Demystifying Mac OS X in Less Than 60 Minutes

Tuesday, 01 April 2008

Mac OS X is a ready to use Operating System that needs little or nothing else other than some exploring. We have been using Mac’s for several years now and have our own list of programs that we use for many tasks, but the average everyday user won’t need much more than they already provide. We will outline the “basics”, plus what we use to fill our everyday needs.

Sections:

    •    Desktop
    •    Stacks
    •    Finder
    •    Standard Apps: What Can You Really Do With A Mac
    •    Useful Mac OS X Shortcuts
    •    Mac OS X Right-Click

Desktop

If you are fortunate enough to have a 17 inch Macbook Pro, you will have an extremely large desktop that can handle many windows with ease. The smaller counter parts do well, and where they lack “Spaces” picks up the slack. Here is a screen shot of our desktop:

The menu along the top holds access to: important information about your Mac, ability to log out/shutoff/sleep, force quit, dock settings, system preferences, software updates, and apple’s download section. These options are prompted by clicking the Apple logo button on the top left of the screen in the menu.

Along the bottom of the Desktop you will notice the System Dock for Mac OS X. Initially you will see several default applications located here. Here you have the Finder, Mail, Safari, iChat, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb, Calendar, Quicktime, PhotoBooth, System Preferences, and Time Machine. Along those we have “Stacks” that contain the items in your user profiles Documents folder and also the same for your computer downloads. Making it easy and convenient to get to documents and recently acquired materials from the Internet.

The top right of the menu bar has a handy access feature to the items you may need to see/use the most. Namely in this example we have our Bluetooth connection manager, Wireless connection manager, battery status, Day/Time, and Spotlight.

Stacks

Mac OS X has two wonderful shortcuts at the far right of the dock past the separator line. There are three icons total: Documents, Downloads, and Trash. If you click on either the Documents or Downloads folder you will be presented with a "stack" listing of all the documents in those folders. The amount of documents within them depends on the type of stack bubble presented. Below you will notice our document stack is full bodied to exhibit all of our documents.

Finder

Finder helps you find everything you need quickly. With Spotlight integrated right (literally top right) into it, you shouldn’t miss a beat. For those unfamiliar, Spotlight is Mac’s search feature built into its operating system. It is incredibly fast and accurate.

The Finder’s left hand side gives the user quick access to all: Devices (attached), Shared (PC’s, Mac’s and more within your network), Places (custom and default shortcuts to folders where quick access is needed), and Search For (logs your most frequent searches and you can even save searches for quick access).

The top navigation of the Finder allows you to; Move back or Forward through folders, View items as icons, lists, columns or cover flow ( very handy with pics, video, presentations, and yes even pdf’s ), and finally also has the ability to enable actions like “New Folder”.

Examining the left hand side of the menu you will notice four sections: Devices, Shared, Places, and Search For.

The “Devices” section will control and USB or Firewire devices that may be plugged into your Mac. By default you will have iDisk and your local hard drive ( Macintosh HD here). If you have an external hard drive plugged in you would find it here, along with any loaded files like iso’s or dmg’s. In the example below we have plugged in our portable USB hard drive and linked to a shared folder on an external PC on the network to demonstrate.

Notice how each device has a different icon to be able to tell them apart.

The “Shared” section brings up any device located on your network that your Mac should be able to connect to having the proper logon credentials. Here we show a PC we have on our network named, Burner.

The “Places” section comes with a few default folders located there like Desktop, Applications, and the user Home folder. Its convenience allows you to add any folder on your system there for quick access. To add any folder here, simply drag it in from the Finder or the Desktop. Here you can see we have setup quick access icons for our: Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, Sites and two personal folders.

The last section, “Search For” stores searches that you recently queried on your Mac. This feature also enables you to save searches if you would like, and provides you with three very common searches: All Images, All Movies, and All Documents at the click of a button.