Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Introduction

Without a doubt, Mac OS X is a stunning technical achievement. In fact, many tech reviewers and experts call it the best personal-computer operating system on earth. But be ware its name.

The X is meant to be a Roman numeral, pronounced "ten." Unfortunately, many people see "Mac OS X" and say "Mac O.S. ex." That's a sure way to get funny looks in public.

Then there's the "Mac OS" part—what a misnomer! Apple designed Mac OS X to look something like the old Mac system software, and certain features have been written to work like they used to. But all of that is just an elaborate fake-out. Mac OS X is an utterly new creation.

If you've never used a computer before, none of this matters. You have nothing to unlearn. You'll find an extremely simple, beautifully designed desktop waiting for you.

But if you're one of the millions of people who have grown accustomed to Windows or the traditional Mac OS, Mac OS X may come as a bit of a shock. Hundreds of features you thought you knew have been removed, replaced, or relocated. (If you ever find yourself groping for an old, favorite feature, see Appendixes C and D—the "Where'd it go?" dictionaries for Mac OS 9 and Windows refugees.)

Why did Apple throw out the operating system that made it famous to begin with? Well, through the years, as Apple piled new features onto a software foundation originally poured in 1984, performing nips and tucks to the ancient software to make it resemble something modern, the original foundation was beginning to creak. Programmers (and some users) com plained of the "spaghetti code" that the Mac OS had become.

Apple felt that there wasn't much point in undertaking a dramatic system-software overhaul if they couldn't master every key feature of modern computer technology in the process, especially crash-proofness. Starting from scratch—and jettisoning the system software we'd come to know over the years—was the only way to do it.

What's New in Tiger

Mac OS X 10.4, affectionately known as Tiger, only builds on the successes of previous Mac OS X versions. You still don't have to worry about viruses, spyware, or Service Pack releases that take up a Saturday afternoon to install and fine-tune. And you'll still enjoy stability that would make the you of 1999 positively drool; your Mac may go for months or years without a system crash.

That's because underneath the gorgeous, translucent desktop of Mac OS X is Unix, the industrial-strength, rock-solid OS that drives many a Web site and university. It's not new by any means; in fact, it's decades old, and has been polished by generations of programmers. That's the very reason Steve Jobs and his team chose it as the basis for the NeXT operating system (which Jobs worked on during his twelve years away from Apple), which Apple bought in 1997 to turn into Mac OS X.

So what is new in Tiger? Apple says it added 200 new features. But it also took some things away, rejiggered others, and generally fine-tuned the whole affair. For example:

• Big-ticket features. By far the most hyped new features in Tiger are Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator.

• Spotlight is a new, permanent menu that lets you search just about everything on your Mac with one click (or one keystroke): files, folders, programs, calendar appointments, email messages, photo keywords, PDF and word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Safari bookmarks, music files, and much more. You can even save a Spotlight search as a smart folder in the Finder, which is a continuously self-updating folder whose contents match criteria you specify. Chapter 3 is dedicated to this huge new feature.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: All About "Tiger"

  What's this business about Tiger?

  Most software companies develop their wares in secret, using code names for new products to throw outsiders off the scent. Apple's code names for Mac OS X and its descendants have been named after big cats: Mac OS X was Cheetah, 10.1 was Puma, 10.2 was Jaguar, and 10.3 was Panther. Apple has even announced that 10.5 (late 2006 or early 2007) will be called Leopard.

  Usually, the code name is dropped as soon as the product is complete, whereupon the marketing department gives it a new name. In Mac OS X's case, though, Apple thinks that its cat names are cool enough to retain for the finished product.

  You do have to wonder what Apple plans to call future versions. Apple increases only the decimal point with each major upgrade, which means it has five big cats to go before it hits Mac OS XI.

  Let's see: Bobcat, Cougar, Lion…Tiger…um…Ocelot?

• Dashboard, meanwhile, is an intriguing strike back against the juggernaut of software bloat. You press a key, and your screen fills with tiny, dedicated-purpose mini-programs that display and process useful information, often from the Web. Apple starts you off with 14 of these so-called widgets—a calculator, weather forecaster, units converter, stock tracker, and so on—but the real magic of Dashboard is how easy it is for programmers to write new ones. Hundreds of new widgets are available for quick, free download to add to your Dashboard collection. Details are in Chapter 5.

  Not nearly as many people will use Automator daily, but it's a fascinating attempt to let you write your own macros–self-running software robots–without making you learn any code. AppleScript was already an easy-to-use programming language, but it was still a language; Automator (the subject of Chapter 8) lets you build a sequence of actions just by dragging tiles into the right order.

• Security. In an age when viruses and hackers are taking all the fun out of PCs, it's great to be on Mac OS X. To date, not a single Mac OS X virus has emerged—partly because the Mac represents a smaller "audience" for virus writers, and partly because the Mac's technical plumbing is more difficult to penetrate.

  In Tiger, Apple has capitalized on Mac OS X's reputation for security. The built-in firewall can now make your Mac completely invisible on the Net—hidden even from evildoers' silent "ping" commands—and a new log file tracks who's trying to break in. New messages alert you when you're downloading something that could contain virus code, and dozens of smaller tweaks make things like System Preferences and software installations even more fortified against spyware. There's even a built-in password-suggestion maker.

  UP TO SPEED: Extremely Quartz

  When you use Fast User Switching to change accounts, your entire screen appears to rotate off the monitor to the left, as though it's on the face of a giant cube.

  You're witnessing Mac OS X's powerful graphics technologies at work—Quartz Extreme (for two-dimensional graphics) and OpenGL (for three-dimensional graphics). These are the same technologies that give you smooth-looking (antialiased) lettering everywhere on the screen, translucence (of open menus, the Dock, and other onscreen elements), smoothly crossfading slideshows in iPhoto and the screen saver, and the ability to turn any document on the screen into an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file (Section 14.5.2.2).

  Quartz Extreme works by offloading graphics calculations to your Mac's video card to make them even faster.

  Note, though, that not all Macs benefit from Quartz Extreme. Your Mac's video card must be on The List: GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, and GeForce4 Ti cards, or any "AGP-based ATI Radeon" card. Unfortunately, this list excludes colored iBook models, the white iBooks sold in 2001 and 2002, G3 desktops, early G4 desktops, some fruit-colored iMac models, and older PowerBooks.

• Parental controls. You, the wise authority figure, can now specify which e-mail correspondents, chat buddies, Web sites and even programs are OK for your children.

• The Finder. You can start a full-screen slideshow right in the Finder, using any random assortment of graphics as your raw material. Burning CDs and DVDs now takes up much less time and disk space, thanks to burn folders that store only aliases of the stuff you want to burn.

  UP TO SPEED: Mac OS X: The Buzzword-Compliant Operating System

  You can't read an article about Mac OS X without hearing certain technical buzzwords that were once exclusively the domain of computer engineers. Apple is understandably proud that Mac OS X offers all of these sophisticated, state-of-the-art operating system features. Unfortunately, publicizing them means exposing the rest of us to a lot of fairly unnecessary geek terms. Here's what they mean:

  Preemptive multitasking. Most people know that multitasking means "doing more than one thing at once." For years, Macs have been capable of making a printout, downloading a file, and letting you type away in a word processor, all at the same time.

  Unfortunately, the Mac OS 7/8/9 (and Windows 95/98/Me) version of multitasking works by the rule of the playground: the bully gets what he wants. If one of your programs insists on hogging the attention of your Mac's processor (because it's crashing, for example), it leaves the other programs gasping for breath. This arrangement is called cooperative multitasking. Clearly, it works only if your programs are in fact cooperating with each other.

  Mac OS X's preemptive multitasking system brings a teacher to the playground to make sure that every program gets a fair amount of time from the Mac's processor. The result is that the programs get along much better, and a poorly written or crashing program isn't permitted to send the other ones home crying.

  Multithreading. Multithreading means "doing more than one thing at once," too, but in this case it's referring to a single program. Even while iMovie is rendering (processing) a special effect, for example, it lets you continue editing at the same time. Not all Mac OS 9 programs offered this feature, but all programs written especially for Mac OS X do. (Note, however, that programs that are simply adapted for Mac OS X–"Carbonized" software, as described on Section 5.3–don't necessarily offer this feature.)

  Symmetrical multiprocessing. Macs containing more than one processor chip are nothing new. But before Mac OS X, only specially written software–Adobe Photoshop filters, for example–benefited from the speed boost.

  No more. Mac OS X automatically capitalizes on multiple processors, sharing the workload of multiple programs (or even multithreaded tasks within a single program), meaning that every Mac OS X program gets accelerated. Mac OS X is smart enough to dole out processing tasks evenly, so that both (or all) of your processors are being put to productive use.

  Dynamic memory allocation. Mac OS X programs don't have fixed RAM allotments. The operating system giveth and taketh away your programs' memory in real time, so that no RAM is wasted. For you, this system means better stability, less hassle.

  Memory protection. In Mac OS X, every program runs in its own indestructible memory bubble–another reason Mac OS X is so much more stable than its predecessors. If one program crashes, it isn't allowed to poison the well of RAM that other programs might want to use. Programs may still freeze or quit unexpectedly; the world will never be entirely free of sloppy programmers. But instead of a message that says, "Save open documents and restart," you'll be delighted to find that you can go right on working. You can even open up the program that just died and get back to work.

• Underlying technologies. Some of the most deep-seated changes are under the hood. New software chunks called Core Image and Core Video provide software companies with ready-to-use image- and video-processing features; as time goes by, that will save the software companies time and keep these controls consistent across more of your programs.

• QuickTime 7 comes with Tiger, too; it offers a redesigned QuickTime Player and a new compression scheme called H.264, which offers spectacular video quality at relatively compact sizes. (And hallelujah!—you no longer have to tell QuickTime how fast your Internet connection is. It figures that out all by itself.)

• VoiceOver is a feature that few will use, but it's an enormous step forward for the vision impaired. It's a full-blown screen reader that tells you exactly what software features are on the screen at the moment—and lets you operate them entirely from the keyboard.

• Web browsing. Safari, the Mac's Web browser, has taken a huge leap forward. Now you can save a Web page to your hard drive, graphics and all, as a single convenient icon; email a complete Web page to somebody; and, at your option, enter Private Browsing mode, where Safari records no trace (cookies, History list, passwords) of your activity. Safari can also read the exciting new Internet news format known as RSS, in which headlines from all your favorite Web sites appear in a single, tidy summary list. Chapter 21 offers a complete crash course in RSS—and Safari.

• Email. Apple's Mail program has been cosmetically overhauled. Little nips and tucks are welcome, too, like the ability to add a photo you've been sent directly to your copy of iPhoto. Smart Mailboxes give you self-updating email folders based on criteria you specify; you can have a different signature for each email account; you can flag messages by priority; and more.

• Tiger programs. Perhaps the least publicized new Tiger feature is the upgrades Apple made to the 50 accessory programs that come with the Mac.

  For example, iChat has always permitted free, long-distance phone calls and even video calls over the Internet—but now, if you have a fast Mac and a high-speed Internet connection, ten people can have an audio conference call, and four can join in a video conference. And iChat is now compatible with Jabber, a popular open-source chat program for Mac, Windows, Unix, Linux, Palm organizers, PocketPCs, and so on.

  The TextEdit word processor can now create simple tables, which helps with its other big-ticket upgrade: TextEdit can now save documents as HTML files, meaning that you can use it as a bare-bones Web-design program. Preview doesn't just show you graphics files; it has built-in image editing (like color correction) and slideshow features, too. It's always been a great PDF reader (like Adobe Acrobat Reader), and now you can annotate PDF documents with comments and ovals.

  In addition to Dashboard and Automator, the other brand-new additions to the Applications folder are Dictionary (a full-blown, illustrated dictionary/thesaurus that you can summon at a keystroke) and Grapher, a stunning two- and three- dimensional graphing calcuator. Font Book, Image Capture, Address Book, iCal, DVD Player, and AppleScript have all been improved in tweaky little ways, too; you'll read about them in Chapters 8, 10, and 20.

  Touch-ups. By far the biggest category of changes is Tiger is the one called Miscellaneous.

  For example, Mac OS X's faxing feature is more mature now; at least it now offers a log that shows which faxes successfully went through. Thanks to a new button in the Print dialog box, you can do more with a document than turn it into a PDF file; you can also encrypt a PDF, email a PDF, or add a PDF to your iPhoto library. And talk about brilliant: One last command in that same menu lets you save a PDF copy of the open document into a new Web receipts folder, which is perfect for keeping records of stuff you buy online.

  System Preferences has a Search box, so you can find a certain setting without having to know which System Preferences pane to click. (On the other hand, the System Preferences toolbar is gone, so you can't build a row of your favorite icons.)

  NOSTALGIA CORNER: What Mac OS X Takes Away

  If you're coming to Mac OS X from Mac OS 9, you don't just have to learn about new features; you also have to unlearn a good deal of what you worked so hard to master in the older system.

  Fortunately, most of the obsolete practices are troubleshooting rituals. For example:

  Extension conflicts. The number one destabilizing factor of the traditional Macintosh has been banished forever: Mac OS X doesn't use system extensions and control panels. You will never again perform an extension conflict test, trying to figure out which extension is making your Mac freeze. None of those habitual routines has any meaning in Mac OS X.

  Memory controls. There's no Memory control panel in Mac OS X. Nor does the Get Info window for Mac OS X programs include a place to change its memory allotment. This is great news.

  Mac OS X manages memory quickly, intelligently, and constantly. The reason you don't allot a certain amount of your Mac's memory to a program, as you had to do in Mac OS 9, is that Mac OS X simply gives each running program as much memory as it needs. And if you undertake some task that requires more memory, Mac OS X instantly gives that program more memory on the fly.

  Rebuilding the desktop. Mac OS X doesn't have the unfortunate habit of holding onto the icons (in its internal database) of programs long since deleted from your hard drive. As a result, you never have to rebuild that desktop, and you'll never see the symptoms that suggest that it's time for desktop rebuilding (a general slowdown and generic icons replacing the usual custom ones).

  The menu. You'll still find an

  

  menu in Mac OS X, but it's no longer a place to store aliases of your favorite files and folders. Instead, it lists commands like Restart and Shut Down, which are relevant no matter what program you're using.

  The Control Strip. This handy floating strip of tiles is gone, too. Its replacement is the set of menulets in the upper-right corner of the screen, on the menu bar. This is now where you make quick control panel settings, like adjusting the volume, checking your laptop battery charge, and so on.

  Finally, remember that some features aren't actually gone–they've just been moved. Before you panic, consult Appendix C for a neat, alphabetical list of every traditional Mac feature and its status in the new operating system.

  A new button in System Preferences lets you reassign or disable the functions of your ⌘, Option, Caps Lock, and Control keys, which is useful if (a) you find yourself turning on Caps Lock a lot by accident, or (b) you're a hard-core Unix geek whose pinky always complained that the Control key on a Mac keyboard isn't in the right place.

  In other news, you can finally make the cursor bigger, which is a huge help for people with giant, high-resolution screens. You can use an iSight camera as a microphone for recording and speech recognition now, too.

The complete list of changes in Mac OS X 10.4 would fill a book—in fact, you're holding it. But some of the nicest changes aren't so much new features as renewals. Tiger comes with an even more full-blown collection of printer drivers, for example, and the latest versions of its underlying Unix security and Internet software.