Mac Basics

My mum is the proud owner of her first Mac and, as she’s not ex-
pert on the Mac or computers in general, I prepared some guides
for her. With Christmas, I’m sure there are other new users out
there, so I thought they might benefit too from the introduction to a
few of the basics for new Mac users. The following plus even more
help can be found at the Apple website:
http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/

The Grand Tour: Introduction

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is the most technologically advanced operating system Ap-
ple has ever released, but don't let that scare you. While there's a lot of powerful
stuff going on under the hood, Tiger makes it easy for you to work, play, and get
entertainment on your Mac.

If you find a big question mark popping up over your head the moment your Mac
starts up, this is a good place to start. These interface initiation lessons will intro-
duce you to the different pieces that make up the Tiger interface, tell you how to
get around it, and show you how to use the Finder and Finder windows, the Desk-
top, the menu bar, the Dock, the Trash, files and folders, and more.

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 For visual reference, here's a quick guide to the lay of the land—Mac Desktop-wise.

Lesson 1: The Finder—Like rummaging through your drawers and closets, the
Finder is the place to, well, find stuff on your Mac. Learn how to do just that using
the Finder and Finder windows.

Lesson 2: The Desktop—This is your main work area. Learn more about what it is
and how to use it (or abuse it) to your organizational whim.

Lesson 3: The Menu Bar—When you want to make your Mac do something, you
can order a host of commands right off the menu. Learn about the menu bar and
how to command your Mac to do your dirty work.

Lesson 4: The Dock—The Dock is your personal launching pad to open applica-
tions, documents, servers, websites, and more. It's also the place to talk Trash.
We'll show you how to use the Dock and customize it for your daily routine.

Lesson 5: Applications, Files, and Folders (Oh My!)—You're going to use these
things frequently, so get to know what they are. We'll show you how to open and
close applications, files, and folders; get more information about these items; and
do various other tasks that involve them.

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Lesson 1: The Finder
When you first start up your Mac, you're greeted by the Finder, which allows you
to visually access practically everything on your Mac, including applications, hard
disks, files, folders, and CDs. You can use the Finder to organize all your files and
folders as neatly or as messy as you want, search for stuff anywhere on your Mac,
delete things you don't want, and more.

Finder Windows
To see all the goodies on your Mac, double-click the hard disk icon (for the unini-
tiated, an icon is a small graphical representation of an item such as a file, folder,
application, CD, or drive). This opens a Finder window, which allows you to visu-
ally see the hierarchy of your computer's contents.

Finder windows generally include a sidebar on the left side that displays whatever
mounted and accessible volumes you have (such as a hard disk, iDisk, network,
CD, DVD, or iPod) in the top portion. The bottom portion contains your user ac-
count folder (aka Home folder—the folder named after your user account name),
some of the folders found in your Home folder (Desktop, Documents, Movies,
Music, and Pictures), and the Applications folder. This is what it looks like:

To really get an idea about how all these standard Finder window elements function,
select stuff, double-click things, push buttons, and drag things around.
The contents of the selected folder or volume appear in the right pane. Depending
on what view your Finder window is set to, this pane may look a little different
from ours (our window above is shown in icons view). In icons view, you can navi-
gate through your hard disk contents by double-clicking the pretty folders to view
the contents inside.

To go back one folder, click the Back button in the toolbar. To close the window,
click the round, red button in the upper-left corner. If you don't want to close the

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window but want it out of your way, click the round, yellow button to minimize
the window to the Dock. If a window is chock full of stuff, you can resize it by
dragging the lower-right corner to make it bigger, or click the round, green but-
ton to maximize the window's size.

Tip: Want to learn how you can customize the Finder window for your needs? Be
sure to check out "Modify My Windows."
If you'd like to change how folder and volume contents appear in the right pane,
click one of the view buttons in the toolbar. For example, when we click the list
view button, our Finder window magically transforms itself into this:

In list view, the Finder window displays folder or volume contents as a list,
which can be sorted by name, date, kind, or other criteria.
List view enables you to see more content in the window than icons view, and dis-
plays some extra file and folder information, such as the last date the item was
modified, the file size, and what kind of item it is. As in icons view, you can navi-
gate through your stuff by simply double-clicking folders until you find what
you're looking for.

If you'd rather see your stuff displayed in a more hierarchical fashion, click the
columns view button. In columns view, the right pane splits into multiple columns
to display your computer's file and folder organization. Instead of double-clicking
folders to see what's inside, select a folder in any column (click on it once) and its
contents will appear in another column to its right. If you really start digging
down deep into your folder forest, you can drag the bottom-right corner of the
Finder window to expand it and see how many layers you've traveled.

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 In column view, you get a better view of your hard disk's folder hierarchy as you look for stuff.
Getting Around
The hard disk icon represents your computer's hard drive. As we said earlier, you
can access everything on your Mac by double-clicking this icon to open it, and
then opening any subsequent folders to find whatever you're looking for (again,
by double-clicking them). At the top level (aka root level), you'll find the Applica-
tions, Library, System, and Users folders, plus a few others. Both the Library and
System folders contain system-level stuff, so don't mess around with their con-
tents until you fully understand what you're doing.

The Applications folder contains (no surprise) all the applications installed on your
Mac. It also includes a Utilities folder, which contains a bunch of utilities, programs
that are designed to support different functions of your Mac.

The Users folder houses all the content for each user on your Mac; each user gets
a separate Home folder that's named after his or her user account name. Whatever
you do, do not rename your Home folder; doing so can make it impossible for
your Mac to access pertinent resources. The active account's Home folder (the
user who's currently logged in to the computer) displays a little house as its icon
instead of a folder. Each Home folder contains a series of subfolders—Desktop,
Documents, Library, Movies, Music, Pictures, Public, and Sites.

When you put stuff on your Desktop, technically it's being stored in your user ac-
count's Desktop folder, even though to you it appears on your Desktop. When you
bring music into iTunes, your music files get stored in the iTunes folder in your
user's Music folder. Likewise, iPhoto stores pictures in the Pictures folder and
iMovie stores movies in the (everybody now) Movies folder. You can get quick ac-
cess to your user account folders from any Finder window sidebar.

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Find Stuff Fast
Sometimes it can take a little effort to navigate through a lot of folders to find
what you want, but you can find stuff lickety-split using the search field in the
Finder window. This field uses Spotlight technology (in Tiger) to scour any volume
you select. (For more information on using Spotlight, see the "Spotlight" lesson.)

The Finder window's search field uses powerful Spotlight search technology to find anything any-
where.
Just start typing in the search field, and Spotlight dynamically displays results in
the Finder window that match your criteria as you type. You can choose where you
want Spotlight to look by clicking on an item in the header (such as Servers, Com-
puter, Home, and more) that appears just below the search field in the Finder
window. Spotlight will scour the location you select and organize its search results
by kind.

For example, if you wanted to find all the JPEG images on your Mac, type .jpg
(the extension that follows all JPEG image names) in the search field, and you'll
immediately see results pop into the window. Click Computer in the header to find
all JPEGs on your entire hard disk. Not only will Spotlight display thumbnails
(small images) of your JPEG images, it'll also list other things that match your cri-
teria, such as documents that contain the word ”.jpg” in them. You can then ac-
cess the file right from that Finder window.

Files, Folders, Action!

While you'll generally find files and folders in any given Finder window, the win-
dow also features an Action menu, which lets you easily perform commands on a
selected file or folder, such as make a duplicate, dump it in the Trash, or create
an archive for sending.

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 We used the Action menu to instantly view a slideshow of our selected photos.
To access the Action menu, click its button (the one with a gear on it) at the top of
the window; the button turns blue to indicate that it's active, and a menu full of
commands pops open (this is called a pop-up menu). To put it in use, select a file
or folder and then click the Action menu. Choose any action from the menu by
clicking it. If you don't want to choose an Action item, click anywhere outside of
the menu to close it.

Other Ways to Make the Finder Active

Besides double-clicking your hard disk or having the Finder active on start up,
you can make the Finder active by doing any of the following:

• Simply click on the Desktop (that big expanse of onscreen space).

• Double-click any folder icon to open a Finder window.
• Click the Finder icon (it looks like a two-toned blue, rectangular, smiling
face) in the Dock.
• Select any application, file, or folder (click the icon once) in a Finder window
or on the Desktop.

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Lesson 2: The Desktop
That big expanse of space that takes up the majority of your screen real estate is
called the Desktop. This is where you do most of your work; applications, files,
and folders get opened on the Desktop. If you insert a CD or DVD into your Mac,
its icon shows up on the Desktop. When you connect an external hard drive or
iPod, or connect to an iDisk (if you or someone you know has a .Mac account) or
server, the volume mounts on the Desktop. You can also store folders and files on
it too. Here's what our Mac Desktop looks like at the moment:

You can move applications, folders, and files onto your Desktop as long as the move doesn't affect
computer operation (like don't move your iTunes folder out of your Music folder or iTunes won't
work properly).
Think of your Mac Desktop like any standard office or school desktop, though this
one is free of pencil holders, tacky knick-knacks, and coffee ring stains. Then
again, your Mac does contain a variety of familiar desktop accoutrements, includ-
ing sticky notes, a calendar, address book, calculator, and more—we'll introduce
these “widgets” in the "Dashboard" lesson.

When you click on the Desktop, the Finder becomes the active application. Same
thing goes for selecting any item on the Desktop. In other words, if you were, say,
reading email in Mail (the email application that comes with Tiger), Mail would be
the active application. The moment you click on the Desktop, the Finder becomes
active, though Mail will still run in the background.

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Keep Your Desktop Organized
When you first get a Mac, the only thing you'll find on the Desktop is your hard
disk icon. It will always be there—you can't move it anywhere else. If you'd like,
you can store other frequently-used things on your Desktop, though you might
also want to consider creating an alias to the item in the Dock. For example, if you
plan on doing a lot of downloading, you might want to create a folder on the
Desktop (press the Command-Shift-N keys on your keyboard all at once), name it
Downloads, and have Safari (the default web browser in Tiger) download all files
to it.

If you have a few scattered picture files littering your Desktop, either stick them in
your Pictures folder or, if you prefer to keep them on your Desktop, create a new
folder called My Pics (or whatever you want to call it) and move them in there. You
might even want to create new subfolders to organize your pictures by subject.
For organization's sake, try not to put everything you create, save, download, or
move onto the Desktop. The more icons you add to your Desktop collection, the
harder it'll be to try and find files later.

Tip: Check out "The Menu Bar" lesson to find out how to make your Mac organize
and clean up your messy Desktop for you.

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Lesson 3: The Menu Bar
Feast your eyes on the top of your screen. See that white bar that spans across the
entire width of your Desktop? That's the menu bar—a vital component to your
everyday Mac life. Though you can't tell by just looking at it, the menu bar hosts
many functions and commands to complete your tasks at hand.

When you need to accomplish a task, you can access just about any application's
functions, commands, and more from the menu bar.
The menu bar contains some words that represent the menus for the active appli-
cation. The menu bar also contains a few icons on its right side that represent
menus for other features on your Mac, such as Spotlight (the magnifying glass
icon) and sound volume (the speaker icon). When you click a menu, it displays a
sheet (the actual menu) full of menu items. To perform a task or command that's
listed in a menu, just choose the item (click it) and your Mac will perform the deed
(and you didn't even have to flag down a waiter).

What's On the Menu?

While you won't find any decadent desserts or a juicy steak, you will find plenty to
sink your teeth into. The menu bar menus will change as you switch applications.
For example, when the Finder is active, you'll see the following menus across the
menu bar (from left to right): Apple (represented by the Apple logo), Finder, File,
Edit, View, Go, Window, and Help. When you click the Window menu, its menu
displays the following menu items: Minimize, Zoom, Cycle Through Windows, and
Bring All to Front. (Depending on whether or not you have any Finder windows
open, your Window menu may contain a few more items.)

Tip: If you're unsure of what application (including the Finder) is active, look at
the word to the right of the Apple logo in the menu bar.
If a menu item is dimmed (the text isn't black), then that particular item isn't ap-
plicable at that moment. For example, if you currently don't have any Finder win-
dows open and you make the Finder active, all of the items in the Window menu
will be dimmed because you need to have a Finder window open in order to per-
form any of the Window menu commands. If you have a window open, some or all
items in the Window menu will be available, depending on whether a window is
currently selected.

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 Because we didn't have anything in our Trash,
the Empty Trash commands are dimmed in the Finder menu.
Every application you use will have a set of menus with menu items—some more
than others. You'll notice that many applications share the same common com-
mands, such as Save, Select All, Copy, Paste, and Undo. Most applications also use
their own set of specialized commands. For example, iTunes (the music-playing
application included with Tiger) features Controls, Visualizer, and Advanced
menus that contain many functions and commands for controlling iTunes play.

As you learn how to use applications or read any of our how-to articles we pub-
lish on our Service & Support site, you will more than likely come across some in-
structions that have you choosing items from menus, like this:

From the File menu, choose Save.

This means that you need to click on the word "File" in the menu bar to display
the menu, and then click "Save" from the menu. Some menus contain submenus.
For example, in the Finder, the View menu has the menu item "Arrange By," which
has a right-facing triangle to its right. When you move your arrow over Arrange
By, its submenu opens with more items to choose.

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Clean Up My Messy Desktop
OK, let's put some of this knowledge to use. To help get you familiar with how
menus and menu commands work, here's how to clean up your Desktop using
Finder menu commands.

1. To tidy up your files and folders so that they all line up in nice, neat rows,
click on the Desktop to make the Finder active.
2. From the View menu, choose Clean Up.
3. If you want to organize files and folders by name, kind, or other criteria do
this: From the View menu, choose Arrange By, then choose Name or Kind
or another choice in the submenu.

By choosing Name, all items on our Desktop were rearranged in alphabetical order to make
finding things easier.

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Lesson 4: The Dock
The Dock is that bar of icons that sits at the bottom of your screen. It provides
easy access to some of the Apple applications on your Mac (such as Mail, Safari,
iTunes, Address Book, and QuickTime Player), displays which applications are cur-
rently running, and holds windows in their minimized state. It's also the place to
find the Trash (its icon looks like a waste basket). For your convenience, you can
add your own applications, files, and folders to the Dock too.

The Dock gives you quick access to commonly used applications and more;
note the black triangle beneath the running applications (Finder and Dashboard).
To select an item in the Dock, just click its icon. For example, if you want to listen
to some music, click the iTunes icon (the CD icon with green music notes) to open
iTunes. When an application is running, the Dock displays a small black triangle
beneath the application's icon. To make any currently running application the ac-
tive one, click its icon in the Dock to switch to it (the active application's name
appears in the menu bar to the right of the Apple logo).

As you open applications (or open files to launch applications), their respective
icons appear in the Dock, even if they weren't there originally. That means if
you've got a lot of applications open, your Dock will grow substantially. If you
minimize a Finder or application window (click the round, yellow button in the
upper-left corner of any window), the window gets sucked down into the Dock
and lays await in its small iconic state (click this icon to regenerate the window
again).

The Dock keeps applications on its left side, while folders and windows are
housed on its right. If you look closely, you'll see a vertical line that separates
them. If you want to rearrange where the icons appear within their line limits, just
drag a docked icon to another location on the Dock and drop it.

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 This line in the Dock separates the application icons from the file, folder, and minimized window
ones.
When you quit an application whose icon resides in the Dock (such as Safari or
Mail), the little black triangle disappears, but the icon remains. When you quit an
application whose icon doesn't reside in the Dock (for example, you just finished
playing Chess), its icon disappears from the Dock.

Adding and Removing Docked Items

If you want to add an application, file, or folder to the Dock, just drag its icon
from any Finder window (or the Desktop) and drop it on the Dock; the icons in the
Dock will move aside to make room for their new neighbor. The resulting icon
that appears in the Dock is actually an alias of the original item (it's kind of a
bridge to your original item). If you drag an application or file onto the Dock,
you'll be able to open it anytime by simply clicking its docked icon. If you drag a
folder onto the Dock, a Finder window of the folder's contents will display when
you click the folder icon in the Dock.

To get rid of any unwanted item, just toss its likeness off the Dock and watch it disappear in a
poof of smoke.
Of course, you can also kick stuff off the Dock too. To remove an item from the
Dock, just drag its icon off the Dock onto the Desktop; the icon will disappear in a
poof of smoke. Don't worry, you didn't permanently remove the item from your
computer; you simply got rid of its alias. If you're feeling guilty and want that item
back, you can easily locate the application, file, or folder in the Finder, and drag
its icon back into the Dock. Keep in mind that there are a couple things that you
won't be able to remove; namely, the Trash and the Finder.

Tip: You can change where the Dock displays and customize its animated behav-
ior in Dock Preferences. You can learn how to do both in "Customize the Dock."

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Trash Talk
Sure, your Mac has a big enough hard drive to keep just about any pack rat
happy, but you shouldn't get into the mindset of not throwing anything away.
When you need to delete unwanted files, folders, or applications, dump them in
the Trash.

Here's what the Trash looks like when it's empty (left) and when it's got something in it (right).
The Trash functions somewhat like a folder in that you can drag things to it and
then open it to see what's inside. However, when you command the Trash to
empty itself, you can kiss its contents goodbye. To get rid of unwanted items,
simply drag the item from the Finder and drop it onto the Trash icon in the Dock.
The item will remain in the Trash folder (click the Trash icon to view its contents)
until you either move it out of the Trash (if you decide to keep it) or empty it:
From the Finder menu, choose Empty Trash.

If you're dumping sensitive files, such as electronic banking statements, docu-

ments that contain social security numbers or private passwords, or drunken pho-
tos of yourself at the company party, you can choose to have your Mac securely
dump the Trash: From the Finder menu, choose Secure Empty Trash. This makes
your Mac write over your trashed files with tons of code, preventing anyone from
ever recovering it. Keep in mind that this process can take some time, depending
on what you're dumping. If you've got a lot of files to "shred," put it in motion and
then go grab a snack, take a nap, or get some exercise and come back to it later.

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Lesson 5: Applications, Files, and Folders (Oh My!)
By now, you know that all those little icons that litter your Finder windows, Desk-
top, and Dock all mean something, but what? What's the difference between a file
and an application? What's the difference between a photo file and a music file, or
a text file for that matter? If these types of questions are keeping you up at night,
rest assured, you've come to the right place. Here's a look at these three impor-
tant things.

Applications
An application is basically a computer program (aka software) that gives users the
tools to accomplish specific tasks. For example, you're probably using Safari right
now to read this webpage (Safari is a web-browsing application). If you want to
send and get email, you need an email application such as Mail. Want to type up a
resume? Use a word-processing application, such as Pages (part of Apple iWork)
or even TextEdit (part of Tiger).

Your Mac's applications are stored in the (drum roll please...) Applications folder. Here's a look at
some.
To open an application, either double-click its icon in a Finder window (applica-
tions are normally installed in the Applications folder), or click it in the Dock (if
it's there). Depending on the application, it may display an interface window, pal-
ettes, tool bar, or other interface components, or it could display nothing at all
until you open a file or create a new one.

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To quit an application, choose Quit from its application menu (for example,
choose Quit iTunes from the iTunes menu if you want to quit iTunes). Keep in
mind that closing a window (by clicking the round, red button) will typically not
quit the application. Either choose Quit from the application menu or use the
keyboard shortcut: Press the Command key (the one with the Apple logo) and the
Q key simultaneously (Command-Q).

Files and File Formats

A file is an electronic collection of information that requires an application to use.
For example, when you create a resume, say, in TextEdit and save it, you'll get a
text file. When you use iTunes to download music from the iTunes Store, you get
audio files. When you download photos from a digital camera to your Mac, you're
copying over image files.

Files come in many types and formats. Here's a small sample of some of the files you'll find on
your Mac.
Each type of file (whether it's text, audio, image, movie, HTML, project code, zip
compressed, or something else) can come in a different file format. For example,
music that you download from the web could be MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, AIFF,
WAV, or other audio file format; most music-playing applications will support
multiple audio file formats for compatibility. That way, you don't have to pay close
attention to the types of files you're downloading. Think of file formats like ice
cream—you know what you're getting, but the flavor may be different.

Files require an application to use. If you want to read someone's resume, you
need an application that understands the type of file at hand (if the file is a Micro-
soft Word document, you can use Word or Apple Pages; if it's a PDF document,
you can use Preview). If you want to look at your photos, you need an application
that can display them (such as iPhoto or Preview). If you want to read this web-
page (which is an HTML file that's stored on our servers), you need Safari or some
other web-browsing application to interpret the HTML code into familiar lan-
guage.

When you double-click a file, an application opens along with it to support the
file. You can also open files by dragging its icon onto a docked application icon. It
doesn't have to be the application that created the file; it just needs to be one that
understands the file type and format. For example, if you download a movie file
from the Internet and double-click it, QuickTime will open and display the movie
in its QuickTime Player window. More than likely, QuickTime was not the applica-
tion that created this file, but it is one that can play it.

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More than one application can support any given file. For example, if you down-
loaded an MP3 music file, you can play that file in iTunes, QuickTime Player, in a
Finder window, or a TextEdit document.

To close a file, just click the round, red button in the upper-left corner of its win-
dow. Keep in mind that closing a file will not necessarily quit the application too.
To quit an application, choose Quit from the application menu or press
Command-Q.

Folders
Folders on your Mac function just like tangible folders in the real world without
the wear and tear. Basically, you use them to organize your applications and files.

You'll be able to spot folders on your Mac because they look like folders,
though their appearance may differ a little from each other, depending on what they contain.
Your Home folder (the house icon named after your user account name) contains
several subfolders, such as Music, Pictures, and Movies, to help keep all your files
organized by type. The Applications folder contains all your applications, the Sys-
tem folder contains all the technowizardry that makes your Mac a Mac, and the
Desktop folder contains all the stuff that's currently on your Desktop.

If you want to add more folders to set up an organizational scheme, here's how to
create a new folder:

1. Make the Finder active (click the Desktop, click inside any Finder window,
double-click the hard drive, or click the Finder icon in the Dock).

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 2. From the File menu, choose New Folder; a new "untitled folder" icon ap-
pears on the Desktop.
3. Name your folder by simply typing a name in the highlighted text box be-
low the folder icon.
You can now drag any files, folders, and applications that you want into your new
folder, or drag the folder into any other folder to establish a hierarchy.

Get Info
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but that never stopped an inquisitive Mac user.
If you're interested in finding out some information about any particular file, ap-
plication, or folder, command your Mac to Get Info. Here's how.

The Get Info command lets you view more information about a selected file, folder, or application.
1. Select any file, folder, or application by clicking once on its icon.
2. From the File menu, choose Get Info (or press Command-I). An Info win-
dow opens.

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 3. The window lists several info categories (such as General, More Info, Pre-
view, and Ownership & Permissions); these items are marked with a disclo-
sure triangle.
4. If a category has its information displayed, the triangle will be facing down-
wards. If the disclosure triangle is pointing to the right, click it to display
the information. Click the General disclosure triangle to see its contents.
5. The General pane displays some file type information for your chosen item,
including its kind, size, where it's located, the date it was first created, and
the last date it was modified.
6. When you're done scoping things out, close the window (click the round,
red button in the upper-left corner).

Congratulations! You've just completed The Grand Tour of your Mac.

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