting that they throw out their programs and rewrite them from the bottom up?

At big companies like Microsoft and Adobe, such a suggestion would wind up on the Joke of the Week bulletin board.

Instead, Apple gave software companies a break. It wrote Mac OS X to let programmers and software companies choose precisely how much work they wanted to put into compatibility with the new system. The various levels include:

• Update the existing programs (Carbon). If software companies and programmers are willing to put some effort into getting with the Mac OS X program, they can simply adapt, or update, their existing software so that it works with Mac OS X.
  The resulting software looks and feels almost like a true Mac OS X program—you get the crash protection, the good looks, the cool-looking graphics, the Save sheets, and so on—but behind the scenes, the bulk of the computer programming is the same as it was in Mac OS 9. These are what Apple calls Carbonized programs, named for the technology (Carbon) that permits them to run on Mac OS X. (Examples of Carbonized programs include AppleWorks, Photoshop versions before CS3, FileMaker, Microsoft Office 2004, and, believe it or not, the Finder itself.)
  Most Carbonized programs don't offer all of the features available to Mac OS X, however. In the following pages, you'll discover which Mac OS X goodies you sacrifice when using programs adapted this way.

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The Cocoa Difference

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Here are some of the advantages Cocoa programs offer. It's worth reading—not to make you drool about a future when all Mac programs will fall into this category, but to help clear up any confusion you may have about why certain features seem to be present only occasionally.

The following features appear in almost all Cocoa programs. That's not to say that you'll never see these features in Carbonized programs; the occasional Carbon program may offer one of these features or another. That's because programmers have to do quite a bit of work to bring them into Carbon applications—and almost none to include them in Cocoa ones.

The Mac has always been the designer's preferred computer, and Mac OS X only strengthens its position. For one thing, Mac OS X comes with over 200 absolutely beautiful fonts that Apple licensed from commercial type companies.

When you use a Carbon program, you usually access these fonts the same way as always: using a Font menu. But when you use a Cocoa program, you get the Font panel, which makes it far easier to organize, search, and use your font collection. describes fonts, and the Font panel, in more detail.

Nestled in the Application menu of every Mac OS X program is a command called Services. These commands are dimmed when you use most Carbonized programs; they become available only when you use Cocoa programs.

Here's a sampling of the most useful commands in the Services menu.

Not all of these Services work in all programs—even Cocoa programs. Implementing them is left to programmers' discretion.

Grab

Grab is a screen-capture program in your Applications→Utilities folder. You use it to turn what you see onscreen into graphics files. It's especially handy when writing computer books or training manuals.

The Grab service, in theory, lets you take your software snapshot from within any Cocoa application, without having to go find and launch Grab separately; unfortunately, it's available only in programs that can accept pasted graphics. You'll find details on Grab's submenu commands (Screen, Selection, Timed Screen) in .

Mail

This handy command springs to life only after you've highlighted some text in a Cocoa program—or a file in the Finder.

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Universal Apps (Intel Macs)

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By the end of 2006, Apple had switched its entire Macintosh product line over to Intel's Core Duo processors (the successor to the Pentium).

Yes, that Intel. The company that Mac partisans had derided for years as part of the Dark Side. The company that Steve Jobs routinely belittled in his demonstrations of PowerPC chips (which IBM and Motorola supplied to Apple for more than a decade). The company whose marketing mascot Apple lit on fire in a 1996 attack ad on TV.

Why the change? Apple's computers can only be as fast as the chips inside them, and the chips that IBM had in the works just weren't keeping up with the industry. As one editorial put it, "Apple's doing a U-turn out of a dead-end road."

And sure enough, Intel-based Macs start up and run much faster than the old Macs, thanks to the endless march of speed improvements in the chip-making world. And thanks to that Intel chip, today's Macs can even run Microsoft Windows and all of the thousands of Windows programs. ( has details.)

At the time, though, there was a small glitch: Existing Mac software didn't run on Intel chips.

Apple would have to ask the world's software companies to rewrite their programs yet again, after already having dragged them through the Mac OS 9-to-Mac OS X transition only a few years earlier.

Fortunately, the transition wasn't as gruesome as you might expect. First, Apple had already secretly recompiled (reworked) Mac OS X itself to run on Intel chips.

Furthermore, Apple wrote an invisible translation program, code-named Rosetta, which permits the existing library of Mac OS X programs—Photoshop, Word, and so on—to run, unmodified, on Intel Macs.

They do not, however, run especially fast on Intel Macs. In fact, many of them run slower than they did on pre-Intel Macs.

To make their programs perform at full speed on Intel-based Macs, programmers have to update their wares. All the big software companies promised to make their programs into universal binaries—programs that run equally well on PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs with a double-click on the very same Finder icon.

It took two years for all the big-name programs to fall in line, but they finally did. Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office 2008, Final Cut Pro, QuarkXPress, FileMaker, Firefox...one by one, the world's most popular Mac programs were reworked into Universal versions. (There's even a list of them—over 7,000 so far—at .)

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Installing Mac OS X Programs

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In general, new programs arrive on your Mac via one of two avenues: on a CD or DVD, or via an Internet download. The CD method is slightly simpler; see "carview.php?tsp=" later in this section.

For help installing downloaded programs, on the other hand, read on.

Programs you download from the Internet generally arrive in a specially encoded, compressed form. (And unless you've changed the settings, they arrive in the Downloads folder stack on your Dock.)

The downloaded file's name usually has one of these filename extensions:

• .sit indicates a StuffIt file, the standard Macintosh file-compression format of years gone by.
• .zip is the standard Windows compression file format. And because Leopard has a built-in Compress command right in the File menu (and doesn't come with StuffIt Expander), .zip is the new standard Macintosh compression format. It certainly makes life easier for people who have to exchange files with the Windows crowd.
• .tar is short for tape archive, an ancient Unix utility that combines (but doesn't compress) several files into a single icon, for simplicity in sending.
• .gz is short for gzip, a standard Unix compression format.
• .tar.gz or .tgz represents one compressed archive containing several files.
• .dmg is a disk image, described below.

Figure : Downloading a new program from the Internet may strew your desktop or Downloads folder with icons. A: These are the original downloaded files. Delete them after they're decompressed. B: The compressed file turns into this .dmg file. Double-click it to "mount" the disk image (if it didn't appear automatically). C: And now, the disk image itself. Double-click it to open the software installer window. "Eject" it after the installation is complete. D: Here's the actual software installer window. Drag the software's icon to your Applications folder, or double-click the installer, if you see one here. After the installation is complete, you can delete all of this stuff (except maybe the .dmg file, if you think you might want to install the software again later).

Fortunately, if you use Safari () as your Web browser, you don't have to worry about all this, because it automatically unzips and unstuffs them.

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Dashboard

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The essence of using most operating systems is running programs, which often produce documents.

In Mac OS X, however, there's a third category: a set of weird, hybrid entities that Apple calls widgets. They appear, all at once, floating in front of your other windows, when your press the F12 key. Welcome to the Dashboard ().

On the thin aluminum Apple keyboard, the Dashboard has a different keystroke: F4. In fact, you can see a tiny Dashboard logo painted right on the key.

Either way, you can change this keyboard assignment, as described below. Also, on laptops where F12 is the Eject key, you have to hold down the Fn key (lower-left corner).

Figure : When you summon the Dashboard, you get a fleet of floating miniprograms that convey or convert all kinds of useful information. They appear and disappear all at once, on a tinted translucent sheet that floats in front of all your other windows. You get rid of Dashboard either by pressing the same key again (F12 or whatever) or by clicking anywhere on the screen except on a widget.

What are these weird, hybrid entities, anyway? They're not really programs, because they don't create documents or have Dock icons (although Dashboard itself has a Dock icon). They're certainly not documents, because you can't name or save them. What they most resemble, actually, is little Web pages. They're meant to display information, much of it from the Internet, and they're written using Web programming languages like HTML and JavaScript. (Come to think of it, they're a lot like gadgets in Windows Vista.)

Mac OS X's starter widgets include a calculator, local movie showtimes database, current weather reporter, stock ticker, clock, White Pages and Yellow Pages phone books, and so on. (You may have to wait a few seconds for them to "warm up," go online, and display any meaningful information.) The real beauty of the Dashboard, though, is that you can take your pick of several thousand additional, free widgets that bring you games, shopping, information, TV and movie schedules, sports, searching tools, and much more. (You'll find them at

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Web Clips: Make Your Own Widgets

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You don't have to be satisfied with Apple's 20 widgets or the several thousand that other people have written. Leopard introduces Web clips, a new way to make a Dashboard widget of your own—in about three clicks.

Web clips exploit an inescapable characteristic of widgets: An awful lot of them exist to deliver real-time information from the Web. That's the point of the Ski Report widget, Weather, Stocks, Flight Tracker, ESPN, and so on.

Figure : Drag the little round handles to make the white box just big enough to surround the part of the page you want to enshrine. Or drag inside the box to move the whole thing.

Clip button

Adjust handles

But what if your interest isn't skiing, stocks, or sports? What if it's the New York Times front page? Or the bestselling children's books on Amazon? Or the most-viewed video on YouTube? Or some cool Flash game that you wish you could summon with the touch of a key?

That's the beauty of Web clips, a joint venture of Dashboard and the Safari Web browser. They let you turn any section of any Web page into a Dashboard widget that updates itself every time you open Dashboard. It's like having a real-time keyhole peek at all your favorite Web sites at once.

Here's how you go about creating a do-it-yourself widget:

Figure : Top: Click a frame style to give your widget better-looking edges. If the widget plays sound, it keeps playing sound when you close the Dashboard unless you turn on "Play audio in Dashboard only." Bottom: Click Edit to return to the front of the widget, where you can adjust its position on the underlying Web page.

1. Open Safari.
   Safari is the Mac's Web browser. It's in your Applications folder.
2. Navigate to the Web page that contains the information you want to snip. Click the Web clips button identified in .
   The screen goes dark, with only a small window of white. As you move your cursor around the page, the small white rectangle conveniently snaps to fit the various rectangular sections of the page.
   As shown in , your job is to make a frame around the part of the page that usually shows the information you want. If the Web site ever redesigns its pages, it'll wreck your widget—but what the heck. It takes only five seconds to make it again.

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Chapter 5: Eight Ways to Transfer Your Files

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A huge percentage of "switchers" do not, in fact, switch. Often, they just add. They may get a Macintosh (and get into the Macintosh), but they keep the old Windows PC around, at least for a while. If you're in that category, get psyched. It turns out that communicating with a Windows PC is one of the Mac's most polished talents.

That's especially good news in the early days of your Mac experience. You probably have a good deal of stuff on the Windows machine that you'd like to bring over to the Mac. Somewhere along the line, somebody probably told you how easy this is to do. In fact, the Mac's reputation for simplicity may even have played a part in your decision to switch.

In any case, this chapter describes the process of building a bridge from the PC to the Mac, so that you can bring all your files and settings into their new home. It also tells you where to put all of them. (The next chapter is dedicated to the slightly hairier process of getting your email and addresses copied over.)

As it turns out, files can take one of several roads from your old PC to your new Mac. For example, you can transfer them on a disk (such as a CD or iPod), by a network, or as an attachment to an email message.

The first part of this chapter covers the mechanical aspects of moving files and folders from your Windows PC to the Mac. in , you'll find a more pointed discussion of where to put each kind of data (mail, photos, music, and so on) once it's on theMac.

By far the easiest way to transfer all the stuff from your PC to your new Mac is to let Apple do it for you. Yes, that's right: those busy Geniuses who work at the 200 Apple stores around the world are prepared to bring your music, pictures, documents, address book, email, bookmarks, and other stuff to its new home on your Mac.

And believe it or not, you may be able to get this service for free.

It's important to understand, though, that there are two levels of this service:

• Standard. This lower-tier service requires some planning. You'll be instructed to put everything that you want rescued into a folder on your Windows desktop called Transfer. Put your Pictures, Music, and Documents folders in there, at the very least.

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Transfer by Apple Genius

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By far the easiest way to transfer all the stuff from your PC to your new Mac is to let Apple do it for you. Yes, that's right: those busy Geniuses who work at the 200 Apple stores around the world are prepared to bring your music, pictures, documents, address book, email, bookmarks, and other stuff to its new home on your Mac.

And believe it or not, you may be able to get this service for free.

It's important to understand, though, that there are two levels of this service:

• Standard. This lower-tier service requires some planning. You'll be instructed to put everything that you want rescued into a folder on your Windows desktop called Transfer. Put your Pictures, Music, and Documents folders in there, at the very least.
  If you're smart, you'll also export your address book, email, calendar, and bookmarks from the various Windows programs they're in now, as described in this chapter and the next. Put those exported files into the Transfer folder, too.
  The Apple store will copy that single Transfer folder to the desktop of your new Mac. That's it. They won't put those files in the right places for you (photos into iPhoto, music into iTunes, etc.); that's left for you to do.
  In other words, the Standard service is a great value if you're tech-savvy enough to import and export data into the proper programs. (Although actually, this book describes those steps pretty well.)
  The best part: if you bring in your old PC at the time you buy a new Mac, this service is free.
  You don't necessarily have to bring in your PC the day you buy the Mac. If you bring a new Mac to the shop reasonably soon after buying it, even if you bought it online, the Geniuses are generally still willing to do the deed for you.
• Complete. Now we're talking. With the Complete service, you just hand over your PC, and the Apple dudes do everything. They take your entire Windows world and transfer everything into the appropriate programs on the Mac.
  For example, all your Windows pictures (even if they're in Picasa or special photoediting programs from HP or Kodak) get brought over to the Mac and imported into iPhoto. All your music is imported into iTunes on the Mac. Your documents and movies get copied to the Documents and Movies folders on the Mac. Your Web bookmarks from Internet Explorer or Firefox get transferred to Safari on the Mac. Even your email, address book, and calendar get transferred from Outlook or Outlook Express on the PC and brought into Mail and iCal on the Mac.

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Transfers by iTornado

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The iTornado is a special USB "smart cable" designed expressly for transferring stuff from a Windows PC to a Mac. You connect the USB cable to each machine, and that's it: you see a table-of-contents screen for each machine (). You copy files back and forth simply by dragging their icons in either direction.

Using this technique, you can move your PC photos directly into theMac's Pictures folder, your iTunes library into the iTunes folder on the Mac, and so on.

It's fast and, goodness knows, simpler than any other do-it-yourself method. It does, however, cost money—the list price, at this writing, is $80. Fortunately, the special code at the back of this book lops 20 percent off the price (and throws in free shipping).

Figure : The iTornado is a retractable USB cable that doesn't require you to install any software. As soon as you connect it, you see the contents of both machines in folder-tree formation. You can drag and drop files from one computer to the other, with no fuss, accounts, or setup—only a knowledge of where you're supposed to put everything. (It works Mac-to-Mac and PC-to-PC, too.)

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Transfers by Disk

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Another way to transfer Windows files to the Mac is to put them onto a disk that you then pop into the Mac. (Although Windows can't read all Mac disks without special software, the Mac can read Windows disks.)

This disk can take any of these forms:

• An external hard drive or iPod. If you have an external hard drive (USB or IEEE 1394, what Apple calls FireWire ), you're in great shape. While it's connected to the PC, drag files and folders onto it. Then unhook the drive from the PC, attach it to the Mac, and marvel as its icon pops up on your desktop, its contents ready for dragging to your Mac's built-in hard drive. (Most iPods work great for this process, too; they can operate as external hard drives—even the iPod Nano.)
• A USB flash drive. These small keychainy sticks are cheap and capacious, and they work beautifully on both Macs and PCs. Like a mini-external hard drive, a flash drive plugs directly into your USB port, at which point it shows up on your desktop just like a normal disk. You copy files to it from your PC, plug it into your Mac, and copy the files off, just like you would for any other disk. And, like an external hard drive, you're left with a backup copy of the data on the drive itself.
• A CD or DVD. If your Windows PC has a CD or DVD burner, here's another convenient method. Burn a disc in Windows, eject it, and then pop it into the Mac (see ). As a bonus, you wind up with a backup of your data on the disc itself.
  

  Figure : Burned CDs generally show up with equal aplomb on both Mac and Windows, regardless of which machine you used to burn it. Here's a CD burned on a Windows XP machine (bottom), and what it looks like on the Mac (top)—same stuff, just a different look and different sorting order. Either way, you can drag files to and from it, rename files, delete files, and so on.
  If you're given a choice of file format when you burn the disc in Windows, choose ISO9660. That's the standard format that the Macintosh can read.
• Move the hard drive itself. This is a grisly, technical maneuver best undertaken by serious wireheads—but it can work. You can install your PC's hard drive directly into a Power Mac or Mac Pro, as long as it was prepared using the older FAT or FAT32 formatting scheme. (The Mac can handle FAT hard drives just fine, but chokes with NTFS hard drives.)

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Transfers by Network

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Here's one of the best features of Mac OS X: It can "see" shared disks and folders on Windows PCs that are on the same network. Seated at the Mac, you can open or copy files from a PC. In fact, you can go in the other direction, too: Your old PC can see shared folders on your Mac.

This isn't a networking book, but offers a crash course. When it's all over, you'll be seated at the Mac, looking at the contents of your Windows PC in a separate window. At that point, you can drag whatever files and folders you want directly to the proper places on the Mac.

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Transfers by File-Sending Web Site

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There's a new breed of file-shuttling Web site prowling the Net—and a new option for transferring large amounts of data between machines.

They're free Web sites, like yousendit.com and sendthisfile.com, that are specifically designed for sending huge files from one computer to another, without worrying about email file attachments or size limits.

On the Windows PC, zip up your files into a great big .zip file. Upload it to one of these free sites, and provide your Mac's email address.

On the Mac, click the link that arrives by email—and presto, that huge zip file gets downloaded onto your Mac. It's free, there's no file-size limit, and you can download the big file(s) within three days of sending them. The only price you pay is a little bit of waiting while the stuff gets uploaded and then downloaded.

If you have your own Web site—a .com of your own, for example, or a free site through a university—you can also use that Web space as a transfer tool. Follow the uploading instructions that you were given when you signed up for the space. (Hint: It usually involves a so-called FTP program.) Then, once all your files are on the site, download them onto your Mac.

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Transfers by Email

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Although sending files as email attachments might seem to be a logical plan, it's very slow. Furthermore, remember that most email providers limit your attachment size to 5 or 10 megabytes. Trying to send more than that at once will clog your system. If you've got a lot of stuff to bring over from your PC, use one of the disk-or network-based transfer systems described earlier in this chapter.

But for smaller transfer jobs or individual files, sending files as plain old email attachments works just fine.

If you have trouble, or if you can't open the attachments at the other end, consider the following potential snags.

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Transfers by iDisk

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If your Windows PC isn't in the same building as the Mac, connecting the two using an Ethernet or a wireless network may not be a practical proposition. But even if you can't connect them into a network, you can still connect them via the network: the Internet.

It turns out that, for $100 per year, Apple will be happy to admit you to a club it calls .Mac ("dot-mac"). It offers a number of handy Internet features that tie in nicely to Mac OS X, as described in .

For many people, the crown jewel of the .Mac services is the iDisk, which appears on your desktop as though it's a multi-gigabyte hard drive. Anything you drag into the folders inside this "drive" gets copied to Apple's secure servers on the Internet. (If that's not enough space for you, Apple will rent you a larger allotment in exchange for more money.)

Because you can use the iDisk as a go-between between Mac and Windows, anywhere in the world, it makes a handy universal transfer disk. Page 296 has details for pulling the iDisk onto the Mac's screen or the PC's screen.

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Transfers by Bluetooth

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Bluetooth isn't really designed to be a networking technology; it's designed to eliminate cables between various gadgets. But if your Mac and a PC each have Bluetooth adapters, you can share files between them as though there's no language barrier at all. (Bluetooth is built into all Macs, and is available as a USB or internal card for Windows machines.)

Mac OS X comes with a nondenominational file-exchange program called Bluetooth File Exchange; not all Windows Bluetooth adapters come with such a program. But if yours does (3Com's adapters do, for example), you should be able to shoot files between the machines with the greatest of ease, if not the greatest of speed.

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Where to Put Your Copied Files

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Just getting your PC files onto the Mac is only half the battle. Now you have to figure out where they go on the Mac.

The short answer: in your Home folder. (Choose Go→Home, or click the Home icon in your Sidebar.)

Some of the more specific "where to put it" answers are pretty obvious:

• My Documents. Put the files and folders from the PC's My Documents folder into your Home→Documents folder. Here's where you should keep all your Microsoft Office files, PDF files, and other day-to-day masterpieces, for example.
• My Music. In recent versions of Windows, a My Music folder is designed to hold all of your MP3 files, AIFF files, WAV files, and other music. As you could probably guess, you should copy these files into your Mac's Home→Music folder.
  After that, you can import the music directly into iTunes. If you used iTunes on your old PC, for example, just open iTunes on your Mac and choose iTunes→Preferences→Advanced. Then click Change, and navigate to the place where you moved your old iTunes library.
  If you used some other music program on your PC (like Windows Media Player or MusicMatch), things are a little different. On your Mac, choose iTunes→Import, and navigate to the folder that contains all your music. (In either case, click Choose in the resulting dialog box.)
• My Pictures. The latest Windows versions also offer a My Pictures folder, which is where your digital camera photos probably wound up. Mac OS X has a similar folder: the Home→Pictures folder.
  Here again, after copying your photos and other graphics faves over to the Mac, you're only halfway home. If you fire up iPhoto (in your Applications folder), choose File→Import, and choose the Pictures folder, you'll then be able to find, organize, and present your photos in spectacular ways.
• My Videos. The My Videos folder of Windows XP contains the video clips you've downloaded from your camcorder (presumably so that you can edit them with, for example, Microsoft's Movie Maker software). Once you've moved them to your Home→Movies folder, though, you're in for a real treat: You can now edit your footage (if it's digital

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Document-Conversion Issues

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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.

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 latest versions of Microsoft Office for Mac and Windows offer an alternative, more compact file format ending with the letter x. For example, Word files are .docx, Excel files are .xlsx, and so on.

The beauty of Mac OS X is that most Mac programs add these file name suffixes automatically and invisibly—and 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. tackles these special cases one by one.

FireWire Disk Mode is by far the fastest method yet for transferring a lot of data—even faster than copying files over a network—but 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:

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Chapter 6: Transferring Email and Contacts

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If you use your PC for email—hey, it could happen—there's good news: Switching to a Mac doesn't mean you have to lose your stash of messages, reconfigure your email accounts from scratch, or manually retype everything in your address book. This chapter covers the secrets of moving your entire email life over to the Mac—messages, addresses, settings, everything—with as little hassle as possible.

As you read this chapter, it's important to keep straight the two leading Windows email programs, which many people don't realize are actually two entirely different beasts:

• Microsoft Outlook. This program is part of Microsoft Office for Windows. It's a sprawling, network-based email, contact, and calendar program that's ubiquitous in corporate offices and many schools. You, or somebody who employs you, paid good money for this software.
• Outlook Express. This Windows program is a free, scaled-down version of Outlook. It comes with Microsoft Windows, and is therefore sitting on practically every PC sold. It doesn't have a calendar, a To Do list, or other bells and whistles of Outlook—but it's free.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft renamed this program, calling it Windows Mail. Most people moving to the Mac these days are doing so to avoid having to do the whole Vista thing, so in this chapter, let's just use the old name: Outlook Express.

Unfortunately, each Windows email program requires a different method of exporting its email and addresses. Each Macintosh email program requires a different piece of go-between Windows software to ease the transition, too.

There are so many permutations of the "to/from" issue, in fact, that you'd practically need a table or two to keep them straight. They might look something like this:

	From Outlook	From Outlook Express	From Eudora
To Apple Mail	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
To Entourage	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
To Eudora for Mac	O2M or Eudora for Windows	Thunderbird or Eudora for Windows	Copy files

	From Outlook	From Outlook Express	From Eudora
To Mac OS X Address Book	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird

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	From Outlook	From Outlook Express	From Eudora
To Apple Mail	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
To Entourage	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
To Eudora for Mac	O2M or Eudora for Windows	Thunderbird or Eudora for Windows	Copy files

	From Outlook	From Outlook Express	From Eudora
To Mac OS X Address Book	O2M or Thunderbird	Thunderbird	Thunderbird
To Entourage	O2M or CSV Method	CSV Method	CSV Method
To Eudora for Mac	O2M or Eudora for Windows	Eudora for Windows	Copy files

It's a complex matrix. But if you know what program you've been using on the PC, and which one you want to use on the Mac, you'll find the steps you need later in this chapter.

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A Reminder That Could Save You Hours

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Remember: For $50, one of the Geniuses at an Apple store will transfer all your mail, settings, and address-book entries from your old PC into Mac OS X Mail for you. Truth is, the Geniuses use exactly the same methods described in this chapter—but the beauty of this concept is that they do the work, not you.

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Transferring Your Outlook Mail

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If Microsoft Outlook has been your Windows address book/email program, you're in luck: You have two options for importing your stuff.

Both of these methods bring over your entire backlog of existing email—the contents of your Inbox, Sent items, archived mail and, perhaps, even deleted items that are still in your email program's Trash.

If you value your time, buy O2M (short for Outlook2Mac)—a $10 utility that streamlines the process of bringing Outlook data to your Mac. (You can download it right now from www.littlemachines.com.)

This, in fact, is the tool that the Geniuses use at the Apple Store when someone pays them to transfer their stuff from a PC to a new Mac.

With O2M, you're spared the lengthy, sometimes tricky steps required by the free conversion methods described in the following pages. The program takes a wizard-like approach to transferring your Outlook data, gently stepping you through the whole process, as shown in . It saves all the exported data into one folder (called My_Outlook_Files), making it simple to grab the files you need and move them to your Mac.

Figure : O2M's wizard-like screens take you gently by the hand and walk you step by step through the process of moving mail, contacts, and calendar appointments from Microsoft Outlook to your Mac applications. Options abound. When exporting email, you can select exactly which folder you want included (top) or filter mail based on a specified date range (bottom). O2M even works with iCal, converting Outlook appointments and meetings into entries on an iCal calendar.

O2M also provides far more options than you get using other methods. For example, it lets you choose messages from only a specific date range—the last year's worth of email, for example, but nothing older. It lets you choose whether or not you want to include attachments with the transferred messages. It can even filter out certain attachments based on type.

O2M's other selling point is that it can handle more than just your email messages. It can also convert calendar entries and your address book, which can be imported directly into iCal, Entourage, or the Mac's Address Book.

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Transferring Your Outlook Address Book

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The contents of your Contacts list may represent years of typing and compiling. The last thing you want to do is leave that valuable info behind or—heaven forbid—manually retype each entry as you set up your Mac email program.

Here are the steps for bringing all those names, phone numbers, email addresses, notes, and other details from Outlook into your favorite Mac contact manager.

If you took the advice in and bought the O2M program, you're already done; this ingenious utility brings over both your email and your Outlook addresses to your choice of Mac programs.

Once again, Thunderbird for Windows comes to the rescue. Its address book module can extract contact info directly from the most popular PC email programs—not just Outlook, but also Outlook Express and Eudora. Better yet, it converts that data into a format that Apple's Address Book understands perfectly.

These steps guide your little-black-book data into Mac OS X's built-in Address Book program. If your aim is to transfer it into Entourage on the Mac instead, see page 182.

When you've got Thunderbird installed, you're ready to transfer your contacts, like this:

1. Import your Outlook contacts into Thunderbird.
   Follow the "Phase 1" steps described —but in Step 3, choose Address Books. Along the way, you'll be asked to choose the name of the email program whose addresses you want to snag (). You can choose Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, or Communicator (an earlier version of the Thunderbird software).
   With your contacts safely stored in Thunderbird, you're halfway home. Next, you need to get these contacts out of Thunderbird and onto your Mac. To do this, you must save them into an LDIF file. LDIF stands for Lightweight Directory Interchange Format—a text format mostly used by network administrators to synchronize directory information across large networks. It's also a format that Apple's Address Book recognizes.
   

   Figure : Thunderbird, the Swiss Army software, is happy to open the address book of almost any email program, or even a text file containing addresses (such as tab- or comma-delimited text).

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Transferring from Outlook Express

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If you've been using Outlook Express (Microsoft's free email program) on the Windows PC, you'll have very little trouble moving into any of the Mac's email programs.

You can use free Windows software as a go-between—but which Mac address book you've adopted will determine which program to use.

• To import your Outlook Express addresses into Apple's Address Book, follow the instructions in "carview.php?tsp=" on page 174.
• To import them into Microsoft Entourage instead, see "carview.php?tsp=" on page 182.

Outlook Express is also a pleasant partner when it comes to moving the messages themselves over to the Mac. Here again, you use Thunderbird as a sort of translator. Follow the steps listed under "," beginning on page 174.

Getting your mail and addresses from Outlook Express (Windows) into Eudora (Macintosh) involves moving it first into Eudora for Windows, and then into Eudora for Macintosh. See "carview.php?tsp=" on page 179 for instructions; they cover moving both your messages and addresses out of Outlook Express.

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Transferring Your Eudora Mail

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Eudora, an email program written at the University of Illinois in the eighties, used to be wildly popular because it was free and full-featured. Today, this venerable email client, now sold by Qualcomm, is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

If you'd like your mail to wind up in a Mac email program like Entourage or Mail, it's good old Thunderbird to the rescue. Follow the steps in "," beginning on page 174.

If you use Eudora on Windows and want to move your existing messages into the Mac version of Eudora, you can copy them straight over to your Mac. All you need to know is where to find the necessary files and how to set them up on your Mac.

Here's the most direct path for converting your Eudora mailboxes from Windows to Mac:

1. Find the Eudora .MBX files on your PC.
   The folder names depend on your version of Windows, but here's the gist:
   Windows 98 or 98SE: Open the My Computer→your hard drive icon→Win98 →Application Data→Qualcomm→Eudora folder.
   Windows Me: Open the My Computer→your hard drive icon→WINDOWS→Application Data→Qualcomm→Eudora folder.
   Windows 2000, Windows XP: Turn on the hidden files, as shown in . Then open the My Computer→your hard drive icon→Documents and Settings→your name→Application Data→Qualcomm→Eudora.
   All versions: In the Eudora folder, you'll find several mailbox files that—depending on your version of Eudora—may end with the filename extension .mbx: In, Out, and Trash, as shown in . These are the files you want, whether they end in .mbx or not.
   

   Figure : Drill down into the your PC's Applications Data folder to find the Eudora folder, where your Eudora mailbox files live. The Trash file contains messages you've already thrown into Eudora's trash can. There's no need to copy that file over to your Mac unless you want to preserve those trashed messages.

Can't find an Application Data folder inside your user folder? That's because Application Data is a hidden folder and you have the "Do not show hidden files and folders" option turned on in Windows. See the instructions for copying Thunderbird files on page 176 to learn how to change this setting.

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Transferring Your Eudora Address Book

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Once again, the steps here depend on which program you'll be using as your Mac address book.

Fortunately, this one's easy. The Swiss Army Converter known as Thunderbird can convert your Eudora address book into a Mac-compatible format; see "carview.php?tsp=" on page 174.

As noted earlier in this chapter, Thunderbird isn't enough if the landing site for your contacts is Microsoft Entourage. In that case, you should use the CSV format as a go-between. See "carview.php?tsp=" on page 182.

The easiest way to transfer your old Eudora contacts to the Mac is to first get your contacts into Mac OS X's Address Book program, as described above. Then, once that transfer is complete, open Eudora on your Mac and choose Eudora→Preferences→Address Book. Turn on "Show OS X AddressBook."

Now all the contacts from your PC are in both Address Book and Eudora, which is extra convenient if you ever decide to switch from Eudora to Mail.

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Email Settings

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guides you through the painless process of plugging your Internet settings—whether by dial-up connection, cable modem, DSL, or network connection—from the PC to your Mac.

But even after you've done that, you can't start sending and receiving email on your Mac until you've transferred some vital email account settings from your PC.

Fortunately, there's only a handful of settings you need to grab—and hunting these down and moving them to your Mac is pretty quick work. Here's all the information you need to gather in order to get yourself set up:

• Account name (or user name). This is the name you use when you log into your email account, such as Joe63 or kjackson.
• Password. This is the password that you have to enter along with your account name to get into your email account. Passwords can't be copied and pasted or directly exported, so you'll need to remember this password and type it in when configuring your Mac email software.
• Account type. There are two main kinds of email server protocols—POP (which stands for post-office protocol—by far most common) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). You'll need to know which type you've been using on your PC, so that you can set up accounts on your Mac the same way.
  Exchange servers are another choice popular in big organizations. If your email is stored on an Exchange server, see page 179.
• Incoming and outgoing mail servers are the names of the computers that route email to and from you, such as mail.earthlink.net or mailserve.photorabbit.com. (The incoming and outgoing servers sometimes have the same address, but they can be two different servers with different names.)

Each of the popular Windows email programs stores these nuggets of email account info differently. Here's how to find the items you need:

Outlook

If you're connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server computer—and you probably are if you're running Outlook in a corporate workplace—your user name and password are exactly the same as the ones you use to log into the network when you start up your computer. You'll have to check with your network administrator to get the name of the mail servers being used on the network.

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Chapter 7: Special Software, Special Problems

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Be glad you waited so long to get a Mac. By now, all the big-name programs look and work almost exactly the same on the Mac as they do on the PC. Once you've mastered the basic differences between the Mac and Windows (keyboard shortcuts, the menu bar, and so on), you'll find that programs from Microsoft, Adobe, and other major software companies feel distinctly familiar in their Mac incarnations. In fact, the documents that they create are in the same format and generally need no conversion.

But one fact is unassailable: There are more software programs available for Windows than for the Mac. Sooner or later, you'll probably run into a familiar Windows program for which there's no equivalent on the Mac.

One solution is simply to run those Windows programs on the Mac, as described in . For thousands of people, that's the screamingly obvious, and extremely convenient, approach. Each time you read, "There's no Mac equivalent of this program" in this chapter, add, in your head, "but you can always run the Windows version."

Still, in other cases, you may not want to fool around with Windows anymore. You may prefer to identify Mac replacements for your favorite Windows programs. That's the purpose of this chapter: to guide you in finding Mac equivalents for the most popular Windows programs (listed here alphabetically), and to guide you in bringing over your data and settings from Windows to the Mac whenever possible.

As digital photography becomes more popular, so do programs like ACDSee, a popular Windows program that serves as a digital shoebox and basic retouching program for digital photos. Your Mac, of course, stands ready to run a far more elegant equivalent: iPhoto. It's one of the world's most pleasant photo-organizing programs—and it's free.

In its most recent incarnation, iPhoto has a pretty complete set of image-retouching features. Still, if you need more editing power, consider Photoshop Elements, a program that's available for both Mac and Windows and has won rave reviews on both platforms.

In any case, ACDSee doesn't have any documents of its own—it does all its work on your existing digital photos, wherever you keep them on your hard drive. All you have to do, then, is move the photos themselves to the Mac, using any of the techniques described in . From there, drag them into the iPhoto window to import them.

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ACDSee

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As digital photography becomes more popular, so do programs like ACDSee, a popular Windows program that serves as a digital shoebox and basic retouching program for digital photos. Your Mac, of course, stands ready to run a far more elegant equivalent: iPhoto. It's one of the world's most pleasant photo-organizing programs—and it's free.

In its most recent incarnation, iPhoto has a pretty complete set of image-retouching features. Still, if you need more editing power, consider Photoshop Elements, a program that's available for both Mac and Windows and has won rave reviews on both platforms.

In any case, ACDSee doesn't have any documents of its own—it does all its work on your existing digital photos, wherever you keep them on your hard drive. All you have to do, then, is move the photos themselves to the Mac, using any of the techniques described in . From there, drag them into the iPhoto window to import them.

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Acrobat Reader

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Acrobat Reader, which lets you read Acrobat (PDF) files, works precisely the same on the Mac as it does in Windows (except that it looks a little nicer on the Mac). If you like, you can download Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com.

There are fewer and fewer reasons to use Acrobat Reader, though; you have a much nicer PDF-reading program right there in your Applications folder, called Preview.

Preview can read PDFs like the best of them—but it's also got Acrobat Reader covered on several other counts. Preview can annotate PDFs with virtual yellow sticky-notes—a great tool for marking up book layouts before they go to press, for example. Also, Preview's search feature is so fast and convenient, it blows Acrobat Reader out of the water. And finally, Preview opens in a matter of seconds, while Acrobat Reader can take a minute or so to launch. (For more on Preview, see page 502.)

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ACT

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No Mac version of this address book/calendar program is available, but don't let that stop you. Export and Import commands are the bread and butter of address and calendar programs. Your ACT life can find a happy home in any of several Mac address books:

• Mac OS X's free, built-in Address Book.
• Palm Desktop for Mac OS X (a free address book/calendar/to-do program from www.palm.com, which works with—but doesn't require—an actual Palm organizer).
• Microsoft Entourage (part of Microsoft Office for Mac).
• Now Contact (www.nowsoftware.com), which is networkable. That is, if you have more than one computer in the house, you can check your Rolodex from any machine on the network (Mac or Windows).

In any case, here are the instructions for transferring your addresses from ACT (version 5 or later) to the Mac:

1. In ACT for Windows, start by choosing File→Data Exchange→Export.
   The Export Wizard dialog box appears.
2. From the "File type" drop-down list, choose Text-Delimited. Specify a folder location and name for your exported file (call it Exported Contacts, for example). Click Next, and click Next on the next screen, too.
   Now you're asked "Which contact or group records do you want to export?"
3. Click "All records," and then click Next.
   Now you see a list of the fields (information tidbits like City, State, and Zip) that ACT is prepared to export. You can save yourself time later if you take a moment now to remove the ones you don't need (click its name and then click Remove Field).
4. Click Finish.
   If you plan to import your addresses into a commercial program like Now Contact, transfer the Exported Contacts file to the Mac (see ), and then import them into Now Contact. The tricky part is making sure that the order of the fields appears in the order Now Contact expects, which may entail some trial, error, and returning to the ACT Export Wizard screen described in step 3 (where you can rearrange the field order).
   If your aim is to import the addresses into Microsoft Entourage on the Mac, or Mac OS X's own Address Book program, though, read on.
5. Open Outlook Express.
   Yes, Outlook Express for Windows, the free program that comes on every PC. (The Windows Vista version is called Windows Mail.) You'll use it as a glorified converter program.

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Ad Subtract (Pop-up Stopper)

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Nothing quite spoils the fun of the Web like pop-ups—those annoying miniature advertising windows that sprout in front of the Web page you're trying to read.

Safari, Mac OS X's Web browser, has a simple menu command for blocking pop-ups: Safari→Block Pop-Up Windows. Nowadays, so does just about every other Web browser made for the Mac—Firefox, Netscape, Camino, and so on. In other words, you don't even need Ad Subtract.

If you're interested in some of Ad Subtract's other features, like blocking animated ads or zapping all ads on Web pages, consider Pith Helmet (for Safari) or Adblock (for Firefox). Both are available for download from this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.

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Adobe [your favorite program here]

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Most of Adobe's bestsellers are available in Mac OS X versions, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, and so on. Even the Mac version of Premiere, the video-editing program, is back (after being abandoned by Adobe from 2003 to 2007).

You almost never have to do any document conversion. A Windows Photoshop document is exactly the same thing as a Macintosh Photoshop document, for example.

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America Online

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America Online is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. In fact, the Mac OS X version may have come preinstalled on your Mac (look in the Applications folder). If not, you can download it from .

You don't actually need the AOL program on your Mac. You can access all of your AOL mail, as well as all of AOL's features, on the Web at www.aol.com.

When you use the Macintosh version of the software for the first time, just plug in your existing screen name and password.

The beauty of AOL is that it stores your mail, address book, buddy list, and favorites online. You can check your email one day at the office on a PC and the following night at home on the Mac, and you'll always see the same messages there. It makes no difference if you connect to the service using a Windows PC, a Macintosh, or a kerosene-powered abacus.

Your Favorites (bookmarks) are stored online only if you use AOL for Windows version 8 and later. If you've been using an earlier version on your PC, your Favorites won't be waiting for you when you switch the Mac.

If your PC meets the system requirements, you'd be wise to upgrade its copy of America Online to version 8 or later before switching to the Macintosh. (This is a free upgrade; you can download the software at www.aol.com/downloads.) If you do so, you'll find the Favorites waiting for you in AOL for Mac OS X.

This is all really good news, of course, but you may have one headache in performing the switch: your Personal Filing Cabinet. If you've been saving email messages into this virtual filing drawer, the news isn't quite as good: these messages are saved on the PC, not online. So when you switch to the Macintosh, your Personal Filing Cabinet will be empty.

Here are your options at this point:

• Be content with only the last 30 days' worth of old mail, and the last week's worth of new mail. This is what lives on the America Online computers, no matter what computer you use to access it. When you move to the Mac, that much email will immediately appear the first time you use AOL.
• Fire up your old PC and open each message in your Personal Filing Cabinet. Click the Forward button, and type in your own AOL address. You're basically emailing each message to yourself.

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AIM (AOL Instant Messenger)

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If you're an online chat junkie, switching to the Mac involves very little disruption to your routine. AIM is available for the Mac, too, and it awaits your download at www.aim.com. Better yet, the minute you fire it up, you'll discover that your entire Windows-version buddy list is intact and ready to use. (That's because it actually lives on the America Online network, not on your Windows PC.)

Actually, you might have a lot more fun—and save a lot of effort—by just using iChat. It's a free Mac OS X chat program that's compatible with the whole AIM network, as described in .

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Children's Software

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Thanks to the vast number of Macs in schools, a huge percentage of educational software programs are available in both Mac and Windows versions—often on the same CD. That includes most programs from The Learning Company (including the Arthur, Carmen Sandiego, Little Bear, and Reader Rabbit series), Broderbund (Kid Pix, Mavis Beacon, Print Shop, and so on), Humongous Entertainment (series like Blue's Clues, Dora the Explorer, Putt-Putt, Backyard Sports), and other major educational publishers.

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Earthlink Total Access

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If Earthlink is your Internet service provider, and you're a fan of its Total Access software (which provides access to email, blocks pop-up ads, lets you switch to other family members' accounts, and so on), you're in luck. Hie thee to www.earthlink.net/home/software/mac to download the Macintosh version, which includes a spam blocker, pop-up blocker, Address Book syncing with Earthlink's Web-based mail, and so on. (And then see for details on transferring your Windows account settings to the Mac.)

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Easy CD Creator

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You don't need any add-on software at all to burn CDs in Mac OS X. You can just drag files and folders onto the icon of a blank CD, as described in .

If you want fancier features—recording less common disc formats, for example—what you need is Toast for the Macintosh. It comes from the same company that makes Easy CD Creator.

Its main rival is DiScribe (www.charismac.com.)Both programs can create audio CDs, video CDs, data DVDs, and so on. Both come with a program that helps you turn old vinyl records and tapes into digital CDs, too.

The only disappointment: Neither program can treat a CD as a glorified floppy disk, as Easy CD Creator for Windows can, so that you can add and delete files freely (rather than burning the CD all at once).

There's a workaround, though: Copy the contents of a rewriteable CD (a CD-RW disc) to a folder on your desktop; make whatever changes you like to the contents of this folder; and then burn the CD-RW again. (Use the Disk Utility program in your Applications→Utilities folder to erase the disc first.)

Ordinarily, the CD-burning feature of Mac OS X burns the entire CD each time, even if you've only filled a small portion of it. But if you download the handy $17 shareware program called CD Session Burner, you can perform additional "mini-burns" of new data to the CD until all the space is used up. Each such session shows up on your desktop with its own icon, as though it's a separate disc. You can download this program from www.sentman.com/burner/.

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Encarta

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Microsoft's best-selling encyclopedia program isn't available for the Macintosh. The World Book Encyclopedia is, however. (Details at www2.worldbook.com.)

Of course, you can also use the Web-based versions of either encyclopedia (or Wikipedia, of course).

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Eudora

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You want Eudora? You got Eudora! It's available on the Mac, as it is in Windows. Download it from www.eudora.com. even tells you how to move your mail and address book over to the Mac version.

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Excel

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See "carview.php?tsp=" in this chapter.

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Firefox

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On Windows, Firefox is a faster, more secure, better-featured Web-browsing alternative to Internet Explorer. If you'd like, you can download the identical Mac version from www.getfirefox.com, and then follow the instructions in for transferring your bookmarks.

Alternatively, you can switch to Mac OS X's built-in, super-fast Safari browser, which offers a more Mac-like browsing experience. houses the coverage of the Safari adventure.

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Games

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Nobody switches to the Mac to play games; of the top 250 computer games for Windows, only about 150 are available for the Macintosh.

Still, that number includes the majority of the big-name titles and series, including Guitar Hero, Madden NFL, Tiger Woods PGA, the various Sims games, Civilization, Quake, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Tomb Raider, WarCraft, Jedi Knight, Soldier of Fortune, Max Payne, Links Championship Edition, Age of Empires, Medal of Honor, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and hordes of others.

And once you do get these programs going on the Mac, you're likely to be impressed. Recent Macs generally come equipped with pleasantly high-horsepower graphics cards—the kind that serious computer games crave.

If you're a game nut, you can stay in touch with what's new and upcoming by reading the articles (and watching the game "trailers") at www.apple.com/games, not to mention www.insidemacgames.com, macgamer.com, and macgamefiles.com.

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Google Desktop Search

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Mac OS X's Spotlight feature does everything that Google Desktop does—searching inside files, finding favorite Web sites, and so on. Spotlight just does it better.

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ICQ

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If you're a fan of this Internet-wide chat program, look no further than ICQ for Mac or one of its many shareware rivals. To grab them, visit www.versiontracker.com and perform a search, on the Mac OS X tab, for ICQ.

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Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer is available for the Mac, but it's ancient, abandoned, and not worth it. Safari (Apple's built-in Web browser) blocks pop-up windows, loads pages more quickly, and doubles as an RSS reader for news sites. Coverage starts in .

If some Web site (like a banking site) refuses to work with Safari, download Firefox for the Mac instead (www.getfirefox.com); it works with almost everything.

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iTunes

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If you grew used to iTunes on Windows, you'll be glad to know that the Mac version is already sitting in your Applications folder. It works identically to the PC version.

Just move your iTunes Library folder from the Music folder of your old PC into the Music folder on your Mac. That's all there is to it!

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Kazaa

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Kazaa, of course, is the "new Napster." People use it to swap music and video files online, hard drive to hard drive—illegally, in many cases. You know who you are.

If you visit www.kazaa.com, you won't find a Macintosh version of the Kazaa program that you need to do file swapping. There are such programs, however, including miMac, Poisoned, and others; you can find them at www.versiontracker.com. Or try Limewire, described next.

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Limewire

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Limewire is the same idea as Kazaa (see above), but it runs on something called the Gnutella network—and there's a nice Mac version of the downloading program. You can get it at www.limewire.com.

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MacAfee VirusScan

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The Mac version is called MacAfee Virex—but don't buy it. You don't even need a virus program for Mac OS X. (If you run Windows on your Mac, as described in the next chapter, then install your copy of VirusScan onto that side of the computer, by all means.)

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Microsoft Access

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Microsoft has never been much interested in creating a Macintosh equivalent of its flagship database program (which comes with the higher-priced versions of Microsoft Office for Windows). FileMaker, a much easier-to-use database program, towers over the Macintosh database market like the Jolly Green Giant (and has a decent following on the Windows side, too). Resistance, Microsoft apparently assumes, is futile.

FileMaker's little brother, Bento (for the Mac), is even easier to use still.

It's easy enough to get your data out of Microsoft Access; just choose File→Export. In the resulting dialog box, you can choose from a number of common export formats that can serve as intermediaries between the Windows and Mac worlds (see ).

Figure : When you export your data from Access, you can choose from any of several formats. The idea is that you'll transfer the resulting exported file onto your Mac, and then import it into a proper database program there.

Among them is Microsoft Excel—that is, you can turn your database into a spreadsheet. The beauty here is that FileMaker on the Macintosh can turn Excel documents into FileMaker databases without even batting an eye. You just drag the exported Excel document onto the FileMaker icon, and FileMaker does the rest.

Unfortunately, there's more to an Access database than just its data. Your database may well have fancy forms (layouts), complete with letterhead and other graphic elements, not to mention relational links between database files. In these situations, the situation isn't quite so hopeful—there's no way to export layouts and relational links to the Macintosh.

In this situation, your best bet might be to run Microsoft Access itself on the Macintosh, as described in .

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Microsoft Money

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Microsoft doesn't make Money for the Macintosh (although it certainly makes money from the Macintosh). If you're looking for a home-finances program for Mac OS X, though, look no further than Quicken (www.intuit.com).

You can even export your Money data into Quicken, although not every scrap of information comes through alive. You'll lose your Money abbreviations, comments, and Lifetime Planner information. Fortunately, the important stuff—your accounts and the transactions in them, including categories, classes, and stocks that you've set up—come through in one piece.

Unfortunately, you have to export one account at a time. Furthermore, you'll be creating something called a QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) file as an intermediary between Windows and the Mac—and this file format can't handle category names longer than 15 characters. Before you begin, then, you might want to take a moment either to shorten them or to make a note of which ones might get truncated in the transfer.

Ready? Fire up Money on your Windows PC and then proceed like this:

1. Choose File→Export.
   The Export dialog box appears. It wants to know if you are exporting your information to another version of Money ("Loose QIF") or to some other, rival financial program that shall, as far as Microsoft is concerned, remain nameless.
2. In the resulting dialog box (), choose Strict QIF, and then click OK.
   One of the greatest perks of moving to Macintosh is that viruses are practically nonexistent. At this writing, in fact, not a single virus for Mac OS X has been reported in the wild.

   The one kind of virus that manages to sneak into Mac OS X are Microsoft Word macro viruses that hide in ordinary Word files sent to you by your Windows friends.

   

   Fortunately, on the Mac version of Word, most of these don't run at all. Second, whenever you try to open a document that contains macros that you didn't create yourself, you see the message shown here. All you have to do is click Disable Macros. The file opens normally, 100 percent virus free.

   If you have Apple's .Mac service (described in ), you have free access to McAfee's antivirus software—just in case. Otherwise, it usually doesn't make financial sense to buy an antivirus program at all.

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Microsoft Office

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Microsoft Office is available for the Mac in what some critics have declared to be a more attractive, less frustrating version than the Windows incarnation. At this writing, the current version is called Office 2008 for Macintosh.

As noted elsewhere in this book, the beauty of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents is that their format is the same on Mac and Windows. You can freely exchange files without having to go through any kind of conversion. (The big exception, as noted earlier, is Access; Microsoft doesn't make a database program for the Mac.)

In heavily formatted documents, you may occasionally see some strange differences: Windows documents containing many numbered paragraphs sometimes become confused on the Mac, for example. And if the Mac and the originating PC don't have the fonts installed, you'll see different fonts, too. Otherwise, documents look identical despite having been shuttled through the ether to a different kind of computer.

With Office 2007 for Windows, Microsoft introduced a set of new file formats (.docx for Word, .pptx for PowerPoint, and so on) that's more compact than the previous set (.doc, .ppt, and so on). When you save a document, you can choose which format you want to use: the old one, which 400 million other people can open on their Macs and PCs, or the new one, which nobody but recent upgraders can open.

Exactly the same conundrum presents itself on the Mac. Office 2008 can open and create those same newfangled files, but the previous versions (like Office 2004 for the Mac) can open only the older formats.

Figure : OmniGraffle comes preinstalled in the Applications folders of many new Mac models, or you can download the latest version from www.omnigroup.com

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Microsoft Publisher

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Microsoft Publisher is a comprehensive page-layout program, complete with canned designs, clip art, and so on.

There's no Mac version of it, but you can perform most of the same tasks using Pages. (Pages is part of Apple's $80 iWork software suite; you can download a 30-day trial from www.apple.com/iwork.) Like Publisher, Pages offers dozens of attractive, ready-to-use page-design templates that you can adapt as you see fit.

There are also plenty of standalone page-design programs—this is the Mac, after all—including professional powerhouses like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress.

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Microsoft Visio

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If flowcharts, org charts, network diagrams, family trees, project processes, office layouts and similar diagrams are part of your own personal workflow, you're in luck—at least some luck. Microsoft Visio isn't available in a Macintosh version, but you'll probably find that OmniGraffle for Mac OS X is a satisfactory, even delightful, replacement (see ). The Pro version even lets you import and export Visio documents.

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Minesweeper

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Time wasters, rejoice! There are a number of free Minesweeper programs for Mac OS X, including CocoaMines and Aqua Mines. You can download them from a site like www.versiontracker.com (search for minesweeper).

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MSN Messenger

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Online chat-aholics have nothing to worry about on the Mac. MSN Messenger, the instant-messaging program, is alive and well in a Mac OS X version that you can download from www.microsoft.com/mac.. Like AOL Instant Messenger described earlier in this chapter, you don't even have to worry about your carefully assembled buddy list. From the instant you start up MSN Messenger for Mac OS X, you'll see your Buddy list in place (because the list is actually stored on the Internet, not on your computer).

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NaturallySpeaking

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Speech-recognition programs have traditionally been far more advanced on Windows than on the Macintosh. Windows programs like Dragon NaturallySpeaking transcribe your dictated text with almost Star Trek–like accuracy, and even let you make corrections and manipulate the computer itself using all voice commands.

Fortunately, that same Dragon technology finally made it onto the Mac in early 2008 with the release of MacSpeech Dictate. It uses precisely the same "recognition engine" as Dragon Naturally Speaking (www.macspeech.com). If you just can't use the keyboard, or don't want to, you'll be amazed at its speed and accuracy.

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Netscape

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Netscape comes in a Mac OS X version—free, of course, from . (Mozilla, which is like a Netscape cousin without all the AOL promotional material, is also available for the Mac, too, from www.mozilla.org. So is the Firefox Web browser, described earlier in this chapter.)

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Newsgroup Readers

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If you're a fan of the online bulletin boards known as newsgroups, you've come to the right place. The Mac is crawling with newsgroup-reading programs. Microsoft Entourage, for instance, has one built in. In the shareware world (try searching www.versiontracker.com), you can take your pick of MT-NewsWatcher X, NewsHunter, and Halime, to name a few.

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Norton AntiVirus

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You can buy Norton Antivirus for the Macintosh, no problem (www.symantec.com). The question is, why? See the box in .

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Norton Utilities

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This program, too, is available in a Mac OS X version. It does the same kinds of things it does in Windows: defragments your hard drive, helps recover files in case of disaster, and repairs disk problems.

In times of trouble, though, you may prefer Disk Warrior, a similar (and, many experts feel, superior) program that you can buy from www.alsoft.com.

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Notepad

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If you're an aficionado of this beloved note-taking tool in the standard Windows Start menu, you're in luck. Mac OS X's Stickies program is even more powerful, because it offers formatting and even graphics. Or, for more of a word-processor effect, check out TextEdit.

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Outlook/Outlook Express

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Mac OS X's built-in Mail program is similar to Outlook Express for Windows (or Windows Mail in Vista), just more powerful and a lot better-looking. describes the process of switching, and covers the rest of the Mail experience.

If you want all the features from Outlook, though, you'd probably be better off using Microsoft Entourage, which is available as part of Microsoft Office for Mac.

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Paint Shop Pro

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If your goal is to retouch and edit digital photos, the closest you can come to Paint Shop on the Mac is probably Photoshop Elements, a sensational Mac OS X program (about $100) that belongs on the hard drive of any serious digital camera owner. (Any digital camera owner who doesn't also own the full-blown Photoshop program, that is.)

If your goal is to organize and use your photos, rather than paint on them, remember that the newest version of iPhoto is either already on your hard drive or available as part of Apple's iLife suite ($80).

Finally, if opening and converting graphics to other formats is your main concern, try Preview (page 502), whose exporting feature is surprisingly powerful. You may also want to investigate the beloved shareware program GraphicConverter (find and download it at www.versiontracker.com), which may be the last graphics editing/converting program you'll ever need.

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Palm Desktop

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The CD that came with your Palm organizer included both Mac and Windows versions of this calendar/address book/to-do list/notepad program. Put another way, if you have a Palm, you probably already have Palm Desktop for Mac OS X.

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Picasa

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Picasa, one of several Windows photo-organizers, isn't available for the Mac (at this writing, anyway; a Mac version is rumored to be in the works for late 2008). But don't worry. On Mac OS X, you can edit, organize, and order prints of your images with iPhoto.

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Pocket PC

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The world of palmtop computers falls into two broad camps: Palm compatibles (from Palm, Sony, Kyocera, and others) and Pocket PC (from Dell, HP, ViewSonic, and others). Pocket PC machines are loaded with useful features. Unfortunately, they also run a tiny (but still confusing) version of Windows—and they can't exchange information with a Macintosh.

Or at least they can't right out of the box. Once you've added the program called PocketMac (www.pocketmac.net), though, you can synchronize your Pocket PC with the appointments, calendar, and to do list from any of the popular Mac OS X programs that handle this kind of information: Microsoft Entourage, Address Book, and iCal. You can even load up the pocket PC with files from Word and Excel for viewing and editing on the road, and MP3 files for music listening in transit. (Depending on the features you want, you'll pay anywhere from $15 to $42.)

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PowerPoint

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PowerPoint is available on the Mac; see "carview.php?tsp=" in this chapter. Remember, too, that Apple's own Keynote presentation program (available as part of iWork for $80) is the same idea as PowerPoint, but with much more spectacular graphic effects.

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QuickBooks

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If you've been happily using QuickBooks for Windows to manage your small business—to prepare estimates and invoices, track bills, maintain lists of inventory and customers, and so on—there's good news and bad news. The good news is that QuickBooks is available on the Mac, and the steps for transferring your company files aren't difficult.

The bad news is that the transfer isn't perfect. Along the way, you might lose your memorized transactions, custom report designs, and reconciliations. Note, too, that you may not be able to send an older Windows file (like QuickBooks 2007) to an older version on the Mac (like QuickBooks 2006).

It's not especially hard; heck, there's a File→Utilities→Copy Company File for QuickBooks Mac command right in QuickBooks for Windows. You can find the rest of the step-by-step instructions in two places:

• Open the electronic Help for QuickBooks for Mac, and search for this topic: "Converting a QuickBooks file from Windows to Mac."
• Follow the do-it-yourself procedure described on Intuit's Support Web page (here'sa short link to it: ).

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Quicken

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If you've been keeping track of your personal finances in Quicken on your PC, you'll feel right at home when you move to the Mac. Quicken 2003 and later versions are available for Mac OS X.

In general, switching over is quick and painless. You can import into the Mac version of Quicken all of the actual transaction information, including accounts, the categories and classes you've used to group them, and stock holdings. Certain kinds of Windows Quicken information—like schedule transactions, QuickFill transactions, online account information, stock histories, and loan information—don't make it, however.

For the official manual on transferring your Quicken data from Windows to the Mac, download this chapter's free PDF Appendix from this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.

If the technology gods are smiling, the Mac version of Quicken should take only a moment to import all of your Windows data, which now appears neatly in your Register windows, ready to use. Make sure the final balances match the final balances in Quicken for Windows. (If they don't, scan your Mac registers for duplicate or missing transactions.)

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RealPlayer

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Want to listen to Internet music and watch Internet video in Real format, just as you did on your PC? No sweat. Visit www.real.com and download RealPlayer for Mac OS X, either in the free basic edition or the fancy paid version.

If you just want to listen to music on your hard drive, though, you'd be better off using iTunes (page 250).

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RssReader

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RSS is a technology for reading quick Web site summaries, and it's taking the Net by storm. RSS returns the Internet to real utility, free from pop-up ads and the other annoyances of Web life.

To take advantage of RSS, however, you need a program to subscribe to Web sites that support RSS—and then to display the resulting summaries. On Windows, you might use a program like RssReader, or a Web site like www.pluck.com.

On Mac OS X, however, Apple's way ahead of you. Both Safari (), and Mail () provide fantastic built-in RSS readers; both can subscribe to RSS sites with ease.

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Skype

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For making Internet-based phone calls, it's hard to beat Skype. If you call from one computer to another, you pay absolutely nothing—no matter how far away your recipient is.

Luckily, you can download a Mac version from www.skype.com. From there, you can audio-chat with all your Mac- and PC-using Skype buddies until you lose your voice.

iChat, Apple's own instant-messaging program, also offers free audio chats. If you and your buddy both have Web cams or videocameras, in fact, you can make free, Internet video calls. See for the details.

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SnagIt

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If you prepare instructions for using any kind of computer or software—computer books, magazine articles, or how-to materials of any kind—you may already be familiar with this amazing screen-capture program. It captures any window, menu, or area of the Windows screen and saves it as a graphics file that you can print or pop into a layout program.

In Mac OS X, this feature is built right in. Here's how to capture:

• The whole screen. Press Shift--3 to create a picture file on your desktop, in PNG format, that depicts the entire screen image. A satisfying camera-shutter sound tells you that you were successful.
  The file is called Picture 1. Each time you press Shift--3, you get another file, called Picture 2, Picture 3, and so on. You can open these files in Preview, Photoshop, or another graphics program, in readiness for editing or printing.
• One section of the screen. You can capture only a rectangular region of the screen by pressing Shift--4. When you drag and release the mouse, you hear the camera-click sound, and the Picture file appears on your desktop as usual.
• One menu, window, icon (with its name), or dialog box. Once you've got your menu or window open onscreen, or the icon visible (even if it's on the Dock), press Shift--4. But instead of dragging diagonally, press the Space bar.
  Now your cursor turns into a tiny camera. Move it so that the misty highlighting fills the window or menu you want to capture—and then click. The resulting Picture file snips the window or menu neatly from its background. (Press the Space bar a second time to exit "snip one screen element" mode and return to "drag across an area" mode.)

If you hold down the Control key as you click or drag (using any of the techniques described above), you copy the screenshot to your clipboard, ready for pasting, rather than saving it as a new graphics file on your desktop.

Mac OS X also offers another way to create screenshots: a program called Grab, which offers a timer option that lets you set up the screen before it takes the shot. It's in your Applications→Utilities folder.

But if you're really serious about capturing screenshots, you should opt instead for Snapz Pro X (

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Solitaire

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Ah yes, Solitaire: possibly the most overused Windows software in the world.

The Mac doesn't come with a preinstalled copy of Solitaire, but the Web is crawling with free and shareware solitaire games for the Mac. Luckily, there's a quick way to unearth the most popular 20 or so. On the Web, visit www.versiontracker.com (one of most popular sources for freeware and shareware Mac programs). Click the Mac OS X tab if it's not already selected, and then, in the Search box, type solitaire.

When you click Go or press Enter, you'll see a substantial list of solitaire games, ready to download: FreeCell, MacSolitaire, Klondike, and so on.

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Street Atlas USA

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This popular mapping and routing software is also available for the Macintosh, although its features aren't quite as complete as they are in the Windows version.

And if it's Europe you want, it's Route 66 you need (.)

If you're looking for driving directions and maps, don't forget about Google Maps (). It's fast, it's convenient, it works the same on both Mac and Windows, and it's free.

Also, don't forget about the Yellow Pages feature of the Dashboard (page 150). It's ready to print directions and draw maps.

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TaxCut, TurboTax

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TaxCut isn't available for the Mac; TurboTax is. You can even buy state versions of TurboTax for the states that require income tax returns. You can buy them wherever fine Mac programs are sold: www.macmall.com, www.macwarehouse.com, www.macconnection.com, and so on.

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WinAmp, MusicMatch

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When it comes to playing MP3 files, creating MP3 files, burning music CDs, and otherwise organizing your music library, you'd be hard-pressed to beat iTunes, the free Mac OS X program that's already on your Mac (and a free download from www.apple.com/itunes).

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Windows Media Player

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The Macintosh equivalent for Windows Media Player is, of course, QuickTime Player. It handily plays and shows almost any kind of movie, picture, or sound (although you'll want to use iTunes for most music playback).

There are a few entertainment sources that come in the Windows Media format, however, notably Windows Media Video (.wmv) movies that play on Web sites. By itself, QuickTime Player can't play them.

Microsoft actually went to the trouble of creating a Macintosh version of Windows Media Player (never mind the irony of its name). You can download it from www.microsoft.com/mac, but it's officially been abandoned.

The more modern, equally free solution is to download and install Flip4Mac. It's technically a plug-in for QuickTime Player, but you don't need to know that. All you need to know is that once you've installed it, you can suddenly play all those Web videos that you couldn't play before. You can download it from this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.

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WinZip

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In Mac OS X, you create a .zip file by right-clicking any Finder icon and choosing "Compress [the icon's name]" from the shortcut menu. You decompress a .zip file by simply double-clicking its icon in the Finder.

Sometimes, however, you'll encounter compressed files on the Mac that end in .sit. You decompress such files with StuffIt Expander, a free download from www.stuffit.com.

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Word

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See "carview.php?tsp=" in this chapter.

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WordPerfect

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Unfortunately, WordPerfect lost the battle with Microsoft Word on the Mac side pretty much the same way it did on the Windows side. If you're a die-hard WordPerfect fan, your best bet might be to invest in Microsoft Word and capitalize on its keystroke-customizing features to turn it into a living simulation of WordPerfect.

Or, if you'd rather not spend a significant portion of your life's savings on a word processor, use the free Word-importing and -exporting features of TextEdit (page 513).

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Yahoo Messenger

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The equivalent chat program on the Mac is, of course, Yahoo Messenger for Mac OS X. It's a free download from .

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Chapter 8: Windows on Macintosh

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The very moment Apple announced in 2006 that all new Mac models would come with Intel chips inside, the geeks and the bloggers started going nuts. "Let's see," they thought. "Macs and PCs now use exactly the same memory, hard drives, monitors, mice, keyboards, networking protocols, and processors. By our calculations, the Mac should be able to run Windows!"

Now, some in the Cult of Macintosh were revolted by the very idea. Who on earth, they asked, wants to pollute the magnificence of the Mac with a headache like Windows?

Lots of people, as it turns out. Millions of switchers have been tempted by the Mac's sleek looks, yet worried about leaving Windows behind entirely. Then there are the people who love Apple's iLife programs, but have jobs that rely on Microsoft Access, Outlook, or some other piece of Windows corporateware. Even true-blue Mac fans occasionally look longingly at some of the Windows-only games, Web sites, palmtop sync software, or movie download services they thought they'd never be able to use.

Today, there are two ways to run Windows on a Mac with an Intel chip:

• Restart it in Boot Camp. Boot Camp lets you restart your Mac into Windows. At that point, it's a full-blown Windows PC, with no trace of the Mac on the screen. It runs at 100 percent of the speed of a real PC, because it is one. Compatibility with Windows software is excellent. The only drag is that you have to restart the Mac again to return to the familiar world of Mac OS X and all your Mac programs and files.
• Run Windows in a window. For $80 or so, you can buy a program like Parallels or VMWare Fusion, which lets you run Windows in a window.
  You're still running Mac OS X, and all your Mac files and programs are still available. But you've got a parallel universe—Microsoft Windows—running in a window simultaneously.
  Compared with Boot Camp, this virtualization software offers only 90 percent of the speed and 90 percent of the software compatibility. But for thousands of people, the convenience of eliminating all those restarts—and gaining the freedom to copy and paste documents between Mac OS X and Windows programs—makes the Windows-in-a-window solution nearly irresistible.

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Boot Camp

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To set up Boot Camp, you need the proper ingredients:

• An Intel-based Mac. All Mac models introduced in 2006 and later have Intel chips inside.
• A copy of Windows XP or Windows Vista. Windows XP needs Service Pack 2. If you have an earlier copy, you're not totally out of luck, but you'll need a hacky approach, which you can read about online. Let Google be your friend.
  For Windows Vista, you need the Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate Edition. In both cases, an Upgrade disc won't work; you need a full-installation copy. Also, Boot Camp requires the normal 32-bit editions of Windows. The fancy 64-bit versions won't work.
• At least 10 gigs of free hard drive space.

Then you're ready to proceed.

Open your Applications→Utilities folder. Inside, open the program called Boot Camp Assistant.

Phase 1: Partition your drive

On the Introduction screen, you can print the instruction booklet, if you like (although the following pages contain the essential info). There's a lot of good, conservative legalese in that booklet: the importance of backing up your whole Mac before you begin, for example.

When you click Continue, you get the dialog box shown in —the most interesting part of the whole process.

Figure : How much hard drive space do you want to dedicate to your "PC"? It's not an idle question; whatever you give Windows is no longer available for your Mac. Drag the vertical handle between the Mac and Windows sides of this diagram.

You're being asked to partition—subdivide—your hard drive (which can't be partitioned already), setting aside a certain amount of space that will hold your copy of Windows and all the PC software you decide to install. This partitioning process doesn't involve erasing your whole hard drive; all your stuff is perfectly safe.

The dialog box offers handy buttons like Divide Equally and Use 32 Gigs, but it also lets you drag a space-divider handle, as shown in , to divide up your drive space between the Mac and Windows sides.

Here's where things get tricky, though. If you choose an amount less than 32 gigabytes for the Windows partition, the Windows XP installer lets you choose between two Windows drive formats:

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Windows in a Window

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The problem with Boot Camp is that every time you switch to or from Windows, you have to close down everything you were working on and restart the computer. You lose two or three minutes each way. And you can't copy and paste between Mac and Windows programs.

There is another way: an $80 utility called Parallels Workstation for Mac OS X (www.parallels.com), and its $80 rival, VMWare Fusion (www.vmware.com). These programs let you run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously; Windows hangs out in a window of its own, while the Mac is running Mac OS X (). You're getting about 90 percent of Boot Camp's Windows speed—not fast enough for 3-D games, but plenty fast for just about everything else.

Figure : The strangest sight you ever did see: Mac OS X and Windows XP. On the same screen. At the same time. Courtesy of VMWare Fusion. Parallels is very similar.

Once again, you have to supply your own copy of Windows for the installation process. This time, though, it doesn't have to be Windows XP or Vista. It can be any version of Windows, all the way back to Windows 3.1—or even Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, or MS-DOS.

Virtualization software on an Intel Mac is a beautiful thing. You can be working on a design in iWork, duck into a Microsoft Access database (Windows only), look up an address, copy it, and paste it back into the Mac program.

And what if you can't decide whether to use Boot Camp (fast and feature-complete, but requires restarting) or Parallels/Fusion (fast and no restarting, but no 3-D games)? No problem—install both. They coexist beautifully on a single Mac, and can even use the same copy of Windows.

Together, they turn the Intel-based Macintosh into the Uni-Computer: the single machine that can run nearly 100 percent of the world's software catalog.

Mastering Parallels or Fusion means mastering Windows, of course, but it also means mastering these tips:

• You don't have to run Windows in a window. With one keystroke, you can make your Windows simulator cover the entire screen. You're still actually running two operating systems at once, but the whole Mac world is hidden for the moment so you can exploit your full screen. Just choose View→Full Screen.

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Chapter 9: Hardware on the Mac

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Most of the discussion in this book so far has covered software—not only the Mac OS X operating system that may be new to you, but also the programs and documents you'll be using on it. But there's more to life with a computer than software. This chapter covers the finer points of using Macintosh-compatible printers, cameras, disks, monitors, and keyboards—plus a guide to Time Machine, Leopard's automatic backup feature.

Printing has always been one of the Mac's strong suits—and you're about to find out why.

One beauty of Mac OS X is that setting up a printer for the first time is incredibly easy. The first time you want to print something, follow this guide:

1. Connect the printer to the Mac, and then turn the printer on.
   Inkjet printers usually connect to your USB jack. Laser printers generally hook up to your Ethernet connector.
2. Open the document you want to print. Choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, choose your printer's name from the Printer pop-up menu (or one of its submenus, if any).
   Cool! Wasn't that easy? Very nice how the Mac autodiscovers, autoconfigures, and autolists almost any USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, or Bonjour (Rendezvous) printer.
   Have a nice afternoon. The End.
   Oh—unless your printer isn't listed in the Printer pop-up menu. In that case, read on.
3. From the Printer pop-up menu, choose Add Printer (, top).
   A special setup window opens (, bottom), which is even better at autodetecting printers available to your Mac. If you see the printer's name now, in the Printer Browser window, click it, and then click Add (, bottom). You've just designated that printer as the default printer, the one that you'll print on most of the time.
   

   Figure : Top: To introduce your Mac to a new printer, try to print something—and then choose Add Printer from this pop-up menu. Bottom: Your Mac should automatically "see" any printers that are hooked up and turned on. Click the one you want, and then click Add.
   You're all set. Have a good time.
   Unless, of course, your printer still isn't showing up. Proceed to step 4.
4. Click the icon for the kind of printer you have: Windows, Bluetooth, AppleTalk, IP (that is, an Internet printer), or whatever.

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Printers and Printing

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Printing has always been one of the Mac's strong suits—and you're about to find out why.

One beauty of Mac OS X is that setting up a printer for the first time is incredibly easy. The first time you want to print something, follow this guide:

1. Connect the printer to the Mac, and then turn the printer on.
   Inkjet printers usually connect to your USB jack. Laser printers generally hook up to your Ethernet connector.
2. Open the document you want to print. Choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, choose your printer's name from the Printer pop-up menu (or one of its submenus, if any).
   Cool! Wasn't that easy? Very nice how the Mac autodiscovers, autoconfigures, and autolists almost any USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, or Bonjour (Rendezvous) printer.
   Have a nice afternoon. The End.
   Oh—unless your printer isn't listed in the Printer pop-up menu. In that case, read on.
3. From the Printer pop-up menu, choose Add Printer (, top).
   A special setup window opens (, bottom), which is even better at autodetecting printers available to your Mac. If you see the printer's name now, in the Printer Browser window, click it, and then click Add (, bottom). You've just designated that printer as the default printer, the one that you'll print on most of the time.
   

   Figure : Top: To introduce your Mac to a new printer, try to print something—and then choose Add Printer from this pop-up menu. Bottom: Your Mac should automatically "see" any printers that are hooked up and turned on. Click the one you want, and then click Add.
   You're all set. Have a good time.
   Unless, of course, your printer still isn't showing up. Proceed to step 4.
4. Click the icon for the kind of printer you have: Windows, Bluetooth, AppleTalk, IP (that is, an Internet printer), or whatever.
   Choose AppleTalk if you're connected to a laser printer via an Ethernet network cable or AirPort wireless network. Choose Windows if there's a Windows-only printer out there on your office network. And so on.
   After a moment, the names of any printers that are turned on and connected appear in the printer list. For most people, that means only one printer—but one's enough.

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Managing Printouts

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After you've used the Print command, you can either sit there until the paper emerges from the printer, or you can manage the printouts-in-waiting. That option is attractive primarily to people who do a lot of printing, have connections to a lot of printers, or share printers with many other people.

Start by opening the printer's window. If you're already in the process of printing, just click the printer's Dock icon. If not, open →System Preferences→Print & Fax, click the printer's name, and then click Open Print Queue.

At this point, you see something like : The printouts that will soon be sliding out of your printer appear in a tidy list.

Here are some of the ways in which you can control these waiting printouts, which Apple collectively calls the print queue:

• Delete them. By clicking an icon, or -clicking several, and then clicking the Delete toolbar button, you remove items from the list of waiting printouts. Now they don't print.
• Pause them. By highlighting a printout and then clicking the Hold button, you pause that printout. It doesn't print out until you highlight it again and then click the Resume button. (Other documents continue to print.) This pausing business could be useful when, for example, you need time to check or refill the printer, or when you're just about to print your resignation as your boss drops by to offer you a promotion.
• Halt them all. You can stop all printouts from a printer by clicking Pause Printer. (They resume when you click the button again, which now says Resume Printer.)

As you now know, the icon for a printer's queue window appears automatically in the Dock when you print. Unfortunately, it stays in the Dock for the rest of the day; it doesn't disappear when the printing is complete.

If you wish it would, right-click) the printer's Dock icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Auto Quit.t

Figure : Waiting printouts appear in this window. You can sort the list by clicking the column headings (Name or Status), make the columns wider or narrower by dragging the column-heading dividers horizontally, or reverse the sorting order by clicking the column name a second time. The Supply Level button opens a graph that shows how much ink each cartridge has remaining (certain printer models only).

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Faxing

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Using the Mac as a fax machine is a terrific idea, for a lot of reasons. It saves money on paper and fax cartridges, and spares you the expense of buying a physical fax machine. Faxing from the Mac also eliminates the silly and wasteful ritual of printing something out just so you can feed it into a fax machine. And because your fax originates directly from the heart of Mac OS X instead of being scanned by a crummy 200-dpi fax-machine scanner, it blesses your recipient with a great-looking document.

Here's the basic idea: When faxes come in, you can read them on the screen, opt to have them printed automatically, or even have them emailed to you so that you can get them wherever you are in the world. (Try that with a regular fax machine.) And sending a fax is even easier on a Mac than on a regular fax machine: You just use the File→Print command, exactly like you're making a printout of the onscreen document.

Figure : When you click the + button, this handy list of fax modems pops up. Chances are, you have only one—and it's either an old Apple Internal or a USB External model that you bought from Apple. Click its name, and then click Add.

Open System Preferences. Click Print & Fax. Click the + button, and proceed as shown in .

Unfortunately, Apple no longer builds fax modems into new Macs—not even laptops. You can buy an external dangly Apple USB Fax/Modem for $50, however. As soon as it's plugged into a USB port, its name appears in the Printers list.

If you intend to send faxes from the Mac, type in your return fax number in the Fax Number box.

If you're smart, you'll also turn on "Show fax status in menu bar." It installs a fax menulet that lets you monitor and control your fax sending and receiving.

If you intend to receive faxes, click Receive Options, and turn on "Receive faxes on this computer." Then specify how soon the fax machine should pick up the call (after how many rings—you don't want it answering calls before you have a chance).

Finally, you can say how you want to handle incoming faxes, as described in .

Figure : When your Mac answers the fax line, it can do three things with the incoming fax. Option 1: Save it as a PDF file that you open with Preview. (The Mac proposes saving these files into the Users→Shared→Shared Faxes folder, but you can set up a more convenient folder.) Option 2: Print it out automatically, just like a real fax machine. Option 3: Email it to you, so you can get your faxes even when you're not home (and so you can forward the fax easily).

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PDF Files

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As a PC veteran, you've probably run into PDF (portable document format) files already. Many a software manual, Read Me file, and downloadable "white paper" comes in this format. In Windows, you needed the free program called Acrobat Reader to open or print these files, and some not-free-at-all software program to create them.

PDF files, however, are one of Mac OS X's common forms of currency. In fact, you can turn any document (in any program with a Print command) into a PDF file.

What's the big deal about PDF in Mac OS X? Consider these advantages:

• Other people see your layout. When you distribute PDF files to other people, they see precisely the same fonts, colors, page design, and other elements that you put in your original document. And here's the kicker: They get to see all of this even if they don't have the fonts or the software you used to create the document. (Contrast with the alternative. Say you're sending somebody a Microsoft Word document. If your correspondent doesn't have precisely the same fonts you have, then he'll see a screwy layout. And if he doesn't have Word or a program that can open Word files, he'll see nothing at all.)
• It's universal. PDF files are very common in the Macintosh, Windows, Unix/Linux, and even Palm and PocketPC organizer worlds. When you create a PDF file, you can distribute it (by email, for example) without worrying about what kinds of computers your correspondents are using.
• It has very high resolution. PDF files print at the maximum quality of any printer. A PDF file prints great both on cheapo inkjets and on high-quality image-setting gear at professional print shops. (Right now you're looking at a PDF file that was printed at a publishing plant.)
• You can search it. Although you may be tempted to think of a PDF file as something like a captured graphic of the original document, it has several key differences. Behind the scenes, its text is still text; Spotlight can find a PDF in a haystack in a matter of seconds. That's an especially handy feature when you work with electronic software manuals in PDF format.

There's nothing to opening up a PDF file: Just double-click it. Preview takes over from there, and opens the PDF file on your screen.

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Fonts—and Font Book

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Mac OS X delivers type that is all smooth, all the time. Fonts in Mac OS X's formats—called TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType—always look smooth onscreen and in printouts, no matter what the point size.

Mac OS X also comes with a program that's just for installing, removing, inspecting, and organizing fonts. It's called Font Book (), it's in your Applications folder, and it's been much improved in Leopard.

Brace yourself. In Mac OS X, there are three Fonts folders. The fonts you actually see listed in the Fonts menus and Font panels of your programs are combinations of these Fonts folders' contents.

They include:

• Your private fonts (your Home folder→Library→Fonts). This Fonts folder sits right inside your own Home folder. You're free to add your own custom fonts to this folder. Go wild—it's your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who uses the Mac can use these fonts; they'll never even know that you have them.
• Main font collection (Library→Fonts). Any fonts in this folder are available to everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody who shares your Macintosh, however, only people with Administrator accounts can change the contents of this folder.)
• Essential system fonts (System→Library→Fonts). This folder contains the 35 fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes, icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can't do anything with them, such as opening, moving, or adding to them. Remember that, for stability reasons, the System folder is sealed under glass forever.

With the exception of the essential system fonts, you'll find an icon representing each of these locations in your Font Book program, described next.

And just to make life even more exciting, Adobe's and Microsoft' s software installers may donate even more fonts to your cause, in yet another folder: your Home→Application Support folder.

Figure : Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families between the various Fonts folders represented here—from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making it available to all account holders.

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Digital Cameras

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Just like Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X is extremely camera-friendly. The simple act of connecting a digital camera to its USB cable stirs Mac OS X into action—namely, it opens iPhoto, Apple's digital-photo shoebox program.

If it's a digital video camera you plugged in, Mac OS X opens iMovie instead. (Both of these programs are described in this book's free 85-page iLife Appendix, which you can download from this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.)

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Disks

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Floppy drives disappeared from Macs beginning in 1997—and these days, they're absent from most Windows PCs, too.

In the meantime, there are all kinds of other disks you can connect to a Mac these days: CDs and DVDs, hard drives, iPods, USB flash drives, and so on.

When you insert a disk, its icon shows up in three places (unless you've changed your Finder preferences): on the right side of the screen, in the Computer window, and in the Sidebar (page 32). To see what's on a disk you've inserted, double-click its icon.

You can make the Mac work like Windows, if you choose. For example, to open a single window containing icons of all currently inserted disks, choose Go→Computer (which produces the rough equivalent of the My Computer window).

To complete the illusion that you're running Windows, you can even tell Mac OS X not to put disk icons on the desktop at all. Just choose Finder→Preferences, click General, and turn off the four top checkboxes—"Hard disks," "External disks," "CDs, DVDs, and iPods," and "Connected servers." They'll no longer appear on the desktop—only in your Computer window. (You can stop them from appearing in the Sidebar, too, by clicking the Sidebar button in the Finder preferences and turning off the same checkboxes.)

To remove a disk from your Mac, use one of these methods:

When I push the key on my keyboard (or the Eject button on my CD-ROM drawer), how come the CD doesn't come out?

There might be three things going on. First of all, some file on the disc might be open—that is, in use by one of your programs. You're not allowed to eject the disc until that file is closed.

Second, to prevent accidental pushings, the Eject key on the modern Mac keyboard is designed to work only when you hold it down steadily for a second or two. Just tapping it doesn't work.

Third, remember that once you've inserted a disk, the Mac won't let go unless you eject it in one of the official ways.

On Mac models with a CD tray (drawer), pushing the button on the CD-ROM door opens the drawer only when it's empty. If there's a disc in it, you can push that button till doomsday, but the Mac will simply ignore you.

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Burning CDs and DVDs

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Who misses the floppy drive anymore? A blank DVD holds about 3,250 times as many files!

You can buy blank CDs incredibly cheaply in bulk—$20 for 100 discs, for example—via the Web. Blank DVDs are only slightly more expensive—about $30 for 100.

Burning a CD or DVD is great for backing stuff up, transferring stuff to another computer (like a Windows PC), mailing to somebody, or offloading (archiving) older files to free up hard drive space.

You can burn a disc in either of two ways: with the blank disc inserted or without.

The burn folder is a special folder that you fill up by dragging file and folder icons to it. Then, when you're ready to burn, you just insert the blank disc and go.

The burn-folder concept has a lot going for it:

• No wasted hard drive space. The Mac just sets aside aliases of the files and folders you want to burn. Aliases take up negligible hard drive space. When you finally burn the disc, the designated material is copied directly onto the CD or DVD.
• Easy reuse. You can keep a burn folder on your desktop, prestocked with the folders you like to back up. Each time you burn a disc, you get the latest version of those folders' contents, and you're saved the effort of having to gather them each time.
  

  Figure : Top: A burn folder looks like any ordinary folder—except that it has that radioactive logo on it. You can drag files and folders right into its window; Mac OS X displays only aliases for now, but when you burn the disc, the actual files and folders will be there. If you open the burn folder, you find an unusual strip across the top. Its most important feature is the Burn button at the right. Bottom: Ready to proceed, Captain.
• Prepare ahead of time. You can get a CD or DVD ready to burn without having a blank disc on hand.

Here's how you use burn folders:

1. Create a burn folder.
   To make a burn folder appear on your desktop, choose File→New Burn Folder. To create one in any other window, right-click a blank spot inside that window and, from the shortcut menu, choose New Burn Folder.
   Either way, a new folder appears, bearing the universal Mac radioactive "burn" symbol ().

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iTunes: The Digital Jukebox

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As a Windows veteran, you may already be familiar with iTunes. This program, which sits in your Applications folder, is the ultimate software jukebox (). It can play music CDs, tune in to Internet radio stations, load up your iPod music player or iPhone, and play back digital sound files (including the Internet's favorite format, MP3 files) and other popular audio formats. It can also turn selected tracks from your music CDs into MP3 files, so that you can store favorite songs on your hard drive to play back anytime—without having to dig up the original CDs. iTunes also lets you record your own custom audio CDs that contain only the good songs. Finally, of course, iTunes is the shop window for the online iTunes Store ($1 a song).

iTunes can also burn MP3 CDs: music CDs that fit much more than the usual 74 or 80 minutes of music onto a disc (because they store songs in MP3 format instead of AIFF).

The first time you run iTunes, you're asked (a) whether you want iTunes to be the program your Mac uses for playing music files from the Internet, (b) whether you want it to ask your permission every time it connects to the Internet, and (c) whether you want the program to scan your Home folder for all music files already on it. (You can decline to have your hard drive scanned at this time. Later, you can always drag it, or any other folder, directly into the iTunes window for automatic scanning.)

The following pages present a mini-manual on iTunes. For the full scoop, plus coverage of the iPod and the iTunes Store, consult iPod: The Missing Manual.

The iTunes screen itself is set up to be a list—a database—of every song you've got in formats like MP3, AIFF, WAV, AAC, and Apple Lossless. iTunes automatically finds, recognizes, and lists all such files in your Home folder→Music→iTunes→iTunes Music folder.

You can instruct iTunes to display the contents of other folders, too, by choosing File→Add to Library. It promptly copies any sound files from the folder you "show" it into your Home folder→Music→iTunes→iTunes folder.

If you're not into collecting MP3 files, you can also populate the main list here simply by inserting a music CD. The songs on it immediately show up in the list.

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DVD Movies

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Using DVD Player, Mac OS X's built-in DVD-playing software, your Mac can play Hollywood DVDs as though it was born to do so.

Watching movies on your Mac screen couldn't be simpler: Just insert the DVD. The Mac detects that it's a video DVD (as opposed to, say, one that's just filled with files) and, unless you've fiddled with your preference settings, opens the DVD Player program (). (It can take awhile.)

If DVD Player doesn't start up automatically when you insert a DVD movie, you can open it yourself. It's sitting there in your Applications folder. (Then fix the problem, using the CDs & DVDs panel of System Preferences.)

Once DVD Player starts playing your movie, you can use the "remote control," which is deconstructed in . Or just use the keyboard controls:

• By far the easiest way to start and stop Playback is to press the Space bar—once to start, again to pause, again to start again.
  

  Figure : Top: DVDs on your screen! Use your mouse to click the buttons, if you like; that's a lot more direct than having to use the arrow keys on a remote control. Bottom: You can orient this controller either horizontally or vertically on your screen by choosing Controls→Use Vertical Controller. You can also do without this remote control altogether, since all of its buttons have keyboard equivalents.
  Slo Mo Frame Advance Return to Movie
  Subtitles Language Angle
  Previous chapter/Next chapter (Hold to scan backward/forward)
• Press Shift-- to fast-forward; press that combination repeatedly to cycle from twice to 4, 8, 16, or 32 times normal speed. (Or just choose a speed from the Controls→Scan Rate submenu.)
  Similarly, press Shift-- to scan backwards. Click Play (or press the Space bar) to resume normal playback.
• You can make the movie louder or quieter by repeatedly tapping - or -. That's a good keystroke to remember when you've hidden the remote control itself.

Or, if you prefer a clip 'n' save cheat sheet of all the keystrokes, here it is:

Function	Keystroke
Play, Pause	Space bar
Fast-forward	Shift--
Rewind	Shift--
Skip back 5 seconds	Option--
Skip forward 5 seconds	Option-

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Keyboard

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As you know by now, switching to the Mac entails switching your brain, especially when it comes to the old keyboard shortcuts. All of those Ctrl-key sequences become, on the Mac, -key sequences. (Check your Macintosh keyboard: The key is right next to the Space bar, usually on both sides.)

But plenty of other Mac keys may seem unfamiliar. For your reassurance pleasure, page 19 offers a rundown of what they do.

In Windows, you may have grown accustomed to certain common keystrokes for navigating text—key combinations that make the insertion point jump to the beginning or end of a word, line, or document, for example.

Mac OS X programs offer similar navigation keystrokes, as you can see here:

Function	Windows keys	Mac keys
Move to previous/next word	Ctrl+arrow keys	Option-arrow keys
Move to beginning/end of line	Home/End	Home/End
Move to previous/next paragraph	Ctrl+up/down arrows	Option-up/down arrows
Move to top/bottom of window	Home/End	Home/End (but see below)
Select all text	Ctrl+A	-A
Select text, one letter at a time	Shift+arrow keys	Shift-arrow keys
Select text, one word at a time	Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys	Option-Shift-arrow keys
Undo	Ctrl+Z	-Z
Cut, Copy, Paste	Ctrl+X, C, P	-X, C, P
Close window	Alt+F4	-W
Switch open programs	Alt+Tab	-Tab
Hide all windows	+D	F11

Incidentally, the keystroke for jumping to the top or bottom of a window varies widely on the program. You need -Home/End in Microsoft Word, -up/down arrow in TextEdit and Stickies, and Home/End in iPhoto and Finder list windows.

As a consolation prize, though, here's a bit of good news: All Cocoa programs (page 141)—TextEdit, Stickies, iPhoto, iDVD, Safari, Keynote, iChat, iCal, Mail, Address Book, and so on—offer an amazing quantity of consistent, Unix-based navigation keystrokes that should last you the rest of your life. Here they are:

• Control-A. Moves your insertion point to the beginning of the paragraph. (Mnemonic: A = beginning of the alphabet.)
• Control-E. Deposits your insertion point at the end of the paragraph. (Mnemonic: E = End.)
• Control-D. Forward delete. Deletes the letter to the right of the insertion point.
• Control-K.

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Mouse

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Most USB mice work as soon as you plug them into your Mac—even two-button, scroll-wheel mice. Using System Preferences, you can even program your spare mouse buttons to invoke cool features like Exposé and the Dashboard.

That's not to say, however, that you shouldn't install your mouse's driver software. If your mouse came with such software (or if you find it on the manufacturer's Web site), you may well find that your mouse learns a few new tricks—making its "back" and "forward" buttons work properly in Safari, for example. Otherwise, a shareware program like USB Overdrive ($20, from www.usboverdrive.com) can unlock those features.

(For more on Mac mice, see page 13.)

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Monitors

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Your Mac can use standard monitors of the type found in the Windows world. Every Macintosh can drive multiple screens at the same time, too, meaning that you can generally use your old PC screen either as your Mac's main monitor or as a second, external screen.

If one of those arrangements appeals to you, the only complication might be the connector. Most PC screens, of course, have a standard VGA connector (or a more modern DVI connector) at the tip of their tails. Your Mac may or may not have a place to plug in that VGA or DVI cable:

• iMacs, Mac laptops, and the Mac Mini come with a short adapter cable. One end clicks into the Mac; the other end mates with your monitor's VGA cable.
• If you have a Power Mac or Mac Pro, you may have both a proprietary Apple monitor connector and a VGA connector, or you may have at least one DVI connector. (If not, you can always buy a second graphics card.)

It's even possible to connect both your Mac and your PC to the same monitor, and switch from one to the other at will. If this arrangement appeals to you, you'll need a so-called KVM switch (which also lets you switch your keyboard and mouse between your two computers). You can find KVM switches for sale at electronics stores, and online from manufacturers like Belkin (www.belkin.com).

In any case, most recent Mac models let you choose either mirror mode (where both screens show the same thing—a handy setup in classroom situations) or desktop extension mode (where one screen acts as additional real estate, an annex to the first). You specify which mode you want using the Displays pane of System Preferences, or using the Displays menu-bar icon.

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Time Machine

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As the old saying goes, there are two kinds of people: those who have a regular backup system—and those who will.

You'll get that grisly joke immediately if you've ever deleted the wrong folder by accident, made changes that you regret, or worst of all, had your hard drive die. All those photos, all that music you've bought online, all your email—gone.

Yet the odds are overwhelming that at this moment, you do not have a complete, current, automated backup of your Mac. Despite a thousand warnings, articles, and cautionary tales a year, guess how many do? About four percent. Everybody else is flying without a net.

If you don't have much to back up—you don't have much in the way of photos, music, or movies—you can get by with burning copies of stuff onto blank CDs or DVDs. But that method leaves most of your Mac unprotected: all your programs and settings, not to mention Mac OS X itself.

What you really want, of course, is a backup that's rock-solid, complete, and automatic. You don't want to have to remember to do a backup, to insert a tape, to find a cartridge. You just want to know that you're safe.

That's the idea behind Time Machine, a marquee feature of Leopard. It's a silent, set-it-and-forget-it piece of peace of mind. You sleep easy, knowing there's a safety copy of your entire system: your system files, programs, settings, music, pictures, videos, document files—everything.

Yes, Time Machine has a fabulous, gorgeous, sci-fi, space-themed recovery mode, where it looks like you're flying back in time to retrieve files, folders, or disks from the past. With luck, you'll never need it. But if your luck runs out, you'll be so happy you set Time Machine up.

Figure : Top: The Mac has just encountered a second hard drive. Time Machine still works if there's other stuff on the drive, but life is simpler if you don't use that drive for anything but Time Machine. The more space Time Machine has to work with, the farther back in time you'll be able to go to recover deleted or mangled files. Bottom: The backup has begun. You know that because you see both a progress message and the

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.Mac Sync

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If you're paying $100 a year for a .Mac account (page 295), Mac OS X has a real surprise in store. In System Preferences, a humble preference pane called .Mac lets you set up automatic syncing between Macs, using the Internet as a conduit to transfer data tidbits like these:

• Safari Bookmarks. If a Web site is important enough to merit bookmarking while you're using your laptop, why shouldn't it also show up in the Bookmarks menu on your desktop Mac at home?
• Calendars, Contacts. This is a big one. There's nothing as exasperating as realizing that the address book you're consulting on your home Mac is missing somebody you're sure you entered—on your Mac at work. This option keeps all your Macs' Address Books and iCal calendars synchronized. Delete a phone number at work, and you'll find it deleted on your Mac at home, too.
• Dashboard Widgets. Now the configuration and setup of your widgets on Mac A are synced to Macs B, C, and D, so they all match.
• Keychains. In other words, your passwords. All your Macs can have the same passwords memorized. Worth its weight in gold.
• Mail Accounts, Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes. These refer to your account settings and preferences from Mac OS X's Mail programs, not the email messages themselves.
• Notes. This option refers to the notes you enter in the Mail Notes feature (). How great to make a reminder for yourself on one Mac, and to have it reminding you later on another one. (If you have Microsoft Office, you'll see an Entourage Notes option here, too.)
• Preferences. All your System Preferences settings.

To set up .Mac syncing, turn on the checkboxes for the items you want synced, as shown in .

After the first sync, you can turn on the checkboxes on the other Macs, too, in effect telling them to participate in the great data-sharing experiment.

The first time they try, they may get confused. "Hold on. My address book is empty, but the one I'm downloading from the Internet (from the other Mac) is loaded. Who wins?" You get the dialog box shown in , which lets you decide how to proceed.

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Chapter 10: Internet Setup

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Millions of people still connect to the Internet using a modem that dials out over ordinary phone lines. But the balance is rapidly tipping in favor of people connecting over higher-speed wires, using so-called broadband connections that are always on: cable modems, DSL, or corporate networks. This chapter explains how to set up each one (and how to use each with a wireless AirPort system).

In this chapter, you'll be spending a lot of time in the Network pane of System Preferences (). (Choose →System Preferences; click Network.) This list summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office network—Ethernet, AirPort wireless, Bluetooth, FireWire, cellular modem card, and so on—and how each connection is doing.

What you may not realize is that the order of the network connections listed here is important. That's the sequence the Mac uses as it tries to get online. If one of your programs needs Internet access, and the first method isn't hooked up, the Mac switches to the next available connection automatically.

In fact, Mac OS X can maintain multiple simultaneous network connections—Ethernet, AirPort, dial-up, even FireWire—a feature known as multihoming.

This feature is especially relevant for laptops. When you open your Web browser, your laptop might first check to see if it's at the office, plugged into a cable modem via an Ethernet cable, which is the fastest, most secure type of connection. If there's no Ethernet, it looks for an AirPort network. Finally, if it draws a blank there, the laptop reluctantly dials the modem. It may not be the fastest Internet connection, but it's all you've got at the moment.

Here's how to go about setting up the connection attempt sequence you want:

1. Open System Preferences. Click the Network icon.
   The Network Status screen () brings home the point of multihoming: You can have more than one network connection operating at once.
   

   Figure : The network connections listed here are tagged with color-coded dots. A green dot means turned on and connected to a network; yellow means working, but not connected at the moment; red means you haven't yet set up a connection method.

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Network Central—and Multihoming

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In this chapter, you'll be spending a lot of time in the Network pane of System Preferences (). (Choose →System Preferences; click Network.) This list summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office network—Ethernet, AirPort wireless, Bluetooth, FireWire, cellular modem card, and so on—and how each connection is doing.

What you may not realize is that the order of the network connections listed here is important. That's the sequence the Mac uses as it tries to get online. If one of your programs needs Internet access, and the first method isn't hooked up, the Mac switches to the next available connection automatically.

In fact, Mac OS X can maintain multiple simultaneous network connections—Ethernet, AirPort, dial-up, even FireWire—a feature known as multihoming.

This feature is especially relevant for laptops. When you open your Web browser, your laptop might first check to see if it's at the office, plugged into a cable modem via an Ethernet cable, which is the fastest, most secure type of connection. If there's no Ethernet, it looks for an AirPort network. Finally, if it draws a blank there, the laptop reluctantly dials the modem. It may not be the fastest Internet connection, but it's all you've got at the moment.

Here's how to go about setting up the connection attempt sequence you want:

1. Open System Preferences. Click the Network icon.
   The Network Status screen () brings home the point of multihoming: You can have more than one network connection operating at once.
   

   Figure : The network connections listed here are tagged with color-coded dots. A green dot means turned on and connected to a network; yellow means working, but not connected at the moment; red means you haven't yet set up a connection method.
2. From the pop-up menu, choose Set Service Order.
   Now you see the display shown in . It lists all the different ways your Mac knows how to get online, or onto an office network.
3. Drag the items up and down in the list into priority order.
   If you have a wired broadband connection, for example, you might want to drag Built-in Ethernet to the top of the list, since that's almost always the fastest way to get online.

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Broadband Connections

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If your Mac is connected wirelessly or, um, wirefully to a cable modem, DSL, or office network, you're one of the lucky ones. You have a high-speed broadband connection to the Internet that's always available, always on. You never have to wait to dial, disconnect, or download. You're connected to the Net via your Mac's Ethernet jack or AirPort antenna, leaving the dial-up era behind.

The real beauty of most broadband connections these days is that they require no setup whatsoever. Take a new Mac out of the box, plug in the Ethernet cable to your cable modem (or choose a wireless network from the menulet), and you can begin surfing the Web instantly.

That's because most cable modems, DSL boxes, and wireless base stations automatically feed all of the necessary configuration settings to the Mac (including techie specs like IP address and DNS Server addresses), courtesy of a glorious feature called DHCP. This acronym means dynamic host configuration protocol, which is tech-ese for: "We'll fill in your Network pane of System Preferences automatically."

If, for some reason, you're not able to surf the Web or check email the first time you try, it's conceivable that your broadband modem or your office network doesn't offer DHCP. In that case, you may have to fiddle with the Network pane of System Preferences, preferably with a customer-support rep from your broadband provider on the phone.

On the Network pane, click either AirPort or Built-in Ethernet, depending on how your Mac is connected to the broadband modem. Now you see something like .

Figure : Don't be alarmed by the morass of numbers and periods—it's all in good fun. (If you find TCP/IP fun, that is.)

In this illustration, you see the setup for a cable-modem account with a static IP address, which means you have to type in all of these numbers yourself, as guided by the cable company. The alternative is a DHCP server account, which fills most of it in automatically.

The beauty of Ethernet connections is that they're super-fast and super-secure. No bad guys sitting across the coffee shop, armed with shareware "sniffing" software, can intercept your email and chat messages, as they theoretically can when you're on wireless.

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Dial-up Modem Connections

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If you ask Apple, dial-up modems are dead. Macs don't even come with built-in modems anymore. You can get an external USB modem for $50, but clearly, Apple is trying to shove the trusty dial-up technology into the recycling bin.

If you open System Preferences→Network, click AirPort in the left-side list, and then click Advanced, you see the cool new dialog box shown here. It lets you manage the list of Wi-Fi hot spots that Mac OS X has memorized on your travels.

For example, you can delete the old ones. You can also double-click a Wi-Fi net's name to type in and store its password. Finally, you can drag the hot spots' names up and down the list to establish a priority for making connections when more than one is available.

Ordinarily, Mac OS X memorizes the names of the various hot spots that you join on your travels. It's kind of nice, actually, because it means you're interrupted less often by the "Do you want to join?" box.

But if you're alarmed at the massive list of hot spots that Leopard has memorized—for privacy reasons, say—here's where you turn off "Remember any network this computer has joined."

Still, millions of people never got the memo. If you're among them, you need to sign up for Internet service. Hundreds of companies, large and small, would love to become your Internet service provider (ISP), generally charging $20 or so per month for the privilege of connecting you to the great Internet.

Once you've selected a service provider, you plug its settings into the Network pane of System Preferences. You get the necessary information directly from your ISP by consulting either its Web page, the instruction sheets that came with your account, or a help-desk agent on the phone.

The following instructions don't pertain to America Online. It comes with its own setup program and doesn't involve any settings in System Preferences.

Open System Preferences and click Network. If your modem isn't already listed, click the + button at lower left; from the Interface pop-up menu that appears, choose External Modem, and then click Create.

Your modem connection now appears in the list at the left side of the pane. Click it. Now fill in the blanks like this:

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Switching Locations

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If you travel with a laptop, you know the drill. You're constantly opening up System Preferences→Network so that you can switch between Internet settings: Ethernet at the office, Wi-Fi at home. Or maybe you simply visit the branch office from time to time, and you're getting tired of having to change the local access number for your ISP each time you leave home (and return home again).

The simple solution is the →Location submenu, which appears once you have set up more than one Location. As illustrates, all you have to do is tell it where you are. Mac OS X handles the details of switching Internet connections.

Figure : The Location feature lets you switch from one "location" to another just by choosing its name—either from the menu (top) or from this pop-up menu in System Preferences (bottom). The Automatic location just means "the standard, default one you originally set up." (Don't be fooled: Despite its name, Automatic isn't the only location that offers multihoming, described earlier in this chapter.)

To create a Location, which is nothing more than a set of memorized settings, open System Preferences, click Network, and then choose Edit Locations from the Location pop-up menu. Continue as shown in .

You can use the commands in the menu to rename or duplicate a Location.

When you click Done, you return to the Network panel. Take this opportunity to set up the kind of Internet connection you use at the corresponding location, just as described on the first pages of this chapter.

Figure : When you choose Edit Locations, this list of existing Locations appears; click the + button. A new entry appears at the bottom of the list. Type a name for your new location, such as Chicago Office or Dining Room Floor.

Wi-Fi hot spots are fast and usually cheap—but they're hot spots. Beyond 150 feet away, you're offline.

No wonder laptop luggers across America are getting into cellular Internet services. All of the big cellphone companies offer PC cards or ExpressCards that let your laptop get online at high speed anywhere in major cities. No hunting for a coffee shop; with a cellular Internet service, you can check your email while zooming down the road in a taxi. (Outside the metropolitan areas, you can still get online wirelessly, though much more slowly.)

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Internet Sharing

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If you have cable modem or DSL service, you're a very lucky individual. Not only do you benefit from great speed when surfing the Web or processing email, but your connection is on full-time. You never have to wait for some modem to dial (screeching all the way), and wait again for it to disconnect. Too bad only one computer in your household or office can enjoy these luxuries.

Actually, it doesn't have to be that way. You can spread the joy of high-speed Internet to every Mac (and PC) on your network in either of two ways:

• Buy a router. A router is a little box, costing about $50, that connects directly to the cable modem or DSL box. In most cases, it has multiple Internet jacks so you can plug in several Macs, PCs, and/or wireless base stations. As a bonus, a router provides excellent security, serving as a firewall to keep out unsolicited visits from hackers on the Internet. (If you use a router, turn off Mac OS X's own firewall in System Preferences→Security.)
• Use Internet Sharing. Mac OS X's Internet Sharing feature is the software version of a router, in that it distributes a single Internet signal to every computer on the network. But unlike a router, it's free. You just fire it up on the one Mac that's connected directly to the Internet—the gateway computer. (Windows Me, XP, and Vista offer a similar feature.)
  But there's a downside: If the gateway Mac is turned off or asleep, the other machines can't get online.
  Most people use Internet Sharing to share a broadband connection like a cable modem or DSL. But in fact, Internet Sharing works if the gateway Mac connects to the Internet via dial-up modem or even a Bluetooth cellphone.
  The only requirement is that the gateway Mac also has a network connection (Ethernet, AirPort, or FireWire) to the Macs that will share the connection.

To turn on Internet Sharing on the gateway Mac, open the Sharing panel of System Preferences. Turn on Internet Sharing, as shown in , and then confirm your decision by clicking Start. (In most setups, you'll want to turn on Internet Sharing only on the gateway Mac.)

To set up sharing, you have to specify (a) how the gateway Mac is connected to the Internet, and (b) how it's connected to the other Macs on your office network:

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.Mac Services

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In January 2000, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained to the Macworld Expo crowds that he and his team had had a mighty brainstorm: Apple controls both ends of the connection between a Mac and the Apple Web site. As a result, Apple should be able to create some pretty clever Internet-based features as a reward to loyal Mac fans. Later that same day, the Apple Web site offered a suite of free services called iTools.

Then the technology bubble burst.

These days, .Mac (as it's now called) costs $100 a year ().

Figure : The .Mac features appear as buttons on the .Mac Web site. For example, iCards are attractively designed electronic greeting cards that you can send by email. Backup is a basic backup program that you can download from this site. Webmail, HomePage, an antivirus program, and features that synchronize your iCal and iSync data with other computers are the other second-tier features. The best feature, however, is iDisk.

Open System Preferences and click the .Mac icon. Click Learn More. You now go online, where your Web browser has opened up to the .Mac sign-up screen. Fill in your name and address, make up an account name and password, turn off the checkbox that invites you to get junk mail, and so on.

The final step is to return to the .Mac pane of System Preferences. Fill in the account name and password you just composed, if necessary. You're ready to use .Mac.

The iDisk is an Internet-based hard-drive icon on your desktop, holding up to 10 gigabytes of files. (Your .Mac account comes with 10 gigabytes of storage. In your account settings at www.mac.com, you can decide how to divide up that storage between your iDisk and the other .Mac stuff, like mail and your Web sites. And, of course, you can pay more money for more storage.)

Anything you drag into the folders inside this iDisk icon gets copied to Apple's secure servers on the Internet. Meanwhile, on your end, it appears to work just like a hard drive.

In other words, iDisk can be a handy pseudo-hard drive. When you're saving a document from within a program, you can save it directly onto your iDisk. And because this backup disk is offsite, if a fire or thief destroys your office

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Internet Location Files

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An Internet location file () is like a system-wide bookmark: When you double-click one, your Web browser opens to that page, or your email program generates an outgoing message to a predetermined addressee. You could put a folder full of location files for favorite Web sites into the Dock. Do the same with addresses to which you frequently send email. Thereafter, you save a step every time you want to jump to a particular Web page or send email to a particular person—just choose the appropriate name from the Dock folder's Stack. (It's fine to rename them, by the way.)

Figure : To create an Internet location file, drag a highlighted address from a program like TextEdit to your desktop. Although Web and email addresses are the most popular types, you can also create location files for the addresses of newsgroups , FTP sites , AppleShare servers afp://at/Engineering:IL5 3rd Floor, AppleTalk zones at://IL5 2nd Floor, and even Web pages stored on your Mac file://Macintosh HD/Website Stuff/home.html.

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Chapter 11: Mail & Address Book

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You know how every copy of Windows comes with Outlook Express, a basic, free email program? Well, every copy of Mac OS X comes with Mail, a slightly fancier email program that's also free. Mail is a surprisingly complete, refreshingly attractive program, filled with shortcuts and surprises. Together with the high-octane Address Book program included with Mac OS X, you may never pine for your Windows setup again.

This chapter assumes that you've already transferred your email, addresses, and email account settings to Mail and the Address Book, as described in .

You get new mail and send mail you've already written in any of several ways:

• Click Get Mail on the toolbar.
• Choose Mailbox→Get All New Mail (or press Shift--N).
  If you have multiple email accounts, you can also use the Mailbox→Get New Mail submenu to pick just one account to check for new mail.
• Right-click Mail's Dock icon, and choose Get New Mail from the shortcut menu. (You can use this method from within any program, as long as Mail is already open.)
• Wait. Mail comes set to check your email automatically every few minutes. To adjust its timing or turn this feature off, choose Mail→Preferences, click General, and then choose a time interval from the "Check for new mail" pop-up menu.

Now Mail contacts the mail servers listed in the Accounts pane of Mail's preferences, retrieving new messages and downloading any files attached to those messages. It also sends any outgoing messages that couldn't be sent when you wrote them.

The far-left column of the Mail window has a tiny Mail Activity monitor tucked away; click the square icon at the bottom of the Mail window to reveal Mail Activity. If you don't want to give up window real estate, or you prefer to monitor your mail in a separate window, you can do that, too. The Activity Viewer window gives you a Stop button, progress bars, and other useful information. Summon it by choosing Window→Activity Viewer, or by pressing -0.

Also, if you're having trouble connecting to some (or all) of your email accounts, choose Window→Connection Doctor. There, you can see detailed information about which of your accounts aren't responding. If your computer's Internet connection is at fault, you can click Assist Me to try to get back online.

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Checking Your Mail

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You get new mail and send mail you've already written in any of several ways:

• Click Get Mail on the toolbar.
• Choose Mailbox→Get All New Mail (or press Shift--N).
  If you have multiple email accounts, you can also use the Mailbox→Get New Mail submenu to pick just one account to check for new mail.
• Right-click Mail's Dock icon, and choose Get New Mail from the shortcut menu. (You can use this method from within any program, as long as Mail is already open.)
• Wait. Mail comes set to check your email automatically every few minutes. To adjust its timing or turn this feature off, choose Mail→Preferences, click General, and then choose a time interval from the "Check for new mail" pop-up menu.

Now Mail contacts the mail servers listed in the Accounts pane of Mail's preferences, retrieving new messages and downloading any files attached to those messages. It also sends any outgoing messages that couldn't be sent when you wrote them.

The far-left column of the Mail window has a tiny Mail Activity monitor tucked away; click the square icon at the bottom of the Mail window to reveal Mail Activity. If you don't want to give up window real estate, or you prefer to monitor your mail in a separate window, you can do that, too. The Activity Viewer window gives you a Stop button, progress bars, and other useful information. Summon it by choosing Window→Activity Viewer, or by pressing -0.

Also, if you're having trouble connecting to some (or all) of your email accounts, choose Window→Connection Doctor. There, you can see detailed information about which of your accounts aren't responding. If your computer's Internet connection is at fault, you can click Assist Me to try to get back online.

You don't have to be content with the factory-installed design of the Mail screen. You can control almost every aspect of its look and layout.

For example, you can control the main window's information columns exactly as you would in a Finder list view window—make a column narrower or wider by dragging the right edge of its column heading, rearrange the columns by dragging their titles, and so on.

You can also control

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Writing Messages

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To send email to a recipient, click the New icon on the toolbar. The New Message form, shown in , opens. If you've ever sent email from a Windows PC, this should all feel familiar. Here are a few notes:

• To send this message to more than one person, separate their addresses in the "To:" box with commas: bob@earthlink.net, billg@microsoft.com, steve@apple.com.
• Mail offers Auto-complete. If somebody is in your Address Book (page 331), just type the first couple letters of his name or email address; Mail automatically completes the address. (If the first guess is wrong, type another letter or two until Mail revises its proposal.)
• As in most dialog boxes, you can jump from blank to blank (from the "To:" field to the "Cc:" field, for example) by pressing the Tab key.
  

  Figure : A message has two sections: the header, which holds information about the message; and the body, the big empty area that contains the message itself. In addition, the Mail window has a toolbar, which offers features for composing and sending messages. The Signature pop-up menu doesn't exist until you create a signature (page 307); the Account pop-up menu lets you pick which email address you'd like to send the message from (if you have more than one email address).
• A blind carbon copy ("Bcc") lets you send a message to someone on the sly (none of the "To" and "Cc" recipients will know that you sent the message to the "Bcc" recipients). If you're sending a message from a different email address than usual, "Reply-to" lets you specify an email address that your recipient should, well, reply to. And a message's Priority lets you tell your recipients how urgent the message is.
  If you would find these fields helpful while composing a message, click the three-lined pop-up menu on the left side of the New Message window. Click Customize. Now just turn on the checkboxes next to whichever fields you want visible, and click OK.
• There are two main kinds of email: plain text and formatted (what Apple calls Rich Text). Plain text messages are faster to send and open, universally compatible with the world's email programs, and greatly preferred by many veteran computer fans. And even though the message is plain, you can still attach pictures and other files.

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Stationery

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Rich text—and even plain text—messages are fine for your everyday personal and business correspondence. But suppose you have an occasion where you want to jazz up your mail, like an electronic invitation to a bridal shower or a mass-mail update as you get your kicks down Route 66.

These messages just cry out for Mail's new Stationery feature. Stationery means colorful, predesigned mail templates that you make your own by dragging in photos from your own collection. Those fancy fonts and graphics will certainly get people's attention when they open the message.

They will, that is, if their email programs understand HTML formatting. That's the formatting that Mail uses for its stationery. (If the nerd-word HTML rings a bell, it's because this HyperText Markup Language is the same used to make many Web pages so lively and colorful.)

It might be a good idea to make sure everyone on your recipient list has a mail program that can handle HTML; otherwise, your message may look like a jumble of code and letters in the middle of the screen.

To make a stylized message with Mail Stationery:

1. Create a new message.
   Click File→New Message, press -N, or click the New Message button on the Mail window toolbar. The choice is up to you.
2. On the right side of the toolbar on the New Message window, click Show Stationery.
   A panel opens up, showing you all the available templates, in categories like "Birthday" and "Announcements."
3. Click a category, and then click a stationery thumbnail image to apply it to your message.
   The body of your message changes to take on the look of the template.
4. If you like what you see, click the Hide Stationery button on the toolbar to fold up the stationery-picker panel.
   If you don't like the background color, try clicking the thumbnail; some templates offer a few different color choices.
   Apple's canned stationery looks fantastic. The only problem is, the photos that adorn most of the templates are pictures of somebody else's family and friends. Unless you work for Apple's modeling agency, you probably have no clue who they are.
   Fortunately, it's easy enough to replace those placeholder photos with your

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Reading Email

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Mail puts all incoming email into your Inbox; the statistic after the word Inbox lets you know how many messages you haven't yet read. New messages are also marked with light blue dots in the main list.

The Mail icon in the Dock also shows you how many new messages you have waiting; it's the number in the red circle.

Click the Inbox folder to see a list of received messages. If it's a long list, press Control-Page Up and Control-Page Down to scroll. Click the name of a message once to read it in the Preview pane, or double-click a message to open it into a separate window. (If a message is already selected, pressing Return or Enter also opens its separate window.)

Instead of reading your mail, you might prefer to have Mac OS X read it to you, as you sit back in your chair and sip a strawberry daiquiri. Highlight the text you want to hear (or choose Edit→Select All), and then choose Edit→Speech→Start Speaking. You'll hear the message read aloud, in the voice you've selected on the Speech pane of System Preferences.

To stop the insanity, choose Edit→Speech→Stop Speaking.

Once you've viewed a message, you can respond to it, delete it, print it, file it, and so on. The following pages should get you started.

Threading is one of the most useful mail-sorting methods to come along in a long time—and it's available in Mail. When threading is turned on, Mail groups emails with the same subject (like "Raccoons" and "Re: Raccoons") as a single item in the main mail list.

To turn on threading, choose View→Organize by Thread. If several messages have the same subject, they all turn light blue to indicate their membership in a thread ().

Here are some powerful ways to use threading:

Figure : Threads have two parts: a heading (the subject of the thread, listed in dark blue when it's not selected) and members (the individual messages in the thread, listed in light blue and indented). Often, the main list shows only a thread's heading; click the flippy triangle to reveal its members.

• View a list of all the messages in a thread by clicking its heading. In the Preview pane, you see a comprehensive inventory of the thread (). You can click a message's name in this list to jump right to it.

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The Anti-Spam Toolkit

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Spam, the junk that now makes up more than 80 percent of email, is a problem that's only getting worse. Luckily, you, along with Mail's advanced spam filters, can make it better—at least for your email accounts.

You'll see the effects of Mail's spam filter the first time you check your mail: A certain swath of message titles appears in color. These are the messages that Mail considers junk.

Out of the box, Mail doesn't apply its spam-targeting features to people whose addresses are in your address book, to people you've emailed recently, or to messages sent to you by name rather than just by email address. You can adjust these settings in Mail→Preferences→Junk Mail tab.

During your first couple of weeks with Mail, your job is to supervise Mail's coloring job. That is, if you get spam that Mail misses, click the message, and then click the Junk button at the top of its window, or the Junk icon on the toolbar. On the other hand, if Mail flags legitimate mail as spam, slap it gently on the wrist by clicking the Not Junk button. Over time, Mail gets better and better at filtering your mail; it even does surprisingly well against the new breed of image-only spam.

The trouble with this so-called Training mode is that you're still left with the task of trashing the spam yourself, saving you no time whatsoever.

Once Mail has perfected its filtering skills to your satisfaction, though, open Mail's preferences, click Junk Mail, and click "Move it to the Junk mailbox." From now on, Mail automatically files what it deems junk into a Junk mailbox, where it's much easier to scan and delete the messages en masse.

Don't miss the "Trust Junk Mail headers set by your Internet Service Provider" option in the Junk Mail pane of the preference window. If you turn on that checkbox, Mail takes your ISP's word that certain messages are spam, giving you a double layer of spam protection.

The Junk filter goes a long way toward cleaning out the spam from your mail collection—but it doesn't catch everything. If you're overrun by spam, here are some other steps you can take:

• Don't let the spammers know you're there.

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RSS Feeds

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The ability to subscribe to those constantly updating news summaries known as RSS feeds in your Web browser (page 353) has saved a lot of people a lot of time over the years. After all, why waste precious minutes looking for the news when you can make the news find you?

With Mail, you don't even have to waste the seconds switching from your Inbox to your browser or dedicated RSS program to get a fresh dose of headlines. They can appear right in the main Mail window. You don't even have to switch programs to find out which political candidate shot his foot off while it was still in his mouth.

In fact, if you find it too exhausting to click the RSS icon in the Mailboxes list, you can choose instead to have all your RSS updates land right in your Inbox along with all your other messages.

With just a few clicks, you can bring the news of the world right in with the rest of your mail. Choose File→Add RSS Feeds, and then proceed as shown in .

As you turn on the feeds you want to see in Mail, -click to select a bunch of feeds at once.

Figure : In the Add RSS Feeds box, you can click to add sites you've already subscribed to in Safari. If you don't already have the feed bookmarked in Safari, click "Specify a custom feed URL" and paste the feed's address into the resulting box. If you've got a ton of feeds and don't want to wade through them all, use the search box to seek out the specific feed you need.

If you want the RSS headlines to appear in your Inbox like regular email messages, turn on "Show in Inbox." Finally, once you've chosen the feeds you want to see, click Add. Your feeds now appear wherever you told them to go: either the Inbox or the Mailboxes column.

Now, in the RSS category of your Mailboxes list, the names of your RSS feeds show up; the number in the small gray circle tells you how many unread headlines are in the list. If a feed headline intrigues you enough to want more information, click "Read More..." to do just that. Safari pops up and whisks you away to the Web site that sent out the feed in the first place.

After you've read a news item and are done with it, click the Delete button at the top of the window. You can tell Mail to dump all the old articles after a certain amount of time (a day, a week, a month...) in Mail→Preferences→RSS→Remove Articles.

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Notes

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No operating system is complete without Notes. You have to have a place for little reminders, phone numbers, phone messages, Web addresses, brainstorms, shopping-list hints—anything that's worth writing down, but too tiny to justify heaving a whole word processor onto its feet.

The silly thing is how many people create reminders for themselves by sending themselves an email message.

That system works, but it's a bit inelegant. Fortunately, Mac OS X now has a dedicated Notes feature. As a bonus, it syncs automatically to the Notes folder of your iPhone's mail program, or to other computers, as long as you have an IMAP-style email account.

Figure : They may look like little pads of scratch paper, but Mail Notes let you paste in Web addresses and photos alongside your typed and formatted text. If you want to share, click the Send button to have the entire Note plop into a new Mail message, ready to be addressed.

Notes look like actual yellow notepaper with ruled lines, but you can style 'em, save 'em, and even send 'em to your friends. You can type into them, paste into them, and attach pictures to them. And unlike loose scraps of paper or email messages to yourself that may get lost in your mailbox, Notes stay obediently tucked in the Reminders section of the Mailboxes list so you can always find them when you need them.

Ordinarily, Notes also appear in your Inbox, at the top. If you prefer to keep your Inbox strictly for messages, though, you can remove the Notes. Choose Mail→Preferences→Accounts→Mailbox Behaviors, and then turn off "Store notes in Inbox." The Notes will still be waiting for you in the side column, down in the Reminders area.

To create a note, click the Note button on the Mail toolbar. You can also choose File→New Note or press Control--N to pop up a fresh piece of onscreen paper.

Once you have your Note, type your text and click the Fonts and Colors buttons at the top of the window to style it. To insert a picture, click the Attach button, and then find the photo or graphic on your Mac you want to use. shows an example.

You can also attach other kinds of files to a Note—ordinary documents, for example. But you can't send such Notes to other people—only Notes with pictures.

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To Dos

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You've got all this mail piling up with all sorts of things to remember: dinner dates, meeting times, project deadlines, car-service appointments. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to remember to look through your mailbox to find out what you're supposed to be doing that day?

It would, and it is, thanks to Mail's To Do feature (). And the best part is that Mail accesses the same To Do list as iCal. The same task list shows up in both programs.

You can use To Dos in several different ways. For example, when you get an email message that requires further action ("I need the photos for the condo association newsletter by Friday"), highlight the important part of the text. Then do any of these things:

• Click To Do in the message window's toolbar.
  

  Figure : Top: If a message brings a task that you need to complete, you can give yourself an extra little reminder, right in Mail. Highlight the pertinent text and click the To Do button to add a large, colorful reminder to the top of the message. Bottom: Click the arrow next to the first line of the To Do for a quick and easy way to set a due date/time and alarm, and also choose which calendar you want to use for this particular chore.
• Choose File→New To Do.
• Press Option--Y.
• Right-click the highlighted text, and then choose New To Do from the shortcut menu.

In each case, Mail pops a copy of the selected text into a yellow strip of note-style paper at the top of the message, as shown in .

That task is also listed in the Reminders area of the Mailboxes list. If you need to see all the tasks that await you from all your mail accounts, click the flippy triangle to have it spin open and reveal your chores. The number in the gray circle indicates how many To Do items you still need to do.

Right-click any item in this To Do list to open a shortcut menu that offers useful controls for setting its due date, priority, and calendar(that is, iCal category).

When you click the To Do area of the Mailboxes list, all your tasks are listed in the center of the Mail window. Click the gray arrow after each To Do subject line to jump back to the original message it came from.

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Address Book

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Address Book is Mac OS X's little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life (). Address Book can also hold related information, like birthdays, anniversaries, and any other tidbits of personal data you'd like to keep at your fingertips.

Figure : The big question: Why isn't this program named iContact? With its three-paned view, soft rounded corners, and gradient-gray background, it looks like a close cousin of iPhoto, iCal, and iTunes.

Once you make Address Book the central repository of all your personal contact information, you can call up this information in a number of convenient ways:

• You can launch Address Book and search for a contact by typing just a few letters in the Search box.
• Regardless of what program you're in, you can use a single keystroke (F12 is the factory setting, or F4 on aluminum keyboards) to summon the Address Book Dashboard widget (page 150). There, you can search for any contact you want, and hide the widget with the same quick keystroke when you're done.
• When you're composing messages in Mail, Address Book automatically fills in email addresses for you when you type the first few letters.
  If you choose Window→Address Panel (Option--A) from within Mail, you can browse all of your addresses without even launching the Address Book program. Once you've selected the people you want to contact, just click the "To:" button to address an email to them—or, if you already have a new email message open, to add them to the recipients.
• When you use iChat to exchange instant messages with people in your Address Book, the pictures you've stored of them automatically appear in chat windows.
• If you've bought a subscription to the .Mac service (page 295), you can synchronize your contacts to the Web, so you can see them while you're away from your Mac (page 275). You can also share Address Books with fellow .Mac members: Choose Address Book→Preferences→Sharing, click the box for "Share your address book," and then click the + button to add the .Mac pals you want to share with. You can even send them an invitation to come share your contact list. If you get an invitation yourself, open your own Address Book program and choose Edit→Subscribe to Address Book.

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Chapter 12: Safari & iChat

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Apple is obviously intrigued by the possibilities of the Internet. With each new release of Mac OS X, more clever tendrils reach out from the Mac to the world's biggest network.

But Apple's most obvious Internet-friendly creation is Safari, a smartly designed window to the Web (available for both Mac OS X and, believe it or not, Windows). This chapter is all about Safari—the compass icon in the Dock points the way to your Internet adventure—and iChat, the unsung superstar of the chat-and-conferencing universe.

Hey! Where the heck do I specify what browser I want to open when, say, I click a link in an email message?

This is going to sound a little odd. But to indicate that you want some other browser (like Firefox) to be your favorite, you start by opening Safari. Choose Safari→Preferences, click the General tab, and choose from the Default Web Browser pop-up menu.

You change email programs using the same twisted logic: You open Mail, and then open its Preferences.

If you'd rather set your default Web browser and email program (and RSS reader, and so on) from System Preferences, try RCDefaultApp, a free System Preference panel that's about 50 times more powerful than the old Internet panel ever was. (You can download it from the "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.)

If you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself.

At least that must be what Apple was thinking when it wrote its own Web browser a few years ago, which so annoyed Microsoft that it promptly ceased all further work on the Mac version of its own Internet Explorer.

Safari is beautiful, very fast, and filled with delicious features. It's not, however, Internet Explorer, and so some Web sites—certain banking sites, for example—refuse to acknowledge its existence. In these situations, you might try the Mac version of Firefox, a free browser available at www.getfirefox.com.

To move your Web bookmarks over from Windows to the Mac, see page 167. Then, when you're ready to get going, read on.

You probably know the drill when it comes to Web browsers. When you click an underlined link

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Safari

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If you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself.

At least that must be what Apple was thinking when it wrote its own Web browser a few years ago, which so annoyed Microsoft that it promptly ceased all further work on the Mac version of its own Internet Explorer.

Safari is beautiful, very fast, and filled with delicious features. It's not, however, Internet Explorer, and so some Web sites—certain banking sites, for example—refuse to acknowledge its existence. In these situations, you might try the Mac version of Firefox, a free browser available at www.getfirefox.com.

To move your Web bookmarks over from Windows to the Mac, see page 167. Then, when you're ready to get going, read on.

You probably know the drill when it comes to Web browsers. When you click an underlined link (hyperlink) or a picture button, you're transported from one Web page to another. One page may be the home page of General Motors; another may contain critical information about a bill in Congress; another might have baby pictures posted by a parent in Omaha. Altogether, several billion Web pages await your visit.

Figure : The Safari window offers tools and features that let you navigate the Web almost effortlessly. These various toolbars and buttons are described in this chapter. One difference that may throw you if you're used to other browsers: When you're loading a Web page, the progress bar appears as a colored stripe that gradually darkens the address bar itself, rather than as a strip at the bottom of the window.

Bookmarks bar

Address bar

Title bar

Form

RSS button

Google search

Text link

Graphic link

Text links aren't always blue and underlined. In fact, trendy Web designers sometimes make it very difficult to tell which text is clickable, and which is just text. When in doubt, move your cursor over some text; if the arrow changes to a pointing-finger cursor, you've found yourself a link.

Some of the other Safari tips that may not be obvious:

• Graphics worth saving. When you see a picture you'd like to keep, right-click it and choose Save Image to Downloads from the shortcut menu. Safari stores it as a new graphics file in Leopard's Downloads folder on your hard drive. (You can specify where Safari saves downloaded pictures on the Safari→Preferences→General tab. In that case, the shortcut menu's wording changes to say, for example, "Save Image to 'Pictures.'")

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Tips for Better Surfing

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Safari is filled with shortcuts and tricks for better speed and more pleasant surfing. For example:

The little orange SnapBack button (), which sometimes appears at the right end of the address bar or Google search bar, takes you instantly back to the Web page whose address you last typed (or whose bookmark you last clicked), or to your first Google results page.

The point here is that, after burrowing from one link to another in pursuit of some Google result or Amazon listing, you can return to your starting point without having to mash the Back button over and over again. (The SnapBack button doesn't appear until you've actually clicked away from the first page you visited.)

At any time, you can designate your current page as the new SnapBack page. To do so, choose History→Mark Page for SnapBack (Option--K).

And you can snap back from the keyboard, too: Option--P.

The world's smarmiest advertisers inundate us with pop-up and pop-under ads—nasty little windows that appear in front of the browser window or, worse, behind it, waiting to jump out the moment you close your current window. They're often deceptive, masquerading as error messages or dialog boxes, and they'll do absolutely anything to get you to click inside them.

If this kind of thing is driving you crazy, choose Safari→Block Pop-Up Windows, so that a checkmark appears next to the command. It's a war out there—but at least you now have some ammunition.

This feature doesn't squelch small windows that pop up when you click a link—only windows that appear unbidden.

Even unbidden windows, however, are sometimes legitimate (and not ads)—notices of new banking features, warnings that the instructions to use a site have changed, and so on. Safari can't tell these from ads and stifles them too. So if a site you trust says "Please turn off pop-up blockers and reload this page," you know you're probably missing out on a useful pop-up message.

Sooner or later, you'll run into a Web site that doesn't work in Safari. Why? When you arrive at a Web site, your browser identifies itself. That's because many commercial Web sites display a different version of the page depending on the browser you're using, thanks to differences in the way various browsers interpret Web layouts.

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Tabbed Browsing

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Beloved by hardcore surfers the world over, tabbed browsing is a way to keep a bunch of Web pages open simultaneously—in a single, neat window. illustrates.

Turning on tabbed browsing unlocks a whole raft of Safari shortcuts and tricks, which are just the sort of thing power surfers gulp down like Gatorade:

• If there's a certain set of Web sites you like to visit daily, put the bookmarks into one folder, using Bookmarks→Add Bookmark Folder and the Bookmarks organizer window (). You can then load all of them at once into a single tabbed window, simply by selecting the resulting "folder" in the Bookmarks menu—or the Bookmarks bar—and choosing Open in Tabs from the submenu.
  The beauty of this arrangement is that you can start reading the first Web page while all of the others load into their own tabs in the background.
  Click the icon at the left end of the Bookmarks bar. In the Bookmarks organizer, click the Bookmarks Bar item in the left-side list. Now you can see an Auto-Click checkbox for each listed folder.

  If you turn on this checkmark, then you'll be able to open all the bookmarks in that folder into tabs, all at once, merely by clicking the folder's name in the Bookmarks bar. (If you want to summon the normal menu from the folder, just hold the mouse button down.)
  

  Figure : Top: First turn on tabbed browsing in Safari's Preferences→Tabs window. (For best results, also turn on "Select new tabs as they are created.") Bottom: Now, when you -click a link, or type an address and press -Return or -Enter, you open a new tab, not a new window as you ordinarily would. You can now pop from one open page to another by clicking the tabs just under your Bookmarks bar, or close one by clicking its button (or pressing -W).
• A variation on a theme: When you have a bunch of pages open in tabs, you can drag the tabs across the window to rearrange the order. When you have them the way you want them, right-click a tab, and then choose "Add Bookmark for These [Number] Tabs" from the shortcut menu. You can save your saved tabs to the Bookmarks bar and load all those pages with one click.

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iChat

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Somewhere between email and the telephone lies a unique communication tool called instant messaging. Plenty of instant messenger programs run on the Mac, but guess what? You don't really need any of them. Mac OS X comes with its very own instant messenger program called iChat, built right into the system and ready to connect to your friends on the AIM, Jabber, or GoogleTalk networks.

To start up iChat, go to Applications→iChat, or just click iChat's Dock icon. It looks like a blue speech balloon with a camcorder inside, which is a clue to one of iChat's best and most substantially beefed-up Leopard features: live video chats over the Internet.

iChat lets you reach out to chat partners on three different networks:

• The AIM network. If you've signed up for a .Mac address (the paid kind or the free kind described below) or a free AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account, you can chat with anyone in the 150-million-member AOL Instant Messenger network.
• The Jabber network. Jabber is another chat network, whose key virtue is its open-source origins. In other words, it wasn't masterminded by some corporate media behemoth; it's an all-volunteer effort, joined by thousands of programmers all over the world. There's no one Jabber chat program (like AOL Instant Messenger). There are dozens, available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, Palm and PocketPC organizers, and so on. All of them can chat with each other across the Internet in one glorious frenzy of typing.
  And now there's one more program that can join the party: iChat.
• Google Talk. Evidently, Google felt that there just weren't enough different chat programs, because it released its own chat program in 2005.
  Behind the scenes, it uses the Jabber network, so Google Talk doesn't really count as a different network. But it does mean that you can use iChat to converse with all those Google Talkers, too.
• Your own local network. Thanks to the Bonjour network-recognition technology, you can communicate with other Macs on your own office network without signing up for anything at all—and without being online. This is a terrific feature when you're sitting around a conference table, idly chatting with colleagues using your wireless laptop (and the boss thinks you're taking notes).

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Text Chats

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A typed chat works like this: Each time you or your chat partner types something and then presses Enter, the text appears on both your screens. iChat displays each typed comment next to an icon, which can be any of these three things:

• A picture they added. If the buddy added her own picture—to her own copy of iChat, a Jabber program, or AOL Instant Messenger—it will be transmitted to you, appearing automatically in the chat window. Cool!
• A picture you added. If you've added a picture of that person to the Buddy List or Address Book, you see it here instead. (After all, your vision of what somebody looks like may not match his own self-image.)
• Generic. If nobody's done icon-dragging of any sort, you get a generic icon—either a blue globe (for .Mac people), a light bulb (for Google Talkers), or the AOL Instant Messenger running man (for AIM people).

To choose a graphic to use as your own icon, click the square picture to the right of your own name at the top of the Buddy, Jabber, or Bonjour list. From the pop-up palette of recently selected pictures, choose Edit Picture to open a pop-up image-selection palette, where you can take a snapshot with your Mac's camera or choose a photo file from your hard drive. Feel free to build an array of different graphics to represent yourself—and to change them in mid-chat, using this pop-up palette, to the delight or confusion of your conversation partner.

When you minimize the iChat message window, its Dock icon displays the icon of the person you're chatting with—a handy reminder that she's still there.

Typing isn't the only thing you can do during a chat. You can also perform any of these stunts:

• Format your text. You can press -B or -I to make your next typed utterance bold or italic. Or change your color or font by choosing Format→Show Colors or Format→Show Fonts, which summons the standard Mac OS X color or font palettes. (If you use some weird font that your chat partners don't have installed, they won't see the same typeface.)
• Insert a smiley. When you choose a face (like Undecided, Angry, or Frown) from this quick-access menu of smiley options (at the right end of the text-reply box), iChat inserts it as a graphic into your response.

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Audio Chats

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iChat becomes much more exciting when you exploit its AV Club capabilities. Even over a dial-up modem connection, you can conduct audio chats, speaking into your microphone and listening to the responses from your speaker.

If you have a broadband connection, though, you get a much more satisfying experience—and, if you have a pretty fast Mac, up to 10 of you can join in one massive, free conference call from across the Internet.

A telephone icon next to a name in your buddy list tells you that the buddy has a microphone, and is ready for a free Internet "phone call." If you see what appear to be stacked phone icons, then your pal's Mac has enough horsepower to handle a multiple-person conference call. (You can see these icons back in .)

To begin an audio chat, take your pick:

• Click the telephone icon next to the buddy's name, or
• Highlight someone in the Buddy List, and then click the telephone icon at the bottom of the list, or
• If you're already in a text chat, choose Buddies→Invite to Audio Chat.

Once your invitation is accepted, you can begin speaking to each other. The bars of the sound-level meter let you know that the microphone—which you've specified in the iChat→Preferences→Audio/Video tab—is working.

Although the audio is full-duplex (you can hear and speak simultaneously, like a phone but unlike a walkie-talkie), there may be a delay, like you're calling overseas on a bad connection. If you can't hear anything at all, check out iChat's Help system, which contains a long list of suggestions.

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Video Chats

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If you and your partner both have broadband Internet connections, even more impressive feats await. You can conduct a free video chat with up to four people, who show up on three vertical panels, gorgeously reflected on a shiny black table surface. This isn't the jerky, out-of-audio-sync, Triscuit-sized video of Windows videoconferencing. If you've got the Mac muscle and bandwidth, your partners are as crisp, clear, bright and smooth as television—and as big as your screen, if you like.

People can come and go; as they enter and leave the "videosphere," iChat slides their glistening screens aside, enlarging or shrinking them as necessary to fit on your screen.

If you see a camcorder icon next to a buddy's name, you can have a full-screen, high-quality video chat with that person, because they, like you, have a suitable camera and a high-speed Internet connection. If you see a stacked camcorder icon, then that person has a G5 or a faster Mac that's capable of joining a four-way video chat.

To begin a video chat, click the camera icon next to a buddy's name, or highlight someone in the Buddy List and then click the camcorder icon at the bottom of the list. Or, if you're already in a text chat, choose Buddies→Invite to Video Chat.

A window opens, showing you. This Preview mode is intended to show what your buddy will see. (You'll probably discover that you need some kind of light in front of you to avoid being too shadowy.) As your buddies join you, they appear in their own windows ().

And now, some video-chat notes:

• If your conversation partners seem unwilling to make eye contact, it's not because they're shifty. They're just looking at you, on the screen, rather than at the camera—and chances are you aren't looking into your camera, either.
• Don't miss the Video→Full Screen command! Wild.
• You can have video chats with Windows computers, too, as long as they're using a recent version of AOL Instant Messenger. Be prepared for disappointment, though; the video is generally jerky, small, and slightly out of sync. That's partly due to the cheap USB Webcams most PCs have, and partly due to the poor video

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Sharing Your Screen

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As you've seen already in this chapter, iChat lets you share your thoughts, your voice, and your image with the people on your buddy lists. And now, for its next trick, it lets you share...your computer.

Figure : Top: You either send or receive an invitation to start sharing your screen, but make sure you know with whom you're dealing before accepting the offer and starting the sharing process. Bottom: When you're sharing someone else's screen, you have the option to click back and forth between the two Mac screens.

Your computer

Desktop of person you're sharing with

iChat's screen sharing feature is a close relative of the network screen-sharing feature described in . It lets you not only see what's on a far-away buddy's screen, but control it, taking command of the distant mouse and keyboard. (Of course, screen sharing can work the other way, too.)

You can open folders, create and edit documents, and copy files on the shared Mac screen. Sharing a screen makes collaborating as easy as working side by side around the same Mac, except now you can be sitting in San Francisco while your buddy is banging it out in Boston.

And if you're the family tech-support specialist—but the family lives all over the country—screen sharing makes troubleshooting a heckuva lot easier. You can now jump on your Mom's shared Mac and figure out why the formatting went wacky in her Word document, without her having to attempt explaining it to you over the phone. ("And then the little thingie disappeared and the doohickey got scrambled...")

Of course, in these days of Big Scary Internet Security Issues, you want to make sure the person you share your screen with is someone you trust completely, because he or she is going to have the same access to your Mac as you do. Needless to say, do not accept screen-sharing invitations from people you don't know. Also, be leery of people on your Bonjour list asking you to share your screen, because Bonjour identities can be easily faked.

To make iChat screen sharing work, you and your buddy must both be running Macs with Leopard. On the other hand, you can share over any account type: AIM, .Mac, Google Talk, Bonjour, or Jabber.

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iChat Theater

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Talk about the next best thing to being there. The new iChat Theater feature lets you make pitches and presentations to people and committees in faraway cities—without standing in a single airport-security line.

That's because iChat Theater turns the chat window into a presentation screen for displaying and narrating your own iPhoto or Keynote slideshows, QuickTime movie files, and even text documents. Your buddy, on the other end of the iChat line, sees these documents at nearly full size—with you in a little picture-in-picture screen in the corner.

Figure : Top: You can start an iChat Theater session by choosing File→Share a File with iChat Theater, or as shown here, by simply dropping the file on an open video chat window and going for the iChat Theater option. Bottom: Once you've started a Theater show in Chat, the shared file takes center stage so you both can look at it and discuss amongst yourselves.

All you need is a fast Mac, fast Internet connection, and some stuff to show off; iChat Theater can display exactly the same kinds of files that Quick Look () can display: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, photos, text and HTML files, PDF files, audio and movie files, fonts, vCards, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and TextEdit documents, and so on.

To get the show running, you can take one of two approaches.

• If a video chat is under way, you can just drag the file(s) you want to share into the video window. iChat asks if you want to send the file to the person or share it with iChat Theater (, top). Click iChat Theater, of course.
• If no video chat is in progress, choose File→Share a File in iChat Theater. Locate the file that you want to present on your hard drive. When iChat asks you to start a video chat with the buddy who's going to be your audience, click the video-camera icon next to that person's name (or choose Video→Invite to Video Chat).

When your friend accepts, the curtain goes up, as shown the bottom of . The file you're sharing takes center stage (er, window) and your buddy appears in a little video window off to the side. Click the

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Chapter 13: Accounts, Parental Controls, & Security

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In an era when security is the hottest high-tech buzzword, Apple was smart to make security a focal point for Leopard. Mac OS X was already virus-free and better protected from Internet attacks than Windows. But Mac OS X 10.5 is the most impenetrable Mac system yet, filled with new defenses against the dark arts.

On the premise that the biggest security threat of all comes from other people in your home or office, though, the most important security feature in Mac OS X is the accounts system.

The concept of user accounts is central to Mac OS X's security approach. Like the Unix under its skin (and also like Windows XP and Vista), Mac OS X is designed from the ground up to be a multiple-user operating system. You can configure a Mac OS X machine so that everyone must log in—that is, you have to click or type your name and type in a password—when the computer turns on ().

Upon doing so, you discover the Macintosh universe just as you left it, including your documents, files, and folders; your preference settings (Web browser bookmarks, desktop picture, screen saver, icons on the desktop and in the Dock, and so on); email account(s), including personal information and mailboxes; your personally installed programs and fonts; your choice of programs that launch automatically at startup; and so on.

This system means that several different people can use it throughout the day, without disrupting each other's files and settings. It also protects the Mac from getting fouled up by mischievous (or bumbling) students, employees, and hackers.

If you're the only person who uses your Mac, you can safely skip most of this chapter. The Mac never pauses at startup time to demand the name and password you made up when you installed Mac OS X, because Apple's installer automatically turns on something called automatic login (page 396). You will be using one of these accounts, though, whether you realize it or not.

Furthermore, when you're stuck in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, you may find the concepts presented here worth skimming, as certain elements of this multiple-user system may intrude upon your solo activities—and figure in the discussions in this book—from time to time.

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Introducing Accounts

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The concept of user accounts is central to Mac OS X's security approach. Like the Unix under its skin (and also like Windows XP and Vista), Mac OS X is designed from the ground up to be a multiple-user operating system. You can configure a Mac OS X machine so that everyone must log in—that is, you have to click or type your name and type in a password—when the computer turns on ().

Upon doing so, you discover the Macintosh universe just as you left it, including your documents, files, and folders; your preference settings (Web browser bookmarks, desktop picture, screen saver, icons on the desktop and in the Dock, and so on); email account(s), including personal information and mailboxes; your personally installed programs and fonts; your choice of programs that launch automatically at startup; and so on.

This system means that several different people can use it throughout the day, without disrupting each other's files and settings. It also protects the Mac from getting fouled up by mischievous (or bumbling) students, employees, and hackers.

If you're the only person who uses your Mac, you can safely skip most of this chapter. The Mac never pauses at startup time to demand the name and password you made up when you installed Mac OS X, because Apple's installer automatically turns on something called automatic login (page 396). You will be using one of these accounts, though, whether you realize it or not.

Furthermore, when you're stuck in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, you may find the concepts presented here worth skimming, as certain elements of this multiple-user system may intrude upon your solo activities—and figure in the discussions in this book—from time to time.

Even if you don't share your Mac with anyone and don't create any other accounts, you might still be tempted to learn about the accounts feature because of its ability to password-protect the entire computer. All you have to do is to turn off the automatic login feature described in . Thereafter, your Mac is protected from unauthorized fiddling when you're away from your desk or when your laptop is stolen.

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Creating an Account

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Suppose somebody new joins your little Mac family—a new worker, student, or love interest, for example. And you want to make them feel at home on your Mac.

Begin by opening System Preferences (). In the System Preferences window, click Accounts. You have just arrived at the master control center for account creation and management ().

To create a new account, start by unlocking the Accounts panel. That is, click the at lower-left, and fill in your own account name and password.

Now you can click the + button beneath the list of accounts. The little panel shown at bottom in appears.

As though this business of accounts and passwords isn't complicated enough already, Mac OS X 10.5 offers several types of accounts. When you create an account, you're expected to specify which type that person gets.

To do that, open the New Account pop-up menu (, bottom). Its five account types are described on the following pages.

Administrator accounts

If this is your own personal Mac, just beneath your name on the Accounts pane of System Preferences, it probably says Admin. This, as you could probably guess, stands for Administrator.

Because you're the person who originally installed Mac OS X, the Mac assumes that you are its administrator—the technical wizard in charge of it. You're the teacher, the parent, the resident guru. You're the one who will maintain this Mac. Only an administrator is allowed to:

• Install new programs into the Applications folder.
• Add fonts that everybody can use.
  

  Figure : Top: The screen lists everyone who has an account. From here, you can create new accounts or change passwords. If you're new at this, there's probably just one account listed here: yours. This is the account that Mac OS X created when you first installed it. You, the all-wise administrator, have to click the to authenticate yourself before you can start making changes. Bottom: In the revamped Leopard account-creation process, the first step is choosing which type of account you want to create.
• Make changes to certain System Preferences panes (including Network, Date & Time, Energy Saver, and Startup Disk).

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Parental Controls

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If you're setting up a Standard or Guest account, the Parental Controls checkbox affords you the opportunity to shield your Mac—or its very young, very fearful, or very mischievous operator—from confusion and harm. This is a helpful feature to remember when you're setting up accounts for students, young children, or easily intimidated adults.

You can specify how many hours a day each person is allowed to use the Mac, and declare certain hours (like sleeping hours) off-limits. You can specify exactly who your kids are allowed to communicate with via email (if they use Mail) and instant messaging (if they use iChat), what Web sites they can visit (if they use Safari), what programs they're allowed to use, and even what words they can look up in the Mac OS X Dictionary.

Here are all the ways you can keep your little Standard account holders shielded from the Internet—and themselves. For sanity's sake, the following discussion refers to the Standard account holder as "your child." But some of these controls—notably those in the System category—are equally useful for people of any age who feel overwhelmed by the Mac, are inclined to mess it up by not knowing what they're doing, or are tempted to mess it up deliberately.

If you use any of these options, the account type listed on the Accounts panel changes from "Standard" to "Managed."

On this tab, you see the options shown in . Use these options to limit what your Managed-account flock is allowed to do. You can limit them to using certain programs, for example, or prevent them from burning DVDs, changing settings, or fiddling with your printer setups.

(Limiting what people can do to your Mac when you're not looking is a handy feature under any shared-computer circumstance. But if there's one word tattooed on its forehead, it would be "Classrooms!")

On the panel that pops up when you click Configure, you have two options: "Use Simple Finder" and "Only allow selected applications."

Figure : In the Parental Controls window, you can control the capabilities of any account holder on your Mac. In the lower half of the System tab window, you can choose applications and even Dashboard widgets by turning on the boxes next to their names. (Expand the flippy triangles if necessary.) Those are the only programs these account holders will be allowed to use. (The new Search box helps you find certain programs without knowing their categories.)

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Editing Accounts

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If you're an administrator, you can change your own account in any way you like.

If you have any other kind of account, though, you can't change anything but your picture and password. If you want to make any other changes, you have to ask an admin to log in, make the changes you want made to your account, and then turn the computer back over to you.

Hey, it happens: Somebody graduates, somebody gets fired, somebody dumps you. Sooner or later, you may need to delete an account from your Mac.

When that time comes, click the account name in the Accounts list and then click the minus-sign button beneath the list. Mac OS X asks what to do with all of the dearly departed's files and settings:

• Save the home folder in a disk image. This option presents the "I'll be back" approach. Mac OS X preserves the dearly departed's folders on the Mac, in a tidy digital envelope that won't clutter your hard drive, and can be reopened in case of emergency.
  In the Users→Deleted Users folder, you find a disk image file (.dmg). If you double-click it, a new, virtual disk icon named for the deleted account appears on your desktop. You can open folders and root through the stuff in this "disk," just as if it were a living, working Home folder.
  If fate ever brings that person back into your life, you can use this disk image to reinstate the deleted person's account. Start by creating a brand-new account. Then copy the contents of the folders in the mounted disk image (Documents, Pictures, Desktop, and so on) into the corresponding folders of the new Home folder.
• Do not change the home folder. This time, Mac OS X removes the account, in that it no longer appears in the Login list or in the Accounts panel of System Preferences—but it leaves the Home folder right where it is. Use this option if you don't intend to dispose of the dearly departed's belongings right here and now.
• Delete the home folder. This button offers the "Hasta la vista, baby" approach. The account and all of its files and settings are vaporized forever, on the spot.

If you delete a Shared Only account, you're not offered the chance to preserve the Home folder contents—because a Shared Only account doesn't

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Setting Up the Login Process

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Once you've set up more than one account, the dialog box shown in appears whenever you turn on the Mac, whenever you choose →Log Out, or whenever the Mac logs you out automatically. But a few extra controls let you, an administrator, set up either more or less security at the login screen—or, put another way, build in less or more convenience.

Open System Preferences, click Accounts, and then click the Login Options button (). Here are some of the ways you can shape the login experience for greater security (or greater convenience):

• Automatic login. This option eliminates the need to sign in at all. It's a timesaving, hassle-free arrangement if only one person uses the Mac, or if one person uses it most of the time.
  When you choose an account holder's name from this pop-up menu, you're prompted for his name and password. Type it and click OK.
  From now on, the dialog box shown in won't appear at all at startup time. After turning on the machine, you, the specified account holder, zoom straight to your desktop.
  

  Figure : These options make it easier or harder for people to sign in, offering various degrees of security. By the way: Turning on "Name and password" also lets you sign in as >console, a troubleshooting technique for people who are comfortable typing Unix commands.
  Of course, only one lucky person can enjoy this express ticket. Everybody else must still enter their names and passwords. (And how can they, since the Mac rushes right into the Automatic person's account at startup time? Answer: The Automatic thing happens only at startup time. The usual login screen appears whenever the current account holder logs out—by choosing →Log Out, for example.)
• Display login window as. Under normal circumstances, the login screen presents a list of account holders when you power up the Mac, as shown in . That's the "List of users" option in action.
  If you're especially worried about security, however, you might not even want that list to appear. If you turn on "Name and password," each person who signs in must type both his name (into a blank that appears)

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Signing In, Logging Out

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Once somebody has set up your account, here's what it's like getting into, and out of, a Mac OS X machine. (For the purposes of this discussion, "you" are no longer the administrator—you're one of the students, employees, or family members for whom an account has been set up.)

When you first turn on the Mac—or when the person who last used this computer chooses →Log Out—the login screen shown in appears. At this point, you can proceed in any of several ways:

• Restart. Click if you need to restart the Mac for some reason. (The Restart and Shut Down buttons don't appear here if the administrator has chosen to hide them as a security precaution.)
• Shut Down. Click if you're done for the day, or if sudden panic about the complexity of user accounts makes you want to run away. The computer turns off.
• Log In. To sign in, click your account name in the list. If you're a keyboard speed freak, you can also type the first letter or two—or press the up or down arrow keys—until your name is highlighted. Then press Return or Enter.
  Either way, the password box appears now (if a password is required). If you accidentally click the wrong person's name on the first screen, you can click Back. Otherwise, type your password, and then press Enter (or click Log In).
  You can try as many times as you want to type the password. With each incorrect guess, the entire dialog box shudders violently from side to side, as though shaking its head "No." If you try unsuccessfully three times, your hint appears—if you've set one up. (If you see a strange icon in the password box, guess what? You've got your Caps Lock key on, and the Mac thinks you're typing an all-capitals password.)

Once you're in, the world of the Mac looks just the way you left it (or the way an administrator set it up for you).

When you're finished using the Mac, choose →Log Out (or press Shift--Q). A confirmation message appears; if you click Cancel or press Esc, you return to whatever you were doing. If you click Log Out, or press Return, you return to the screen shown in Figure , and the entire sign-in cycle begins again.

If you press Option as you choose

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Sharing Across Accounts

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It's all fine to say that every account is segregated from all other accounts. It's nice to know that your stuff is safe from the prying eyes of your co-workers or family.

But what about collaboration? What if you want to give some files or folders to another account holder?

You can't just open up someone else's Home folder and drop it in there. Yes, every account holder has a Home folder (all in the Users folder on your hard drive). But if you try to open anybody else's Home folder, you'll see a tiny red icon superimposed on almost every folder inside, telling you "Look, but don't touch."

Fortunately, there are a couple of wormholes between accounts ():

Figure : Top: In other people's Home folders, the Public and Sites folders are available for your inspection. These two folders contain stuff that other people have "published" for the benefit of their co-workers. Middle: In the Public folder is the Drop Box, which serves the opposite purpose. It lets anyone else who uses this Mac hand in files to you; they, however, can't see what's in it. Bottom: Inside the Users folder (to get there from a Home folder, press -up arrow) is the Shared folder, a wormhole connecting all accounts. Everybody has full access to everything inside.

• The Shared folder. Sitting in the Users folder is one folder that doesn't correspond to any particular person: Shared. Everybody can freely access this folder, inserting and extracting files without restriction. It's the common ground among all the account holders on a single Mac. It's Central Park, the farmer's market, and the grocery-store bulletin board.
• The Public folder. In your Home folder, there's a folder called Public. Anything you copy into it becomes available for inspection or copying (but not changing or deleting) by any other account holder, whether they log into your Mac or sign in from across the network.
• The Drop Box. And inside your Public folder is another cool little folder: the Drop Box. It exists to let other people give files to you, discreetly and invisibly to anyone else. That is, people can drop files and folders into your Drop Box, but they can't actually

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Fast User Switching

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The account system described so far in this chapter has its charms. It keeps everyone's stuff separate, it keeps your files safe, and it lets you have the desktop picture of your choice.

Unfortunately, it can go from handy to hassle in one split second. That's when you're logged in, and somebody else wants to duck in just for a second—to check email or a calendar, for example. What are you supposed to do—log out completely, closing all your documents and quitting all your programs, just so the interloper can look something up? Then afterward, you'd have to log back in and fire up all your stuff again, praying that your inspirational muse hasn't fled in the meantime.

Fortunately, that's all over now. Fast User Switching—which works just as it does in Windows—lets Person B log in and use the Mac for a little while. All of your stuff, Person A, simply slides into the background, still open the way you had it; see .

When Person B is finished working, you can bring your whole work environment back to the screen without having to reopen anything. All your windows and programs are still open, just as you left them.

To turn on this feature, open the Accounts panel of System Preferences (and click the , if necessary, to unlock the panel). Click Login Options, and turn on "Enable fast user switching." (You can see this dialog box in .)

The only change you notice immediately is the appearance of your own account name in the upper-right corner of the screen (, top). You can change what this menu looks like by using the "View as" pop-up menu, also shown in .

That's all there is to it. Next time you need a fellow account holder to relinquish control so that you can duck in to do a little work, just choose your name from the Accounts menu. Type your password, if one is required, and feel guiltless about the interruption.

Figure : Top: The appearance of the Accounts menu lets you know that Fast User Switching is turned on. The circled checkmark indicates people who are already logged in, including those who have been "fast user switched" into the background. The dimmed name shows who's logged in right now. Bottom: When the screen changes from your account to somebody else's, your entire world slides visibly offscreen as though it's mounted on the side of a rotating cube—a spectacular animation made possible by Mac OS X's Quartz Extreme graphics software.

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Four Mac OS X Security Shields

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Mac OS X has a spectacular reputation for stability and security. At this writing, not a single Mac OS X virus has emerged—a spectacular feature that may even have played a part in your decision to go Macward. There's no Windows-esque plague of spyware, either (downloaded programs that do something sneaky behind your back). In fact, there isn't any Mac spyware.

The usual rap is, "Well, that's because Windows is a much bigger target. What virus writer is going to waste his time on a computer with eight percent market share?"

That may be part of the reason Mac OS X is virus-free. But Mac OS X has also been built more intelligently from the ground up. Listed below are a few of the many drafty corners of a typical operating system that Apple has solidly plugged:

• The original Windows XP came with five of its ports open. Mac OS X has always come from the factory with all of them shut and locked.
  Ports are channels that remote computers use to connect to services on your computer: one for instant messaging, one for Windows XP's remote-control feature, and so on. It's fine to have them open if you're expecting visitors. But if you've got an open port that exposes the soft underbelly of your computer without your knowledge, you're in for a world of hurt. Open ports are precisely what permitted viruses like Blaster to infiltrate millions of PCs. Microsoft didn't close those ports until the Windows XP Service Pack 2.
• Whenever a program tried to install itself in the original Windows XP, the operating system went ahead and installed it, potentially without your awareness.
  In Mac OS X, that never happens. You're notified at every juncture when anything is trying to install itself on your Mac. In fact, you're even notified when you're opening a disk image or .zip file that could contain an installable program ().
• Unlike certain other operating systems, Mac OS X doesn't even let an administrator touch the files that drive the operating system itself without pestering you to provide your password and grant it permission to do so. A Mac OS X virus (if there were such a thing) could theoretically wipe out all of your files, but wouldn't be able to access anyone else's stuff—and couldn't touch the operating system itself.

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Chapter 14: Networking, File Sharing, & Screen Sharing

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Just about every Mac ever built is network-ready. Buy a couple of components, and you can connect all the computers in your office together, with or without wires. The process of rigging the hardware and software for a network is somewhat more technical than, say, emptying the Trash, but it's not exactly rocket science.

Once you've got a network, you can copy files from one machine to another—even between Windows PCs and Macs—just as you'd drag files between folders on your own Mac. You can send little messages to each other's screens. Everyone on the network can consult the same database or calendar. You can play games over the network. You can share a single printer, cable modem, or fax modem among all the Macs in the office. You can connect to this network from wherever you are in the world, using the Internet as the world's longest extension cord back to your office.

And in Mac OS X 10.5, you can even do screen sharing, which means that you, the wise computer whiz, can see what's on the screen of your pathetic, floundering relative or buddy elsewhere on the network. You can even seize control of the other Mac's mouse and keyboard. You can troubleshoot, fiddle with settings, and so on. It's the next best thing to being there—and often a lot better than being there.

This chapter concerns itself with local networking—setting up a network in your home or small office. But don't miss its sibling, , which is about hooking up to the somewhat larger network called the Internet.

Most people connect their computers using one of two connection systems: Ethernet or Wi-Fi (which Apple calls AirPort).

Almost every Mac, PC, and network-ready laser printer has an Ethernet jack on the back or side panel (see ). If you connect all of the computers and Ethernet printers in your small office to a central Ethernet hub or router—a compact, inexpensive box with jacks for 5, 10, or even more computers and printers—you've got yourself a very fast, very reliable network. (Most people wind up hiding the hub in a closet, and running the wiring either along the edges of the room or inside the walls.) You can buy Ethernet cables, plus the hub, at any computer store or, less expensively, from an Internet-based mail-order house. (Hubs aren't Mac-specific.)

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Wiring the Network

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Most people connect their computers using one of two connection systems: Ethernet or Wi-Fi (which Apple calls AirPort).

Almost every Mac, PC, and network-ready laser printer has an Ethernet jack on the back or side panel (see ). If you connect all of the computers and Ethernet printers in your small office to a central Ethernet hub or router—a compact, inexpensive box with jacks for 5, 10, or even more computers and printers—you've got yourself a very fast, very reliable network. (Most people wind up hiding the hub in a closet, and running the wiring either along the edges of the room or inside the walls.) You can buy Ethernet cables, plus the hub, at any computer store or, less expensively, from an Internet-based mail-order house. (Hubs aren't Mac-specific.)

Ethernet is the best networking system for many offices. It's fast, easy, and cheap.

Wi-Fi, known to the geeks as 802.11 and to Apple fans as AirPort, means wireless networking. It's the technology that lets laptops the world over get online at high speed in any Wi-Fi "hot spot." Hot spots are everywhere these days: in homes, offices, coffee shops (notably Starbucks), hotels, airports, and thousands of other places.

At www.jiwire.com, you can type in an address or a city and learn exactly where to find the closest Wi-Fi hot spots.

Figure : An Ethernet jack (left) looks like an overweight telephone jack. It connects to an Ethernet router or hub (right) via an Ethernet cable (also known as Cat 5 or Cat 6), which ends in what looks like an overweight telephone-wire plug (also known as an RJ-45 connector).

Ethernet jack

Ethernet hub

When you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot, your Mac has a very fast connection to the Internet, as though it's connected to a cable modem or DSL.

AirPort circuitry comes preinstalled every Mac laptop, iMac, and Mac Mini, and you can order it built into a new Mac Pro.

This circuitry lets your machine connect to your network and the Internet without any wires at all. You just have to be within about 150 feet of a base station or (in Windows terminology) access point, which must in turn be physically connected to your network and Internet connection.

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File Sharing

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When you're done wiring (or not wiring, as the case may be), your network is ready. Your Mac should "see" any Ethernet or shared USB printers, in readiness to print (). You can now play network games or use a network calendar. And you can now turn on File Sharing, one of the most useful features of the Mac OS.

In File Sharing, you can summon the icon for a folder or disk attached to another computer on the network, whether it's a Mac or a Windows PC. It shows up in a Finder window, as shown in .

At this point, you can drag files back and forth, exactly as though the other computer's folder or disk is a hard drive connected to your own machine.

In a pinch, you can connect two Macs without any real network at all. You can create an Ethernet connection without a hub or a router—or an AirPort connection without a Wi-Fi base station.

To set up the wired connection, just run a standard Ethernet cable between the Ethernet jacks of the two Macs. (You don't need to use an Ethernet crossover cable, as you did in days of old.)

To set up a wireless connection, from your menulet, choose Create Network. Make up a name for your little private network, and then click OK. On the second Mac, choose →Join Network, enter the same private network name, and click Join.

At this point, your two Macs belong to the same ad hoc micro-network. But that doesn't mean that you've started accessing their files yet.

To do that, in the Finder on one of the Macs, choose Go→Connect to Server. The Network window opens, showing the icons for all the computers on the local network. Double-click the one you want, enter the account password, if necessary, and you're in.

The thing is, it's not easy being Apple. You have to write one operating system that's supposed to please everyone, from the self-employed first-time computer owner to the network administrator for NASA. You have to design a networking system simple enough for the laptop owner who just wants to copy things to a desktop Mac when returning from a trip, yet secure and flexible enough for the network designer at a large corporation.

Clearly, different people have different attitudes toward the need for security and flexibility.

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Accessing Shared Files

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So far in this chapter, you've read about setting up a Mac so that people at other computers can access its files.

Now comes the payoff: sitting at another computer and connecting to the one you set up. There are two ways to go about it.

Suppose, then, that you're seated in front of your Mac, and you want to see the files on another Mac on the network. Proceed like this:

1. Open any Finder window.
   In the Shared category of the Sidebar at the left side of the window, icons for all the computers on the network appear. See .
   The same Sidebar items show up in the Save and Open dialog boxes of your programs, too, making the entire network available to you for opening and saving files.
   

   Figure : Macs often appear in the Sidebar with model-specific names (MacBook, iMac, and so on). Other computers (like PCs) have generic blue monitors. When you click All in the Sidebar, you see both the icons of individual computers and the icons of network chunks (like AppleTalk zones and Windows workgroups).
   If you don't see a certain Mac's icon here, it might be turned off, it might not be on the network, or it might have File Sharing turned off.
   If there are more than six icons in the Sidebar, or if you're on a corporate-style network that has sub-chunks like nodes or workgroups, you also see an icon called All. Click it to see the full list of network entities that your Mac can see: not just individual Mac, Windows, and Unix machines, but also any "network neighborhoods" (limbs of your network tree). For example, you may see the names of AppleTalk zones (clusters of machines, as found in big companies and universities).
   Or, if you're trying to tap into a Windows machine, open the icon representing the workgroup (computer cluster) that contains the machine you want. In small office networks, it's usually called MSHOME or WORKGROUP. In big corporations, these workgroups can be called almost anything—as long as it's no more than 12 letters long with no punctuation. (Thanks, Microsoft.)
   If you do see icons for workgroups or other network "zones," double-click your way until you're seeing the icons for individual computers.

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Networking with Windows

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Mac OS X represents a historic moment in Mac-Windows relations: It lets Macs and Windows PCs see each other on the network, with no special software (or talent) required.

In fact, you can go in either direction. Your Mac can see shared folders on the Windows PCs, and a Windows PC can see shared folders on your Mac. Since a huge number of Mac "switchers" are actually Mac "adders" (meaning that you're keeping the old PC around), you might find these features especially useful.

It goes like this:

Suppose you have a Windows PC and a Mac on the same wired or wireless network. Here's how you get the Mac and PC chatting:

1. On your Windows PC, share some files.
   Just as on the Mac, there are two ways to share files in Windows. One of them is super-simple: You just copy the files you want to share into a central, fully accessible folder. No passwords, accounts, or other steps are required.
   In Windows XP, that folder is Shared Documents, which you can find by choosing Start→My Computer. Share it on the network as shown in , top.
   In Windows Vista, it's the Public folder, which appears in the Navigation pane of every Explorer window. (In Vista, there's one Public folder for the whole computer, not one per account holder.)
   The second, more complicated method is the "share any folder" method, just as in Leopard. In general, you right-click the folder you want to share, choose Properties from the shortcut menu, click the Sharing tab, and turn on "Share this folder on the network" (, top). Repeat for any other folders you want to make available to your Mac.
   If you expect that you might want to access a shared disk or folder again later, take a moment to make an alias of it. (For example, right-click it and choose Make Alias from the shortcut menu.)

   Next time, you can bring it back to your screen later just by double-clicking the alias. And if you turned on "Remember this password in my keychain," you won't even be asked for your name and password again.

   Similarly, if you drag a shared folder into the Dock, you can bring it back to your screen later just by clicking its icon.

   You can even drag its icon into the Login Items window described in . Now the disk appears on your desktop

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Screen Sharing

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The prayers of baffled beginners and exasperated experts everywhere have now been answered. Now, when the novice needs help from the guru, the guru doesn't have to run all the way downstairs or down the hall to assist. Thanks to the new screen-sharing feature of Leopard, you can see exactly what's on the screen of another Mac, from across the network—and even seize control of the other Mac's mouse and keyboard (with the newbie's permission, of course).

If your Mac's icon doesn't show up on the PC at all, or vice versa, it's probably because the Mac doesn't know anything about Windows workgroups. And even a lowly home PC is part of a workgroup (a corporate cluster), whether it knows it or not. And until your Mac is part of that very tiny club, it won't be able to see your PCs, and they won't be able to see it.

So if you're having no luck with this whole Mac-PC thing, try this. Open System Preferences. Click Network. Click whatever connection you're on right now (like AirPort or Ethernet). Click Advanced. Click WINS.

Now you see the peculiar set of controls shown here. The Workgroup pop-up menu already lists the workgroups that your Mac sees. Choose "workgroup" from the pop-up menu. Click OK, and then click Apply.

And marvel as your Windows PCs' names show up in the Sidebar, where they didn't before.

(Of course, your workgroup name might not be "workgroup," but that and mshome are the two most common Windows home-network workgroup names.)

(Anyone who's ever tried to help someone troubleshoot over the phone knows exactly what this means.)

Nor is playing Bail-Out-the-Newbie the only situation when screen sharing is useful. It's also great for collaborating on a document, showing something to someone for approval, or just freaking each other out. It can also be handy when you are the owner of both Macs (a laptop and a desktop, for example), and you want to run a program that you don't have on the Mac that's in front of you. You might want to adjust the playlist selection on the upstairs Mac that's connected to your sound system, for example. Or maybe you just want to keep an eye on what your kids are doing on the Macs upstairs in their rooms.

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Chapter 15: System Preferences

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The hub of Mac customization is System Preferences, the equivalent of the Control Panel in Windows. Some of its panels are extremely important, because their settings determine whether or not you can connect to a network or go online to exchange email. Others handle the more cosmetic aspects of customizing Mac OS X.

This chapter guides you through the entire System Preferences program, panel by panel.

Only a system administrator (page 379) can change settings that affect everyone who shares a certain machine: its Internet settings, Energy Saver settings, and so on. If you see a bunch of controls that are dimmed and unavailable, now you know why.

A tiny in the lower-left corner of a panel is the other telltale sign. If you, a nonadministrator, would like to edit some settings, call an administrator over to your Mac and ask him to click the lock, input his password, and supervise your tweaks.

You can open System Preferences by choosing its name from the menu, clicking its "light-switch" icon in the Dock, or double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. At first, the rows of icons are grouped according to function: Personal, Hardware, and so on (, top).

But you can also view them in tidy alphabetical order, as shown at bottom in . That can spare you the ritual of hunting through various rows just to find a certain panel icon whose name you already know. (Quick, without looking: Which row is Date & Time in?) This chapter describes the various panels following this alphabetical arrangement.

Figure : You can view your System Preferences icons alphabetically (top), rather than in rows of arbitrary categories (bottom); just choose View→Organize Alphabetically. This approach not only saves space, but also makes finding a certain panel much easier, because you don't need to worry about which category it's in.

Either way, when you click one of the icons, the corresponding controls appear in the main System Preferences window. To access a different preference pane, you have a number of options:

• Fast: When System Preferences first opens, the insertion point is blinking in the new System Preferences search box. (If the insertion point is

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The System Preferences Window

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You can open System Preferences by choosing its name from the menu, clicking its "light-switch" icon in the Dock, or double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. At first, the rows of icons are grouped according to function: Personal, Hardware, and so on (, top).

But you can also view them in tidy alphabetical order, as shown at bottom in . That can spare you the ritual of hunting through various rows just to find a certain panel icon whose name you already know. (Quick, without looking: Which row is Date & Time in?) This chapter describes the various panels following this alphabetical arrangement.

Figure : You can view your System Preferences icons alphabetically (top), rather than in rows of arbitrary categories (bottom); just choose View→Organize Alphabetically. This approach not only saves space, but also makes finding a certain panel much easier, because you don't need to worry about which category it's in.

Either way, when you click one of the icons, the corresponding controls appear in the main System Preferences window. To access a different preference pane, you have a number of options:

• Fast: When System Preferences first opens, the insertion point is blinking in the new System Preferences search box. (If the insertion point is not blinking there, press -F.) Type a few letters of volume, resolution, wallpaper, wireless, or whatever feature you want to adjust. In a literal illustration of Spotlight's power, the System Preferences window darkens except for the icons where you'll find relevant controls (). Click the name or icon of the one that looks most promising.
• Fast: Click the Show All icon in the upper-left corner of the window (or press -L, a shortcut worth learning). Then click the icon of the new panel you want.
• Faster: Choose any panel's name from the View menu—or, if System Preferences is already open, from the System Preferences Dock icon.
  

  Figure : Even if you don't know what System Preferences panel contains the settings you want to change, Spotlight can help. Type into the box at the top, and watch as the "spotlight" shines on the relevant icons. At that point, you can either click the icon, click the name in the pop-up menu, or arrow down the menu and press Enter to choose. (Apple removed the System Preferences toolbar, but it hopes that this Spotlight business is just as useful.)

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.Mac

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This panel is of no value unless you've signed up for a .Mac account (page 295). It offers four tabs:

• Account. This is where you fill in your member name and password for your .Mac account, if you've subscribed.
• Sync. Here's where you tell Leopard which elements of your digital world—calendar, address book, email, and so on—you want synchronized, via the .Mac service, among your various Macs.
• iDisk. The Disk Space graph indicates how full your electronic iDisk is.
• Back to My Mac. This new Leopard feature of .Mac does just what the description here says: It lets you, on the road with your laptop (for example), connect to your Mac back home—to retrieve a file you left behind, for example. Details are in .

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Accounts

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This is the master list of people who are allowed to log into your Mac. It's where you can adjust their passwords, startup pictures, self-opening startup items, permissions to use various features of the Mac, and other security tools. All of this is described in .

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Appearance

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This panel is mostly about how things look on the screen: windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, and fonts. Nothing you find here lets you perform any radical surgery on the overall Mac OS X look—but you can tweak certain settings to match your personal style.

Two pop-up menus let you crank up or tone down Mac OS X's overall colorfulness:

• Appearance. Choose between Blue or Graphite. Blue refers to Mac OS X's factory setting—bright, candy-colored scroll-bar handles, progress bars, menu, and pulsing OK buttons—and those shiny red, yellow, and green buttons in the corner of every window. If you, like some graphics professionals, find all this circus-poster coloring a bit distracting, then choose Graphite, which renders all those interface elements in various shades of gray.
• Highlight color. When you drag your cursor across text, its background changes color to indicate that you've selected it. Exactly what color the background becomes is up to you—just choose the shade you want using the pop-up menu. The Highlight color also affects such subtleties as the lines on the inside of a window as you drag an icon into it.

If you choose Other, the Color Picker palette appears, from which you can choose any color your Mac is capable of displaying (page 148).

These radio buttons control the scroll-bar arrow buttons of all your windows. You can keep these arrows together at one end of the scroll bar, or you can split them up so that the "up" arrow sits at the top of the scroll bar, and the "down" arrow is at the bottom—a much more Windows-like arrangement. (Horizontal scroll bars are similarly affected.)

For details on the "Jump to the next page" and "Scroll to here" options, see page 440.

You can also turn on these checkboxes:

• Use smooth scrolling. This option affects only one tiny situation: when you click (or hold the cursor down) inside the empty area of the scroll bar (not on the handle, and not on the arrow buttons). And it makes only one tiny change: Instead of jumping abruptly from screen to screen, the window lurches with slight accelerations and decelerations, so that the paragraph you're eyeing never jumps suddenly out of view.

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Bluetooth

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This panel, radically redesigned for Leopard, shows up only if your Mac is equipped with a Bluetooth transmitter, either built-in or in the form of an external USB gadget.

Bluetooth is a short-range, low-power, wireless cable-elimination technology. It's designed to connect gadgets in pairings that make sense, like cellphone+earpiece, wireless keyboard+Mac, Palm organizer+Mac, or Mac+cellphone (to connect to the Internet or to transmit files).

Now, you wouldn't want the guy in the next cubicle to be able to operate your Mac using his Bluetooth keyboard. So the first step in any Bluetooth relationship is pairing, where you formally introduce the two gadgets that will be communicating. Here's how that goes:

Figure : Top: This System Preferences panel reveals a list of every Bluetooth gadget your Mac knows about. Click a Bluetooth device to see details. Middle: The Bluetooth Setup Assistant scans the area for Bluetooth gadgets, and, after a moment, lists them. Click one, and then click Continue. Bottom: Where security is an issue, the Assistant offers you the chance to pair your Bluetooth device with the Mac. To prove that you're really the owner of both the laptop and the phone, the Mac displays a one-time password, which you have 30 seconds to type into the phone. Once that's done, you're free to use the phone's Internet connection without any further muss, fuss, or passwords.

1. Open System Preferences→Bluetooth.
   Make sure Bluetooth Power is turned on. (The only reason to turn it off is to save laptop battery power.) Also make sure Discoverable is turned on; that makes the Mac "visible" to other Bluetooth gadgets in range.
2. Click the + button below the list at left.
   The Bluetooth Setup Assistant opens, offering a list of typical Bluetooth equipment that your Mac can talk to: Mobile Phone, Headset, Printer, etc.
3. Click the kind of gear you have, and then click Continue.
   The Mac whirs for a moment, and then displays the names of all Bluetooth gadgets that it can sniff out. Usually, it finds the one you're trying to pair.
4. Click the name of the phone/headset/keyboard/whatever, and then click Continue.

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CDs & DVDs

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This handy pane () lets you tell the Mac what it should do when it detects you've inserted a CD or DVD. For example, when you insert a music CD, you probably want iTunes () to open automatically so you can listen to the CD or convert its musical contents to MP3 or AAC files on your hard drive. Similarly, when you insert a picture CD (such as a Kodak Photo CD), you probably want iPhoto to open in readiness to import the pictures from the CD into your photo collection.

Figure : You can tell the Mac exactly which program to launch when you insert each kind of disc, or tell it to do nothing at all.

And when you insert a DVD from Blockbuster, you want the Mac's DVD Player program to open.

For each kind of disc (blank CD, blank DVD, music CD, picture CD, or video DVD), the pop-up menu lets you choose options like these:

• Ask what to do. A dialog box appears that asks what you want to do with the newly inserted disc.
• Open (iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, DVD Player...). The Mac can open a certain program automatically when you insert the disc. When the day comes that somebody writes a better music player than iTunes, or a better digital shoebox than iPhoto, you can use the "Open other application" option.
• Run script. If you've become handy writing or downloading AppleScript programs (), you can schedule one of your own scripts to take over from here. For example, you can set things up so that inserting a blank CD automatically copies your Home folder onto it for backup purposes.
• Ignore. The Mac won't do anything when you insert a disc except display its icon on the desktop. (If it's a blank disc, the Mac does nothing at all.)

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Date & Time

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Your Mac's conception of what time it is can be very important. Every file you create or save is stamped with this time, and every email you send or receive is marked with this time. As you might expect, setting your Mac's clock is what the Date & Time pane is all about.

Click the Date & Time tab. If your Mac is online, turn on "Set date & time automatically," and be done with it. Your Mac sets its own clock by consulting a highly accurate scientific clock on the Internet. (No need to worry about Daylight Saving Time, either; the time servers take that into account.)

If you have a full-time Internet connection (cable modem or DSL, for example), you may as well leave this checkbox turned on, so your Mac's clock is always correct. If you connect to the Internet by modem, however, turn off the checkbox, so your Mac won't keep trying to dial spontaneously at all hours of the night.

If you're not online and have no prospect of getting there, you can also set the date and time manually. To change the month, day, or year, you can click the digit that needs changing and then either (a) type a new number or (b) click the little arrow buttons. Press the Tab key to highlight the next number. (You can also specify the day of the month by clicking a date on the minicalendar.)

To set the time of day, use the same technique—or, for more geeky fun, you can set the time by dragging the hour, minute, or second hands on the analog clock. Finally, click Save. (If you get carried away with dragging the clock hands around and lose track of the real time, click the Revert button to restore the panel settings.)

If you're frustrated that the Mac is showing you the 24-hour "military time" on your menu bar (that is, 17:30 instead of 5:30 p.m.)—or that it isn't showing military time when you'd like it to—click the Clock tab and turn "Use a 24-hour clock" on or off.

Note, however, that this affects only the menu bar clock. If you'd like to reformat the menu bar clock and all other dates (like the ones that show when your files were modified in list views), click the Open International button at the bottom of the Date & Time pane. Once there, click the Formats tab. There you'll see a Customize button for Times, which leads you to a whole new world of time-format customization. You can drag elements of the current time (Hour, Minute, Second, Millisecond, and so on) into any order you like, and separate them with any desired punctuation.

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Desktop & Screen Saver

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This panel offers two ways to show off Mac OS X's glamorous graphics features: desktop pictures and screen savers.

Figure : Using the list of picture sources at left, you can preview an entire folder of your own images before installing one specific image as your new desktop picture. Use the Choose Folder option to select a folder of assorted graphics—or, if you're an iPhoto veteran, click an iPhoto album name, as shown here. Clicking one of the thumbnails installs the corresponding picture on the desktop. Bottom: The on/off switch for the transparency of Mac OS X's menu bar.

Mac OS X comes with several ready-to-use collections of desktop pictures, ranging from National Geographic-style nature photos to plain solid colors. To install a new background picture, first choose one of the image categories in the list at the left side of the window, as shown in .

Your choices include Apple Images (muted, soft-focus swishes and swirls), Nature (bugs, water, Leopard outer space), Plants (flowers, soft-focus leaves), Black & White (breathtaking monochrome shots), Abstract (swishes and swirls with wild colors), or Solid Colors (simple grays, blues, and greens).

Using your own pictures

Of course, you may feel that decorating your Mac desktop is much more fun if you use one of your own pictures. You can use any digital photo, scanned image, or graphic you want in almost any graphics format (JPEG, PICT, GIF, TIFF, Photoshop, and—just in case you hope to master your digital camera by dangling its electronic instruction manual in front of you each morning—even PDF).

That's why icons for your own Pictures folder and iPhoto Albums collections also appear here, along with a button that lets you choose any folder of pictures. When you click one of these icons, you see thumbnail versions of its contents in the main screen to its right. Just click the thumbnail of any picture to apply it immediately to the desktop. (There's no need to remove the previously installed picture first.)

If there's one certain picture you like, but it's not in any of the listed sources, you can drag its image file onto the

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Displays

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Displays is the center of operations for all your monitor settings. Here, you set your monitor's resolution, determine how many colors are displayed onscreen, and calibrate color balance and brightness.

You can open up this panel with a quick keystroke from any program on the Mac. Just press Option as you tap one of the screen-brightness keys on the top row of your keyboard.

The specific controls you'll see here depend on the kind of monitor you're using, but here are the ones you'll most likely see:

Figure : In the early days of the Mac, higher color settings required a sacrifice in speed, since the Mac had to compute the color for thousands of individual pixels. Today, there's little downside to leaving your screen at its maximum depth setting ("Millions" of colors). Photos, especially, look best at higher depth settings. (The Detect Displays button appears primarily on laptops; it means "Check for an external monitor or projector.")

This tab is the main headquarters for your screen controls. It governs these settings:

• Resolutions. All Mac screens today can make the screen picture larger or smaller, thus accommodating different kinds of work. You perform this magnification or reduction by switching among different resolutions (measurements of the number of dots that compose the screen). The Resolutions list displays the various resolution settings your monitor can accommodate: 800 × 600, 1024 × 768, and so on ().
  When you use a low-resolution setting, such as 800 × 600, the dots of your screen image get larger, thus enlarging (zooming in on) the picture—but showing a smaller slice of the page. Use this setting when playing a small QuickTime movie, for example, so that it fills more of the screen. (Lower resolutions usually look blurry on flat-panel screens, though.) At higher resolutions, such as 1280 × 800, the screen dots get smaller, making your windows and icons smaller, but showing more overall area. Use this kind of setting when working on two-page spreads in your page-layout program, for example.
• Colors. Today's Mac monitors offer different

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Dock

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See for details on the Dock and its System Preferences pane.

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Energy Saver

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The Energy Saver program helps you and your Mac in a number of ways. By blacking out the screen after a period of inactivity, it prolongs the life of your monitor. By putting the Mac to sleep half an hour after you've stopped using it, Energy Saver cuts down on electricity costs and pollution. On a laptop, Energy Saver extends the length of the battery charge by controlling the activity of the hard drive and screen.

Best of all, this pane offers the option to have your computer turn off each night automatically, and turn on again at a specified time in anticipation of your arrival at the desk.

The Energy Saver controls are very different on a laptop Mac and a desktop.

On a desktop Mac, you see a pair of sliders; on a laptop, you have to click Show Details to see them ().

Figure : Top: Here's what Energy Saver looks like in its expanded condition on a laptop. (On a desktop machine, it's far simpler.) In the "Put the display to sleep" option, you can specify an independent sleep time for the screen. Bottom: Here are the Schedule controls—a welcome return of the Mac's self-scheduling abilities.

In any case, the top slider controls when the Mac will automatically go to sleep—anywhere from one minute after your last activity to Never. (Activity can be mouse movement, keyboard action, or Internet data transfer; Energy Saver won't put your Mac to sleep in the middle of a download.)

At that time, the screen goes dark, the hard drive stops spinning, and your processor chip slows to a crawl. Your Mac is now in sleep mode, using only a fraction of its usual electricity consumption. To wake it up when you return to your desk, press any key. Everything you were working on, including open programs and documents, is still onscreen, exactly as it was. (To turn off this automatic sleep feature entirely, drag the slider to Never.)

On Macs of old, the beauty of the independent "Put the display to sleep" slider was that you could make the screen go dark before the Mac itself. That way, the Mac would awaken instantly when you touched a key or clicked the mouse.

In Mac OS X, the Mac

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Exposé & Spaces

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Exposé and Spaces, the two ingenious window- and screen-management features of Mac OS X, are described in detail in —and so is this joint-venture control panel.

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International

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The International pane's primary job is to set up your Mac to work in other languages. If you bought your Mac with a localized operating system—a version that already runs in your own language—and you're already using the only language, number format, and keyboard layout you'll ever need, then you can ignore most of this panel.

But at the very least, check it out. When it comes to showing off Mac OS X to your friends and loved ones, the "wow" factor on the Mac's polyglot features is huge.

In Mac OS X, you can shift from language to language in certain programs on the fly, without reinstalling the operating system or even restarting the computer.

On the Language tab, you see a listing of the different languages the Mac can switch into, in the corresponding languages—Français, Español, and so on. Just drag one of the languages to the top of the list to select it as the target language, as shown in .

Now launch Safari, TextEdit, or Stickies. Every menu, button, and dialog box is now in the new language you selected! If you log out and back in (or restart) at this point, the entire Finder will be in the new language, too.

Programs differ widely in their "language awareness." If you use a language beyond the 16 in the list, adding it (use the Edit button) ensures that its relevant features will be available in all programs. (You may still have to add additional language software to make your menus and dialog boxes change.)

Of course, if you're really French (for example), you'll also want to make these changes:

• On the Formats tab, choose your French-speaking country from the Region pop-up menu, so that time and date formats, number punctuation, and currency symbols also conform to your local customs. (Turn on "Show all regions," if necessary.)
  For example, the decimal and thousands separator characters for displaying large numbers differ from country to country. (The number 25,600.99, for example, would be written as 25 600,99 in France, and as 25.600,99 in Spanish.) And what appears to an American to be July 4 (the notation 7/4), to a European indicates April 7.
  If, for some reason, Apple's preprogrammed settings aren't right for your region, you'll see Customize buttons that let you override them.

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Keyboard & Mouse

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This panel lets you do some frivolous fine-tuning of your mouse, keyboard, and (for laptops) trackpad. It also unlocks Mac OS X's strange and remarkable Full Keyboard Access feature, which lets you control your Mac's menus, windows, dialog boxes, buttons, the Dock, and the toolbar—all from the keyboard (page 135). Here's a tour of the Keyboard & Mouse tabs.

The changes you make are tiny, but can have a cumulatively big impact on your daily typing routine.

• Key Repeat Rate, Delay Until Repeat. You're probably too young to remember the antique once known as the typewriter. On some electric versions of this machine, you could hold down the letter X key to type a series of XXXXXXXs—ideal for crossing something out in a contract, for example.
  On the Mac, every key behaves this way. Hold down any key long enough, and it starts spitting out repetitions, making it easy to type, for example, "No WAAAAAAAY!" or "You go, girrrrrrrrrl!" These two sliders govern this behavior. On the right: a slider that determines how long you must hold down the key before it starts repeating (to prevent triggering repetitions accidentally, in other words). On the left: a slider that governs how fast each key spits out letters once the spitting has begun.
• Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys. This option appears only on laptops and aluminum-keyboard Macs. It's complicated, so read slowly.
  On Mac laptops, many of the F-keys on the top row perform laptop-related functions. For example, the F1 and F2 keys adjust the screen brightness, F3, F4, and F5 control the speaker volume, and so on. (You have the same setup on the aluminum Apple keyboard. Many of its F-keys have special hardware-control functions, too.)
  So what if you want to use those keys for other functions? For example, the F1 key is the Help key in many programs. How can you open Help, if F1 makes the screen dimmer?
  In those situations, you're supposed to trigger the F-key's second personality by pressing the Fn key simultaneously. So if F1 opens Help on a desktop Mac, Fn-F1 does it on a laptop.
  If you find yourself using the software features (like Help) more often than the hardware features (like brightness), you can reverse this logic. Turning on "Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" lets the F-keys be F-keys, so they have no hardware-control functions. Now F1 by itself opens Help. Now, however, you add the Fn key for the

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Network

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The Network panel is the brain of your Mac's Internet and local networking connections. See for the settings you need to plug in.

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Parental Controls

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These controls, new in Leopard, are described at length in .

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Print & Fax

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describes printing and faxing in detail. This panel's purpose in life is to offer a centralized list of the printers you've introduced to the Mac, to specify the one you use most of the time, and to report on their status.

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QuickTime

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The settings in the QuickTime panel affect the way movies are played back on your Mac, including movies that stream to you from a Web page and movies that you watch using QuickTime Player (page 507). Very few of these settings are worth tweaking.

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Security

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Mac OS X turns out to be one of the most secure operating systems on earth—and this panel helps to explain why. See for details on locking up your Mac.

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Sharing

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Mac OS X is an upstanding network citizen, flexible enough to share its contents with other Macs, Windows PCs, people dialing in from the road, people dialing in from the Internet, and so on. On this totally overhauled panel, you'll find on/off switches for each of these sharing channels. In this book, many of these features are covered in other chapters:

• Screen Sharing, File Sharing. .
• Printer Sharing. .
• Web Sharing. This single checkbox turns your Mac into a full-fledged Web server—a computer that provides Web pages to any visitors on the Internet.
  Place the actual Web pages (in HTML format) into your Home→Sites folder. Then give out the URL at the bottom of the Sharing pane to any prospective visitors: family members, neighbors, and so on.
  Unless you have an Internet connection that's on all the time (like a DSL or cable connection), your visitors will only be able to access the Web site when you are also online.
• Remote Login. Warning: This checkbox is for Unix nerds only. When turned on, it enables you to tap into your Mac's Unix underbelly from anywhere in the world, using a cryptic command called ssh. If you have no aspirations of ever becoming a command-line user, you can safely ignore this checkbox.
  

  Figure : When Software Update finds an appropriate software morsel, it presents this dialog box that offers to install it automatically. (If you see a smaller version of this dialog box, with no visible list of the new components, click the Details button.) Apple has always created updated and bug-fixing versions of its software components, but they don't do you any good if you don't know about them. You no longer have to scour Mac news Web sites to discover that one of these components has been released and then hunt down the software itself.
• Remote Management. Lets someone else control your Mac using Apple Remote Desktop, a popular add-on program for teachers.
• Remote Apple Events. Lets AppleScript gurus (page 480) send commands to Macs across the network.
• Xgrid Sharing. Xgrid is powerful software that lets you divide up a complex computational task—like computer animation or huge scientific calculations—among a whole bunch of Macs on your network, so that they automatically work on the problem when they're otherwise sitting idle. If you're intrigued, visit .

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Software Update

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Few operating-system ideas are simpler or better than this one: Whenever Apple improves or fixes some piece Mac OS X or some Apple-branded program, the Software Update program can notify you, download the update, and install it into your system automatically. These updates may include new versions of programs like iPhoto and iMovie; drivers for newly released printers, scanners, cameras, and such; bug fixes and security patches; and so on. It is, in other words, just like Windows Update.

Software Update doesn't run rampant through your system software, however. It's quietly respectful. For example, Software Update doesn't download the new software without asking your permission first and explicitly telling you what it plans to install, as shown in .

For maximum effortlessness, turn on the "Check for updates" checkbox and then select a frequency from the pop-up menu—daily, weekly, or monthly. If you also turn on "Download important updates in the background," you'll still be notified before anything gets installed, but you won't have to wait for the downloading—the deed will already be done.

(If you've had "Check for updates" turned off, you can always click the Check Now button to force Mac OS X to report in to see if new patches are available.)

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Sound

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Using the panes of the Sound panel, you can configure the sound system of your Mac in any of several ways.

Here's a quick way to jump directly to the Sound panel of System Preferences—from the keyboard, without ever having to open System Preferences or click Sound. Just press Option as you tap one of the volume-adjustment keys on the top row of your Apple keyboard.

"Sound effects" means error beeps—the sound you hear when the Mac wants your attention, or when you click someplace you shouldn't.

Just click the sound of your choice to make it your default system beep. Most of the canned choices here are funny and clever, yet subdued enough to be of practical value as alert sounds ().

As for the other controls on the Sound Effects panel, they include:

• Alert volume slider. Some Mac fans are confused by the fact that even when they drag this slider all the way to the left, the sound from games and music CDs still plays at full volume.
  The actual main volume slider for your Mac is the "Output volume" slider at the bottom of the Sound pane. The "Alert volume" slider is just for error beeps; Apple was kind enough to let you adjust the volume of these error beeps independently.
• Play user interface sound effects. This option produces a few subtle sound effects during certain Finder operations: when you drag something off of the Dock, into the Trash, or into a folder, or when the Finder finishes a file-copying job.
  

  Figure : You can adjust your overall speaker volume independently from the alert-beep volume, thank goodness. Tip nerds should note that you can also adjust the alert volume by holding down the Option key as you drag the handle in the speaker-volume menulet (on your menu bar).
• Play feedback when volume is changed. Most Mac keyboards have little volume-adjustment keys on the top row that, when pressed, adjust the overall speaker level. Each time you press one of these keys, the Mac beeps to help you gauge the current volume.
  That's all fine when you're working at home. But more than one person has been humiliated in an important meeting when the Mac made a sudden, inappropriately loud sonic outburst—and then amplified that embarrassment by furiously and repeatedly pressing the volume-down key, beeping all the way.

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Speech

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Although it may surprise many Mac users, the Mac is quite talented when it comes to speech. Its abilities fall into two categories: reading text aloud, using a synthesized voice; and taking commands from your voice.

The Apple marketing machine may have been working too hard when it called this feature "speech recognition"—the Mac OS feature called PlainTalk doesn't take dictation, typing out what you say. (For that, you need a program like MacSpeech Dictate, www.macspeech.com, which is based on the same recognition technology as Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows.)

Instead, PlainTalk is a command-and-control technology. It lets you open programs, trigger AppleScripts, choose menu commands, trigger keystrokes, and click dialog box buttons and tabs—just by speaking their names.

Few people use PlainTalk speech recognition. But if your Mac has a microphone, PlainTalk is worth at least a 15-minute test drive. It may become a part of your work routine forever. Complete details are in the free downloadable Appendix for this chapter, PlainTalk Speech Recognition.pdf. It's available on this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.

The conversation doesn't have to be one-way; it's even easier to make the Mac talk.

The Mac can read almost anything you like: text that you pass your cursor over, alert messages, menus, and any text document in any program. It can speak in your choice of 24 synthesizer voices, ages 8 to 50. Most read with a twangy, charmingly Norwegian accent—all but Alex, who makes his debut in Leopard and sounds scarily like a professional human voice-over artist.

Figure : At the outset, you see only six voices—the ones that sound the most human. Choose More Voices to see the complete list of 22. Then, for 15 minutes of hilarity, try clicking the voices in turn to hear sample sentences. Drag the slider to affect how fast each one speaks. (Clearly, Apple's programmers had some fun with this assignment.)

To set this up, click the Text to Speech tab (), Here, you can control which voice your Mac uses, as well as how fast it should speak. Click "Speak selected text when the key is pressed"; you'll be asked to press the keys you want to use as a trigger (like Option-S). From now on, the Mac will read aloud any highlighted text, in any program, when you press Option-S!

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Spotlight

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Here's how you tell the Mac (a) which categories of files and information you want the Spotlight search feature to search, (b) which folders you don't want searched, for privacy reasons, and (c) which key combination you want to use for summoning the Spotlight menu or dialog box. Details appear are in .

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Startup Disk

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Use this panel to pick the System Folder your Mac will use the next time it starts up—when you're swapping between Mac OS X and Windows (running with Boot Camp), for example.

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Time Machine

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Here's the master on/off switch and options panel for Time Machine, which is described in .

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Universal Access

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The Universal Access panel is designed for people who type with one hand, find it difficult to use a mouse, or have trouble seeing or hearing. (These features can also be handy when the mouse is broken or missing.)

If you have trouble seeing the screen, then boy, does Mac OS X have features for you.

VoiceOver

The Mac has always been able to read stuff on the screen out loud. But in Leopard, Apple took this feature light-years farther, turning it into a full-blown screen reader for the benefit of people who can't see. VoiceOver doesn't just read every scrap of text it finds on the screen, it also lets you control everything on the screen (menus, buttons, and so on) without ever needing the mouse.

As you can guess, learning VoiceOver means learning a lot of new keyboard shortcuts. (Most of them involve the same two modifier keys pressed together: Control-Option.) Click "Open VoiceOver Utility" to configure this feature's settings. You'll want to spend a good deal of time with the online help screens reading about how VoiceOver works (choose Help→Mac Help, and search for voiceover).

Zoom

Another quick solution is to reduce your monitor's resolution—thus magnifying the image—using the Displays panel described earlier in this chapter. If you have a 17-inch or larger monitor set to, say, 640 × 480, the result is a greatly magnified picture.

That method doesn't give you much flexibility, however, and it's a hassle to adjust. If you agree, then try the Zoom feature that appears here; it lets you enlarge the area surrounding your cursor in any increment.

To make it work, press Option--8 as you're working. Or, if the Seeing panel is open, click On in the Zoom section. That's the master switch.

No zooming actually takes place, however, until you press Option--plus sign (to zoom in) or Option--minus sign (to zoom out). With each press, the entire screen image gets larger or smaller, creating a virtual monitor that follows your cursor around the screen.

If you have a laptop, just using the Control-key trackpad trick described in is a far faster and easier way to magnify the screen.

And if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel on top (or a scroll-pea, like Apple's standard Mighty Mouse), you can also zoom in or out by pressing Control while you turn

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Chapter 16: The Free Programs

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Right out of the box, Mac OS X comes with a healthy assortment of nearly 50 freebies: programs for sending email, writing documents, doing math, even playing games. Some are dressed-up versions of Mac programs that have been around for years. Others, though, are new programs that not only show off some of Mac OS X's most dramatic new technologies, but also let you get real work done without having to invest in additional software.

These programs reside in two important folders on your hard drive: Applications (in the main hard drive window) and Utilities (within the Applications folder). The Applications folder houses the productivity programs; Utilities holds a couple of dozen maintenance programs for setting up printers and network connections, fixing problems on your hard disk, and so on.

You can jump straight to the Applications folder in the Finder by pressing Shift--A, or by clicking the Applications button in the Finder Sidebar (it's the icon that looks like an A). Similarly, Shift--U takes you to the Utilities folder.

You might consider adding the Application and Utilities folders' icons to the right side of your Dock, too, so that you can access them no matter what program you're in.

This chapter guides you through the most important items in your new software library, one program at a time. (Depending on your Mac model, you may find other programs in your Applications folder; Apple occasionally licenses software from other companies to spice up the collection for certain Mac models.)

The Address Book is a database that stores names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information. covers the process of importing your Windows contacts into Address Book, and can help you use them once they're there.

This folder contains all of the scripts and tools pertaining to the Mac's remarkable AppleScript langauge.

Now, AppleScript may be hard for a Windows switcher to grasp right away, because there's simply nothing like it in Windows. It's a programming language that's both very simple and very powerful, because it lets Mac programs send instructions or data to

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Address Book

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The Address Book is a database that stores names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information. covers the process of importing your Windows contacts into Address Book, and can help you use them once they're there.

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AppleScript

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This folder contains all of the scripts and tools pertaining to the Mac's remarkable AppleScript langauge.

Now, AppleScript may be hard for a Windows switcher to grasp right away, because there's simply nothing like it in Windows. It's a programming language that's both very simple and very powerful, because it lets Mac programs send instructions or data to each other.

A simple AppleScript program might perform some simple daily task for you: backing up your Documents folder, for example. A more complex script can be pages long. In professional printing and publishing, where AppleScript enjoys its greatest popularity, a script might connect to a photographer's hard drive elsewhere on the Internet, download a photo from a predetermined folder, color-correct it in Photoshop, import it into a specified page-layout document, print a proof copy, and send a notification email to the editor—automatically.

Mac OS X comes with several dozen prewritten scripts that are genuinely useful—and all you have to do is choose their names from a menu. "Playing back" an AppleScript in this way requires about as much technical skill as pressing an elevator button.

To sample some of these cool starter scripts, you must first bring the Script menu to your menu bar. To do so, see .

Some of the scripts in this menu operate on familiar components of the Mac OS, like the Finder; others show off applications or features that are new in Mac OS X. Here are a few of the best:

• Basics→Open Script Editor launches Script Editor, a program that you can use to edit and write your own AppleScript programs.
• Finder Scripts→Add to File Names, Finder→Add to Folder Names. These scripts tack on a prefix or suffix to the name of every file or folder in the frontmost Finder window (or, if no windows are open, on the desktop). Now you're starting to see the power of AppleScript: You could use this script to add the word draft or final or old to all of the files in a certain folder.
• Finder Scripts→Replace Text in Item Names lets you do a search-and-replace of text bits inside file names, folder names, or both. When one publisher rejects your 45-chapter book proposal, you can use this script to change all 45 chapter files from, for example, "A History of Mouse Pads—A Proposal for Random House, " to "A History of Mouse Pads—A Proposal for Simon & Schuster, ."

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Automator

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Automator is another program that lets you teach your Mac what to do, step by step. But it's easier to use than AppleScript, because you don't have to type any commands. Instead, you assemble a series of visual building blocks called actions. Drag actions into the right order, click a big Run button, and your Mac faithfully runs through the list of steps you've given it.

This, too, is a program that most Mac fans will rarely explore. But if you're curious, by all means download the free appendix to this chapter, called "Automator.pdf." It's available on this book's "Missing CD" at www.missingmanuals.com.

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Calculator

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The Mac OS X Calculator is useful for performing quick arithmetic without having to open a spreadsheet, but it can also act as a scientific calculator for students and scientists, a conversion calculator for metric and U.S. measures, even a currency calculator for world travelers.

Here's everything you need to know for basic math:

• The calculator has three modes: Basic, Advanced (), and Programmer. Switch among them by choosing the appropriate commands from the View menu (or, more conveniently, using the keyboard shortcuts -1, -2, and -3).
  

  Figure : The Calculator program offers a four-function Basic mode, a full-blown scientific calculator mode, and a programmer's calculator (shown here, and capable of hex, octal, decimal, and binary notation). The first two modes offer a "paper tape" feature (View→Show Paper Tape) that lets you correct errors made way back in a calculation. To edit one of the numbers on the paper tape, drag through it, retype, and then click Recalculate Totals. You can also save the tape as a text file by choosing File→Save Tape As, or print it by selecting File→Print Tape.
• You can operate the Calculator by clicking the onscreen buttons, but it's much easier to press the corresponding number and symbol keys on your keyboard.
  If you have a Mac laptop, don't miss the embedded numeric keypad, superimposed on the right side of the keyboard and labeled on the keys in a different color ink. When you press the Fn key in the lower-left corner of the keyboard, typing these keys produces the numbers instead of the letters.
• As you go, you can make your calculator speak each key you press. This is a sensational feature; the Mac's voice ensures that you don't mistype as you keep your eyes on the receipts in front of you, typing by touch.
  Just choose Speech→Speak Button Pressed to turn this feature on or off. (You can choose the voice in the Speech pane of System Preferences.)
• Once you've calculated a result, you can copy it (using File→Copy, or -C) and paste your answer directly into another program.
• If you don't need anything more than a basic calculator, just use the calculator Dashboard widget instead (page 150). You can access it from any program by pressing F12 (and, if the calculator isn't already on the screen, dragging it there from the bar that appears when you click the + button).

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Chess

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Mac OS X comes with only one game, but it's a beauty (). Chess is a traditional chess game played on a gorgeously rendered board with a set of realistic 3-D pieces. You can rotate the board in space, as described in .

The program is actually a 20-year-old Unix-based chess program, GNU Chess, that Apple packaged up in a new wrapper.

Figure : You don't have to be terribly exact about grabbing the chess pieces when it's time to make your move. Just click anywhere within a piece's current square to drag it into a new position on the board (shown here in its Marble incarnation). And how did this chess board get rotated like this? Because you can grab a corner of the board and rotate it in 3-D space. Cool!

When you launch Chess, you're presented with a fresh, new game that's set up in Human vs. Computer mode—meaning that you (the Human, with the light-colored pieces) get to play against the Computer (your Mac, on the dark side). Drag the chess piece of your choice into position on the board, and the game is afoot.

If you choose Game→New Game, however, you're offered a pop-up menu with choices like Human vs. Computer, Human vs. Human, and so on. If you switch the pop-up menu to Computer vs. Human, you and your Mac trade places; the Mac takes the white side of the board and opens the game with the first move, and you play the black side.

The same New Game dialog box also offers a pop-up menu called Variant, which offers three other chess-like games: Crazyhouse, Suicide, and Losers. The Chess help screens (choose Help→Chess Help, click "Starting a new chess game") explain these variations.

On some night when the video store is closed and you're desperate for entertainment, you might also want to try the Computer vs. Computer option, which pits your Mac against itself. Pour yourself a beer, open a bag of chips, and settle in to watch until someone—either the Mac or the Mac—gains victory.

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Dashboard

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In Leopard, Dashboard is a true-blue, double-clickable application. Its behavior doesn't actually change much as a result—it works exactly as described in , and exactly as it always has. But one perk is that you can remove its icon from your Dock, which you couldn't do in the pre-Leopard days.

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Dictionary

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For word nerds everywhere, the Dictionary (and Thesaurus) is a blessing—a handy way to look up word definitions, pronunciations, and synonyms. To be precise, Leopard now comes with electronic versions of seven reference works in one:

• The entire New Oxford American Dictionary.
• The complete Oxford American Writers Thesaurus.
• A new dictionary of Apple terms, from A/UX to widget. (Apparently there aren't any Apple terms that begin with X, Y, or Z.)
• Wikipedia. Of course, this famous open-source, citizen-created encyclopedia isn't actually on your Mac. All Dictionary does is give you an easy way to search the online version, and display the results right in the comfy Dictionary window.
• A Japanese dictionary, thesaurus, and Japanese-to-English translation dictionary.

You don't ordinarily see the Japanese reference books. You have to turn them on in Dictionary→Preferences.

Mac OS X also comes with about a million ways to look up a word:

• Double-click the Dictionary icon. You get the window shown at top in . As you type into the Spotlight-y search box, you home in on matching words; double-click a word, or highlight it and press Enter, to view a full, typographically elegant definition, complete with sample sentence and pronunciation guide.
  And if you don't recognize a word in the definition, click that word to look up its definition. (Each word turns blue and underlined when you point to it, as a reminder.) You can then double-click again in that definition—and on, and on, and on.

  (You can then use the History menu, the ◂ and ▸ buttons on the toolbar, or the -[ and -] keystrokes to go back and forward in your chain of lookups.)
  It's worth exploring the Dictionary→Preferences dialog box, by the way. There, you can choose U.S. or British pronunciations and adjust the font size.
  

  Figure : When you open the Dictionary, it generally assumes that you want a word's definition (top left). If you prefer to see the Wikipedia entry (lower right) at startup time instead, for example, choose Dictionary→Preferences—and drag Wikipedia upward so that it precedes New Oxford American Dictionary. That's all there is to it!

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DVD Player

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DVD Player, your Mac's built-in movie projector, is described in .

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Exposé

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Like Dashboard, Exposé (page 116) has an icon all its own in Applications. Double-clicking it triggers the F9 effect, which means shrinking and moving all open windows around so you can see them simultaneously.

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Font Book

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This delightful program lets you install or uninstall fonts, or sets of fonts, as the whim suits you. It's also great for examining your fonts to see what they look like. Details in .

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Front Row

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For the last few years, most new Mac models have come with a peculiar accessory: a slim white remote control, looking for all the world like an iPod that's lost too much weight. If you point it at the Mac and press the remote's Menu button, you're catapulted into the magic world of Front Row, a special overlay that provides access to your music, photos, movies, and DVD player—with super-big fonts and graphics that are visible from the couch across the room.

It might seem a little bit weird, then, to hear that Front Row, the software, now comes on all Macs, even the ones that didn't come with a remote control and don't have an infrared sensor.

That's because you can operate Front Row entirely from the keyboard—even from across the room, if you have a Bluetooth wireless one. So now even infrared-less Macs like the Mac Pro are invited to the Front Row party.

As shown in , Front Row is all about drilling down from one menu into another.

Use the arrow keys or the + and − buttons on the remote to choose the activity you're interested in: Music, Photos, DVD, or Videos. Use the Space bar or the ▸ button as the Enter key to choose that kind of entertainment. You'll find, to your delight, that Front Row lets you fire up not only all the music you've got in iTunes, all the photos in iPhoto, and so on, but also all the music, photos, and videos stored on other Macs on your network (assuming you've left iPhoto and iTunes running on those Macs).

Your Mac is now an entertainment center that can be operated from across the room.

Figure : Front Row is all about drilling down through the menu screens, exactly as on an iPod. Start here, on the main menu. Use the center button on the remote, or the Space bar on your keyboard, to select a command or category and open the next screen. Keep going like that until you're watching your movies or slideshows, or listening to your music.

Here, then, is the cheat sheet for navigating your Mac's entertainment collections—whether you have a Front Row remote or not.

How to	Using the Remote	Using the Keyboard
Open and close Front Row

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GarageBand

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GarageBand, Apple's do-it-yourself music construction kit, isn't actually part of Mac OS X. If you have a copy, that's because it's part of the iLife suite that comes on every new Mac (GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb). It's described in the free 85-page iLife appendix to this chapter, available on this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

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iCal

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In many ways, iCal is not so different from those "Hunks of the Midwest Police Stations" paper calendars people leave hanging on the walls for months past their natural life span. But iCal offers several advantages over paper calendars. For example:

• It can automate the process of entering repeating events, such as weekly staff meetings or gym workout dates.
• iCal can give you a gentle nudge (with a sound, a dialog box, or even an email) when an important appointment is approaching.
• iCal can share information with your Address Book program, with Mail, with your iPod or iPhone, with other Macs, with "published" calendars on the Internet, or with a Palm organizer. Some of these features require one of those .Mac accounts described in . But iCal also works fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.
• iCal can subscribe to other people's calendars. For example, you can subscribe to your spouse's calendar, thereby finding out when you've been committed to after-dinner drinks on the night of the big game on TV.

iCal's Dock icon now displays today's date—even when iCal isn't running. That's reason enough to upgrade to Leopard right there, n'est-ce pas?

When you open iCal, you see something like . By clicking one of the View buttons above the calendar, you can switch among these views:

• Day shows the appointments for a single day in the main calendar area, broken down by time slot.
  If you choose iCal→Preferences, you can specify what hours constitute a workday. This is ideal both for those annoying power-life people who get up at 5 a.m. for two hours of calisthenics and the more reasonable people who sleep until 11 a.m.
  iCal provides a quick way to get to the current day's date—choose View→Go to Today, or press -T.
• Week fills the main display area with seven columns, reflecting the current week. (You can establish a five-day work week instead in iCal→Preferences.)
  If you double-click the date above the calendar, you open the day view for that day.
• Month shows the entire month that contains the current date (). Double-click a date number to open the day view for that date.

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iChat

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Details on the iChat instant-messaging program are in .

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iDVD

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iDVD isn't really part of Mac OS X, although you probably have a copy of it; as part of the iLife software suite, iDVD comes free on every new Mac. iDVD lets you turn your digital photos or camcorder movies into DVDs that work on almost any DVD player, complete with menus, slideshow controls, and other navigation features. iDVD handles the technology; you control the style.

For a primer on iDVD, see the free, downloadable iLife appendix to this chapter, available on this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

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iMovie, iPhoto

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Here's another pair of the iLife apps—not really part of Mac OS X, but probably kicking around on your Mac because iLife comes with all new Macs.

A basic getting-started chapter for these programs awaits, in free downloadable 85-page PDF form, on this book's "Missing CD" page at www.missingmanuals.com.

If that basic guide isn't enough for you, keep in mind that masterfully written, in-depth guides are available in the form of iMovie '08 & iDVD: The Missing Manual and iPhoto '08: The Missing Manual. (Corresponding Missing Manual titles are available for earlier versions of these programs, too.)

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iTunes

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iTunes is Apple's beloved digital music-library program. tells all.

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Mail

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See for the whole story.

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Photo Booth

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It may be goofy, it may be pointless, but the Photo Booth program is a bigger time drain than Solitaire, the Web, and Dancing with the Stars put together.

It's a match made in heaven for Macs that have a tiny video camera above the screen, but you can also use it with a camcorder, external iSight camera, or Webcam. Just be sure that the camera is turned on and hooked up before you open Photo Booth.

Open this program and then peer into the camera. Photo Booth acts like a digital mirror, showing whatever the camera sees—that is, you.

But then click the Effects button. You enter a world of special visual effects—and we're talking very special. Some make you look like a pinhead, or bulbous, or a Siamese twin; others simulate Andy Warhol paintings, fisheye lenses, and charcoal sketches (). In the Leopard version, in fact, there are five pages of effects, nine previews on a page; click the left or right arrow buttons, or press -left or right arrow key, to see them all. (The last two pages hold backdrop effects, described below.)

Figure : The Photo Booth effects must have been dreamed up one night at Apple in the midst of a serious beer party. They're truly, disturbingly creative. If you decide that you really look best without any help from Apple's warped imagery, click the Normal icon in the center.

Click an effect

Still

4-Up

Movie

Effects pages

Finished shots (still, 4-up, movie)

Some of the effects have sliders that govern their intensity; you'll see them appear when you click the preview.

When you find an effect that looks appealing (or unappealing, depending on your goals here), click the camera button, or press -T. You see and hear a three-second countdown, and then snap! —your screen flashes white to add illumination, and the resulting photo appears on your screen. Its thumbnail joins the collection at the bottom.

If that countdown is getting on your nerves, Option- click the camera button. You can get rid of the screen flash, too, by Shift- clicking. Needless to say, if you press Option and Shift, you get neither the countdown nor the flash.

If you click the 4-Up button identified in , then when you click the Camera icon (or press

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Preview

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Preview is Mac OS X's built-in graphics viewer, fax viewer, and PDF reader. It's always been teeming with features that most Mac owners never even knew were there—but in Leopard, it's a real powerhouse.

Preview's hallmark is its surprising versatility. It can display and manipulate pictures saved in a wide variety of formats, including common graphics formats like JPEG, TIFF, PICT, and GIF; less commonly used formats like BMP, PNG, SGI, TGA, and MacPaint; and even Photoshop, EPS, and PDF graphics. You can even open animated GIFs by adding a Play button to the toolbar, as described below.

Bunches o' graphics

If you highlight a group of image files in the Finder and open them all at once (for example, by pressing -O), Preview opens the first one, but lists the thumbnails of the whole group in the Sidebar. You can walk through them with the and keys, or you can choose View→Slideshow (Shift--F) to begin a full-screen slideshow.

Use the menu below the Sidebar group to change the sorting order of these thumbnails.

Cropping graphics

To crop graphics in Preview, drag across the part of the graphic that you want to keep. To redraw, drag the round handles on the dotted rectangle; or, to proceed with the crop, choose Tools→Crop. (The keyboard shortcut is -K.)

If you don't think you'll ever need the original again, save the document. Otherwise, choose File→Save As to spin the cropped image out as a separate file, preserving the original in the process.

You can also rotate an image—even a PDF document—in 90-degree increments and then flip it vertically or horizontally, using the commands in the Tools menu. In fact, if you select several thumbnails in the Sidebar first, you can rotate or flip them all simultaneously.

Fixing up photos

Preview is no Photoshop, but it's getting closer. Let us count the ways:

• Choose Tools→Inspector. A floating palette appears. Click the first tab to see the photo's name, when it was taken, its pixel dimensions, and so on. Click the second one for even more geeky photo details, including camera settings like the lens type, ISO setting, focus mode, whether the flash was on, and so on.

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QuickTime Player

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Dozens of Mac OS X programs can play digital movies in Apple' s QuickTime format (the rough equivalent of .AVI files in Windows): Word, FileMaker, AppleWorks, PowerPoint, Safari, America Online, and so on.

But the cornerstone of Mac OS X's movie-, sound-, and photo-playback software is QuickTime Player, which sits in your Applications→QuickTime folder (and comes factory-installed on the Dock). It does exactly what you'd expect: show pictures, play movies, and play sounds. You might think of it as Apple's take on Windows Media Player.

Figure : Some of the controls shown here are available only in the Pro version of QuickTime Player. They appear as soon as you type in your registration code (which you get when you pay $30).

Counter

Volume

Rewind to start

Selection handle

Play/Stop

Scroll bar

Jump to end

Playhead

Audio level meters

Resize handle

You can open a movie file by double-clicking it, dragging it onto the QuickTime Player icon, or by launching QuickTime Player and then choosing File→Open File (-O). The most important controls () are:

• Scroll bar. Drag the playhead to jump to a different spot in the movie.
• Play/Stop button. Click once to start, and again to stop. You can also press the Space bar, Return key, or -right arrow for this purpose. (Or avoid the buttons altogether and double-click the movie itself to start or stop playback.)
  You can make any movie automatically play when opened, so that you avoid clicking the Play button. To do so, choose QuickTime Player→Preferences→Player Preferences, and turn on "Automatically play movies when opened."
• Selection handles. These tiny black triangles appear only in the $30 Pro version. You use them to highlight stretches of footage.
• Volume. If you like, you can make the soundtrack louder or softer by dragging this slider with your mouse or clicking in its "track." You may find it easier, however, to press the up or down arrow keys.

Try minimizing a QuickTime Player window while a movie is playing. It shrinks to the Dock—and keeps on playing. Do this enough times, and you'll know what it's like to be Steve Jobs on stage.

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Safari

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Apple's first and only Web browser feels decidedly faster and more modern than Internet Explorer, and there are enough tips and tricks lurking inside to last you a lifetime. Details in .

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Stickies

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Stickies () lets you create virtual Post-it notes that you can stick anywhere on your screen—a triumphant software answer to the thousands of people who stick notes on the edges of their actual monitors. If you're a fan of the Windows Notepad, you might find yourself getting heavily into Stickies instead.

Figure : In the old days of the Mac, the notes you created with Stickies were text-only, single-font deals. Today, however, you can use a mix of fonts, text colors, and styles within each note. You can even paste in graphics, sounds, and movies (like PICT, GIF, JPEG, QuickTime, AIFF, whole PDF files, and so on), creating the world's most elaborate reminders and to-do lists.

You can use Stickies to type quick notes and to-do items, paste in Web addresses or phone numbers you need to remember, or store any other little scraps and snippets of text you come across. Your electronic Post-its show up whenever the Stickies program is running.

You can use a mix of fonts, text colors, and styles within each note. You can even copy and paste (or drag) pictures, movies, and sounds into your notes, producing the world's most elaborate reminders and to-do lists. You can even spell check your notes and search-and-replace text.

The first time you launch Stickies, a few sample notes appear automatically, describing some of the program's features. You can quickly dispose of each sample by clicking the close button in the upper-left corner of each note or by choosing File→Close (-W). Each time you close a note, a dialog box asks if you want to save the note. If you click Don't Save, the note disappears permanently.

The Stickies module that's part of Dashboard (page 150) is extremely similar, and it's arguably quicker to open (just press F12). But it's also far more limited.

To create a new note, choose File→New Note (-N) and start typing, pasting, or dragging text (or graphics, movies, or sounds) in from other programs.

Once you start plastering your Mac with notes, it doesn't take long to find yourself plagued with desktop clutter. Fortunately, Stickies includes a few built-in tricks for managing a deskful of notes:

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System Preferences

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This program opens the door to the nerve center of Mac OS X's various user preferences, settings, and options. covers every option in detail.

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TextEdit

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TextEdit is a word processor ()—a pretty darn powerful one, at that, considering you didn't have to pay a cent extra for it. You can create real documents with real formatting, using style sheets, colors, automatic numbering and bullets, tables, and customized line spacing, and—get this—even save the result as a Microsoft Word document. If you need to use Word files, but you can't stand bloated Microsoft interfaces, welcome.

Not only can TextEdit open and save Microsoft Word documents, but it even recognizes some of the very same keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can advance through documents one word at a time by pressing Option-left arrow or Option-right arrow. Adding the Shift key to those key combinations lets you select one whole word at a time. You can also use the key in conjunction with the right and left arrow keys to jump to the beginning or end of a line.

The one confusing aspect of TextEdit is that it's both a plain text editor (no formatting; globally compatible) and a true word processor (fonts, sizes, styles; compatible with other word processors). You need to keep your wits about you as you edit, because the minute you add formatting to your document, TextEdit no longer lets you save it as a plain text file.

Here's the scheme:

• You can change a plain text document to a formatted one by choosing Format→Make Rich Text. The ruler appears automatically to remind you that a new world of formatting has just become available.
  

  Figure : The text ruler gives you control over tab stops, line spacing, paragraph justification, and so on. Pressing -R makes it appear and disappear. The Style pop-up menu lists canned sets of character and paragraph formatting, so you can apply them consistently throughout a document.
• Conversely, you can change a formatted document (a Word file you've opened, for example) to a plain text document by choosing Format→Make Plain Text. An alert message appears to point out that you're about to lose all formatting.
• If you know what kind of document you always want to open, go to the TextEdit→Preferences dialog box; on the New Document tab, select Rich Text or Plain Text. That's what you'll get each time you choose File→New.

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Time Machine

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This marquee feature of Leopard is described in .

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Utilities: Your Mac OS X Toolbox

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The Utilities folder (inside your Applications folder) is home to another batch of freebies: another couple of dozen tools for monitoring, tuning, tweaking, and troubleshooting your Mac.

The truth is, you're likely to use only a few of these utilities. The rest are very specialized gizmos primarily of interest to network administrators or Unix geeks who are obsessed with knowing what kind of computer-code gibberish is going on behind the scenes.

Even so, Apple obviously noticed that as the sophistication of Mac OS X fans grows, more people open the Utilities folder more often. That's why there's a menu command and a keystroke that can take you there. In the Finder, choose Go→Utilities (Shift--U).

Activity Monitor is designed to let the technologically savvy Mac fan see how much of the Mac's available power is being tapped at any given moment.

The Processes table

Even when you're only running a program or two on your Mac, dozens of computational tasks (processes ) are going on in the background. The top half of the dialog box, which looks like a table, shows you all the different processes—visible and invisible—that your Mac is handling at the moment.

Check out how many items appear in the Process list, even when you're just staring at the desktop. It's awesome to see just how busy your Mac is! Some are easily recognizable programs (such as Finder), while others are background system-level operations you don't normally see. For each item, you can see the percentage of CPU being used, who's using it (either your account name, someone else's, or root, meaning the Mac itself), and how much memory it's using.

Or use the pop-up menu above the list to see:

• All Processes. This is the complete list of running processes; you'll notice that the vast majority are little Unix applications you never even knew you had.
• My Processes. This list shows only the programs that pertain to your world—your login. There are still plenty of unfamiliar items, but they're all running to serve your account.
• Windowed Processes. Now this is probably what you were expecting: a list of actual programs with actual English names, like Activity Monitor, Finder, Safari, and Mail. These are the only ones running in actual windows, the only ones that are

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Appendix : Installation & Troubleshooting

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If you're lucky, this is a wasted chapter. After all, you'll probably never have to install Mac OS X (assuming it came preinstalled on your Mac), and in the best of all technological worlds, you won't have to do much troubleshooting, either. But here's this appendix, anyway—just in case.

Getting Ready to Install

Three Kinds of Installation

The Basic Installation

The Upgrade Installation

The Clean Install ("Archive and Install")

Erase & Install

The Setup Assistant

Troubleshooting

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Getting Ready to Install

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For starters, you need to make sure that you and your Mac have what it takes to handle Mac OS X—specifically:

• A Macintosh with a G4, G5, or Intel processor. Basically, most Macs manufactured since the end of 2004 are eligible, which isn't bad at all.
• Plenty of free hard disk space. You need 9 GB free to install the full Mac OS X 10.5—less if you decline to install all the optional languages and printer drivers (more on this in a moment).
• A lot of memory. Apple recommends at least 512 MB of memory, but for the greatest speed, install 1 gigabyte—2 or more if you can afford it. (And these days, you probably can.)
• The latest firmware. Firmware describes the low-level, underlying software instructions that control the actual circuitry of your Mac. Every now and then, Apple updates it for certain Mac models, and it's very important that your Mac has the absolute latest. If yours doesn't, a message will appear to let you know during the Leopard installation. Some Macs might just spit the DVD right out. Quit the installer and grab the latest updater from www.apple.com/support/downloads.
• A copy of Leopard to install. Apple sells Leopard in several ways. There's the regular Leopard DVD, for example, and there's the Family Pack, which authorizes you to install Leopard on up to five Macs in the same household. (Neither version is copy-protected or requires any kind of serial number, which is a nice change from Windows; only the honor system stops you from installing on a sixth Mac.)
  And then there's the version that comes with every new Mac. It's labeled Mac OS X Leopard Disc 1, but it's the same thing as the sold-separately DVD. (Disc 2, in this case, contains all the other programs that come with a new Mac, like the iLife software suite.)

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Three Kinds of Installation

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The Mac OS X installer can perform a number of different installations. For example, it can put a copy of Mac OS X 10.5 onto a hard drive that currently has:

• Nothing on it. If you one day have to erase your hard drive completely—because it's completely hosed, or, less drastically, because you've bought a new, empty external hard drive—this is how to do it. See "," on page 541, for a step-by-step guide.
• Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.4. The Leopard installer can turn your older copy of Mac OS X into the 10.5 version, in the process maintaining all of your older preferences, fonts, documents, accounts, and so on. See "carview.php?tsp=" on page 540.
  On the other hand, a substantial body of evidence (specifically, hundreds of moaning Mac fans online) points to the wisdom of performing a clean install, rather than an upgrade installation. (Apple calls the clean install the "Archive & Install" option.) A clean installation provides a healthier, more glitch-proof copy of 10.5. See "carview.php?tsp=" on page 540.
• Mac OS X 10.5. In times of dire troubleshooting, when nothing in has helped, you can actually give yourself a fresh copy of 10.5, even though it's already on the hard drive. See "carview.php?tsp=" on page 540.

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The Basic Installation

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The installation process takes about 45 minutes, but for the sake of your own psyche, you'll probably want to set aside a whole afternoon. Once the installation is over, you'll want to play around, organize your files, and learn the lay of the land.

Here's how you install Leopard onto a drive that doesn't have a version of Mac OS X on it already:

1. Insert the Mac OS X DVD. Double-click the Install Mac OS X icon in the disc's main window. When the Restart button appears, click it.
   The Mac starts up from the disc and takes you directly to the first Installer screen.
   The installer soon falls into a pattern: Read the instructions, make a couple of choices, and click Continue to advance to the next screen. As you go, the list on the left side of the screen reveals where you are in the overall procedure.
   You can back out of the installation at any time before step 5, just by choosing Installer→Quit Installer. When the Restart button appears, click it. Then eject the Mac OS X disc, either by holding down the mouse button while the computer restarts or, if you have a tray-loading CD drive, by pushing its Eject button during the moment of darkness during the restart.
2. Work your way through the Select Language screen, Welcome screen, and Software License Agreement screens, clicking Continue each time.
   Note that once you're past the Select Language screen, the Mac OS X Installer menu bar becomes available. In the Utilities menu are some very useful commands; they let you jump directly into programs like Disk Utility (to erase or partition your hard drive), Terminal (to do some Unixy preparatory steps), System Profiler (to see how much memory this machine has), Reset Password (if you've forgotten yours), and more.
   If you do decide to take that detour to another program, when you quit it, you'll return to the Installer program, right where you left off.
   The Software License Agreement requires you to click a button confirming that you agree with whatever Apple's lawyers say.
3. On the Select a Destination screen, click the disk or partition on which you want to install Mac OS X.
   Icons for all of your disks (or partitions) appear on the screen, but ones that are off-limits to Mac OS X (like CDs and USB hard drives) appear dimmed, if at all. Click the icon of the drive—or the partition, if you've created one to hold Mac OS X—that will be your new main startup drive.

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The Upgrade Installation

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If Mac OS X version 10.0 through 10.4-point-anything is on your hard drive, the Leopard installer can neatly nip and tuck its software code, turning it into version 10.5. Everything remains just as you had it: your accounts, folders, files, email, network settings, everything-else settings, and so on.

This sophisticated surgery occasionally leaves behind a minor gremlin here and there: peculiar cosmetic glitches, a checkbox that doesn't seem to work, and so on. If that possibility concerns you, a clean install is a safer way to go. (A clean install does, however, require a little more post-installation fiddling to reinstate your settings, notably your Internet and network preferences.)

If you're still game to perform the upgrade installation, follow the previously outlined steps 1 through 3. On the Select Destination screen, however, click Options.

Now you're offered several variations of the basic installation. The one you want is Upgrade Mac OS X. Click it, and then click OK. Proceed with the previous step 4. (The button described there now says Upgrade, though, instead of Install.)

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The Clean Install ("Archive and Install")

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In Windows, the clean install is considered an essential troubleshooting technique. It entails installing a second System Folder or Windows folder—a fresh one, uncontaminated by the detritus left behind by you and your software programs.

In general, though, you and your software can't invade the Mac OS X System folder. The kind of gradual corruption that could occur in those older operating systems is theoretically impossible in Mac OS X, and therefore the need to perform a clean install is almost completely eliminated.

That's the theory, anyway. In fact, somehow or other, things do go wrong with your Mac OS X installation. Maybe you or somebody else has been fiddling around in Terminal and wound up deleting or changing some important underlying files. Certain shareware programs can perform deep-seated changes like this, too.

The point is that eventually, you may wish you could just start over with a new, perfect copy of Mac OS X. And thanks to option, you can—without having to erase the hard drive first.

Start by following steps 1 through 3 in "carview.php?tsp=" section. On the Select Destination screen, though, click Options. Now you're offered four kinds of installation. Turn on "Archive and Install." ("Preserve Users and Network Settings" should be on, too.)

This powerful option leaves all of your accounts (Home folders, documents, pictures, movies, Favorites, email, and so on) untouched. As the option's name implies, it also leaves your network and Internet settings alone. But it deactivates your old System folder (you'll find it, later, in a new folder called Previous System Folders) and puts a new one in its place. And that's exactly what you want.

Click OK and then continue with step 4 (page 539). When it's all over, you'll be confident that your Mac OS X installation is clean, fresh, and ready for action.

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Erase & Install

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The final installation option is called Erase & Install (known to the geek community as "Nuke 'n' Pave"). As you can guess, it erases your entire hard drive and installs the ultimate clean, fresh, sparkling new copy of Leopard and its applications there. Use this "nuke-and-pave" option when you're about to sell your Mac and want to ensure that no trace of your former stuff is still there.

If you're absolutely certain that you won't regret completely erasing the computer (or you have a brand-new, virgin hard drive), follow the previously described steps 1 through 3. On the Select Destination screen, though, click Options, and select Erase & Install. Continue with step 4.

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The Setup Assistant

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When the Mac restarts after the installation, the first thing you experience is one of the most visually stunning post-installation OS startup movies in history: a fly-through of deep space, accompanied by scooby-dooby music and a fancy parade of 3-D, computer-generated translations of the word "Welcome." Once Apple has quite finished showing off its multimedia prowess, you arrive at a Welcome screen.

You also hear a man's voice letting you know that if you're blind, you can press Esc to hear audio guidance for setting up the Mac and learning VoiceOve.

If you do so, you're treated to a crash course in VoiceOver, the screen-control/screen-reading software described in . This, by the way, is the only time you'll be offered this tutorial, so pay attention. (Hint: Here are the basics. Hold down the Control and Option keys and press the arrow keys to highlight different elements of the screen, hearing them pronounced. When a new window opens, press Control-Option-Shift-W to read the contents of the window. Press Control-Option-Space bar to "click.")

Once again, you're in for a click-through-the-screens experience, this time with the aim of setting up your Mac's various options. After answering the questions on each screen, click Continue.

The number and sequence of information screens you'll encounter depend on whether you've upgraded an existing Mac or started fresh, but here are some of the possibilities:

• Welcome. Click the name of the country you're in.
• Select Your Keyboard. Different countries require different keyboard layouts. For example, if you choose the Canadian layout, pressing the ] key on a U.S. keyboard produces the ç symbol. Click Continue.
• Do you already own a Mac? If you choose "Transfer my information from another Mac," the installer will assist you in sucking all of your old programs, files, folders, and settings from the old Mac to the new one.
  You have to help it, however, by connecting a FireWire cable between the two Macs, and then restarting the old Mac while holding down its T key. ("FireWire connection established.") Yes, that's right: the installer is putting you into FireWire Disk Mode (page 168) for super-high-speed transfer.

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Troubleshooting

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Whether it's a car engine or an operating system, anything with several thousand parts can develop the occasional technical hiccup. Mac OS X is far more resilient than its predecessors, but it's still a complex system with the potential for occasional glitches.

It's safe to say that you'll have to do less troubleshooting in Mac OS X than in Mac OS 9 or Windows, especially considering that most freaky little glitches go away if you just try these two steps, one at a time:

• Quit and restart the wayward program.
• Log out and log back in again.

It's the other problems that'll drive you batty.

All kinds of glitches may befall you, occasionally, in Mac OS X. Your desktop picture doesn't change when you change it in System Preferences. A menulet doesn't open when you click it. A program won't open—it just bounces in the Dock a couple of times and then stops.

When a single program is acting up like this, but quitting and restarting it does no good, try the following steps, in the following sequence.

First Resort: Repair Permissions

An amazing number of mysterious glitches arise because the permissions of either that item or something in your System folder—that is, the complex mesh of interconnected Unix permissions described in —have become muddled.

When something doesn't seem to be working right, therefore, open your Applications→Utilities folder and open Disk Utility. Proceed as shown in .

This is a really, really great trick to know.

Many Mac mavens, in fact, believe in running this Repair Permissions routine after running any kind of installer, just to nip nascent problems in the bud. That includes both installers of new programs and of Apple's own Mac OS X updates.

Figure : Click your hard drive's name in the left-side list; click the First Aid tab; click Repair Disk Permissions; and then read an article while the Mac checks out your disk. If the program finds anything amiss, you'll see messages like these. Among the text, you may recognize some Unix shorthand for read, write, and execute privileges (page 418).

Second Resort: Look for an Update

If a program starts acting up immediately after you've installed or upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, chances are good that it has some minor incompatibility. Chances are also good that you'll find an updated version on the company's Web site.

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Appendix : The "Where'd It Go?" Dictionary

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All the words and pictures so far in this book are just great for leisure reading. But in a crisis of helplessness on your new Mac, this appendix may be more useful. It's an alphabetical listing of every common Windows function and where to find it in Mac OS X. After all, an operating system is an operating system. The actual functions are pretty much the same—they're just in different places.

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To find out the version number of the program you're using, don't look in the Help menu. Instead, look in the application menu next to the menu—the one that bears the name of the program you're in. That's where you find the About command for Macintosh programs.

The special features that let you operate the computer even with impaired vision, hearing, or motor control are called Universal Access in Mac OS X. It's in System Preferences ().

The Mac never displays Web pages directly on the desktop—and knowing Apple, that's probably a point of pride. But Dashboard () keeps Internet information only a keystroke away.

The Mac requires no program for installing the driver for a new external gadget. The drivers for most printers, mice, keyboards, cameras, camcorders, and other accessories are preinstalled. If you plug something into the Mac and find that it doesn't work immediately, just install the driver from the included CD (or the manufacturer's Web site).

Here's another one you just don't need on the Macintosh. Installing a program onto the Mac is described in . Removing a program simply involves dragging its icon to the Trash. (For a clean sweep, inspect your Home→Library→Preferences and Library→Application Support folders to see if any preference files got left behind.)

There's no Programs menu built into Mac OS X, like the one on the Windows Start menu. If you'd like one, drag your Applications folder into the end of the Dock. Now its icon is a tidy pop-up menu of every program on your machine.

On the Mac, it's the Option key. You can substitute Option for Alt in any keystroke in most popular programs. The Option key has a number of secondary features on the Mac, too: It hides the windows of one program when you click into another, for example. (As for operating the Mac's menus from the keyboard, see page 134.)

On the Mac, it's called Software Update, and it does exactly the same thing (page 470).

It's in the same place on the Macintosh keyboard, but it's called the Delete key.

The status of the battery in your Mac laptop appears in the menu bar. (If you don't see it, open System Preferences→Energy Saver and turn it on.)

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Appendix : The Master Mac OS X Secret Keystroke List

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Here it is, by popular, frustrated demand: The master list of every secret (or not-so-secret) keystroke in Mac OS X Leopard, including all of the keys you can press during startup. Clip and post to your monitor (unless, of course, you got this book from the library).

For the most part, the following list doesn't include the keystrokes that are already listed in your menus, like -P for Print, -S for Save, and so on.

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Keys to Hold Down	Effect
C	Starts up from a CD
D	Starts up from the first partition
N	Starts up from network server
R	Resets the laptop screen
T	Puts the Mac into FireWire Target Disk mode
X	Starts up in Mac OS X (if 9 is on the same disk)
Option	Shows icons of all startup disks and partitions, so you can choose one for starting up.
Shift-Option--Delete	Starts up from external drive (or CD)
Option--P-R	Zaps the parameter RAM (PRAM). (Hold down until you hear the second chime.)
Option--O-F	Brings up Open Firmware screen (pre-Intel Macs).
-V	Shows Unix console messages during startup, logout, and shutdown
-S	Starts up in single-user (Unix command-line) mode
Mouse down	Ejects a stuck CD or DVD
Shift	Just after powering up: Turns off kernel extensions (page 835)
Shift	Just after logging in: Prevents Finder windows and startup items from opening. (They'll return the next time you start up.)

-Space	Highlights Spotlight box
Option--Space	Opens Spotlight window
,	Expands or collapses a selected folder in list view
Option-	Expands a folder in a list view and all folders inside it
Option-	Collapses folder and all folders inside it
-	Opens parent folder
Shift-Option--	Selects the Desktop
- (or -O)	Opens the selected icon
Option-click the flippy triangle	Expands or collapses all folders within that window
Tab	Selects next icon alphabetically
Shift-Tab	Selects previous icon alphabetically
Space bar	Opens Quick Look preview of highlighted icon(s)
Space bar	(During a spring-loaded folder drag) Opens the disk or folder under mouse immediately
Option--drag	Scrolls a Finder window in any direction (list or icon view)
Option-click the Zoom button	Enlarges the window to full screen
Option-click Close button	Closes all Finder windows
-drag an icon	Moves it into, or out of, the System folder (administrator password required)
Option	Changes Quick Look button to Slideshow button
-drag	Rearranges or removes menulets or toolbar icons
-click window title	Opens a pop-up menu showing the folder path
Option-click the Minimize button	Minimizes all windows (works in most programs)

Option	Changes "About This Mac" to "System Profiler"
Option

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