Mac Kindergarten

Everybody uses Finder, the file browsing application of Mac OS X, a lot. Let’s look at some handy shortcuts to speed navigation up a little.

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Mac OS X does a great job of providing you with information on the files on your hard drive. Today we will look at how to show all kind of information on your files.

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Every time when you open or save a file, you have to navigate the directories to get to the place where it belongs to. It can take some time until you reach the folder in question or pick an item from a long list of files.

Well, not on a Mac… (more…)

You have all your stuff in your personal home folder, so why keeping the hard disk icon on the Desktop?

You don’t have a home network, so why keep the Shared area in the Finder sidebar?
Let’s get rid of all that stuff. Or let’s get it back (in case we accidently deleted something).

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Our reader Agnes uses an application, which makes use of the F8-F12 keys. By default, these keys are assigned to bring up Spaces, control Exposé and the Dashboard.

However, there is a way, to use these keys as “normal” F-keys in an application. Let’s see how.

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Here we go. Welcome to Mac OS X Leopard!This is pretty much how Mac OS X Leopard looks like after you finished the inital boot of your Mac.

(click thumbnail to enlargen image)

You see the two main things the Desktop.

The menu bar at the top. It always stays there - not matter which program you have open. See the apple-icon to the very left in the menu bar. Click on it to access things like information about your Mac, System Preferences and also to shut down or restart your Mac. On the very right side of the menu bar you see different icons, such as the time, a little speaker (for volume control) and a magnifying glas.

This is Spotlight, which is used to search for all kinds of things on your Mac - files, folders, emails, dictionary entries, etc. We will cover Spotlight later. Of course you can play around with it. Just click on the icon to open the search box and enter something; e.g. “Leopard” (without the quotation marks). Just give it a try.

The Dock at the bottom of the screen. It is used to launch programs and to indicate running programs (you see a blue light-spot below the icon). See also the folders on the right hand side (next to the trash bin). If you click on them, they open up in a nice way. Give it a try now. These two items - menubar and dock is what we will refer to in the future.

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