Lion is the world’s first download-only mainstream operating system, as Appendix A makes clear. In other words, you don’t get a single page of printed instructions.
To find your way around, you’re expected to use Apple’s online help system. And as you’ll quickly discover, these help pages are tersely written, offer very little technical depth, lack useful examples, and provide no tutorials whatsoever. You can’t even mark your place, underline, or read them in the bathroom.
The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied Mac OS X—version 10.7 in particular.
Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate readers at every technical level. The primary discussions are written for advanced-beginner or intermediate Mac fans. But if you’re a Mac first-timer, miniature sidebar articles called Up To Speed provide the introductory information you need to understand the topic at hand. If you’re a Mac veteran, on the other hand, keep your eye out for similar shaded boxes called Power Users’ Clinic. They offer more technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts.
When you write a book like this, you do a lot of soul-searching about how much stuff to cover. Of course, a thinner book, or at least a thinner-looking one, is always preferable; plenty of readers are intimidated by a book that dwarfs the Tokyo White Pages.
On the other hand, Apple keeps adding features and rarely takes them away. So if this book is to remain true to its goal—serving as the best possible source of information about every aspect of Mac OS X—it isn’t going to get any thinner.
Even so, some chapters come with free downloadable appendixes—PDF documents, available on this book’s “Missing CD” page—that go into further detail on some of the tweakiest features. (You’ll see references to them sprinkled throughout the book.)
Maybe this idea will save a few trees—and a few back muscles when you try to pick this book up.
Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual is divided into six parts, each containing several chapters:
Part One, covers everything you see on the screen when you turn on a Mac OS X computer: the Dock, the Sidebar, Spotlight, Dashboard, Spaces, Mission Control, Launchpad, Time Machine, icons, windows, menus, scroll bars, the Trash, aliases, the
menu, and so on.Part Two, is dedicated to the proposition that an operating system is little more than a launchpad for programs—the actual applications you use in your everyday work, such as email programs, Web browsers, word processors, graphics suites, and so on. These chapters describe how to work with applications in Mac OS X: how to launch them, switch among them, swap data between them, use them to create and open files, and control them using the AppleScript and Automator automation tools.
Part Three, is an item-by-item discussion of the individual software nuggets that make up this operating system—the 29 panels of System Preferences, and the 50-some programs in your Applications and Utilities folders.
Part Four, treads in more advanced territory. Networking, file sharing, and screen sharing are, of course, tasks Mac OS X was born to do. These chapters cover all of the above, plus the prodigious visual talents of Mac OS X (fonts, printing, graphics, handwriting recognition), its multimedia gifts (sound, speech, movies), and the Unix that lies beneath. If you’re feeling particularly advanced, you’ll also find instructions on using Mac OS X’s Unix underpinnings.
Part Five, covers all the Internet features of Mac OS X, including the Mail email program and the Safari Web browser/RSS reader; iChat for instant messaging and audio or video chats; Web sharing; Internet sharing; Apple’s free, online iCloud services; and connecting to, and controlling, your Mac from across the wires—FTP, SSH, VPN, and so on.
Part Six. This book’s appendixes include a Windows-to-Mac dictionary (to help Windows refugees find the new locations of familiar features in Mac OS X); guidance on installing this operating system; a troubleshooting handbook; and a thorough master list of all the keyboard shortcuts and trackpad/mouse gestures in Lion.
Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Open the System folder→Libraries→Fonts folder.” That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this: “On your hard drive, you’ll find a folder called System. Open that. Inside the System folder window is a folder called Libraries; double-click it to open it. Inside that folder is yet another one called Fonts. Double-click to open it, too.”
Similarly, this kind of arrow shorthand helps to simplify the
business of choosing commands in menus, such as →Dock→Position on Left.
To get the most out of this book, visit www.missingmanuals.com. Use the “Missing CD-ROM” to reveal a neat, organized, chapter-by-chapter list of the shareware and freeware mentioned in this book.
The Web site also offers corrections and updates to the book. (To see them, click the book’s title, and then click View/Submit Errata.) In fact, please submit such corrections and updates yourself! In an effort to keep the book as up to date and accurate as possible, each time O’Reilly prints more copies of this book, I’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. I’ll also note such changes on the Web site so that you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And I’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more Mac OS 10.7 updates.
Get Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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