Launchpad

All right. It’s Monday morning. Yawn, stretch, fluff your hair (if any).

You want to start with a quick Web check. And for that, you’ll need Safari, the Mac’s Web browser.

  1. Put four fingers on the trackpad (thumb and three fingers), and pinch them inward toward the center.

    If you have a Magic Mouse, just click Launchpad on the Dock.

    Your screen goes dark and fills up with what looks like the Home screen on the iPhone or iPad. You’ve just opened the new Launchpad. Here are the icons of all your Mac’s programs, evenly spaced, arrayed (if there are lots of them) on multiple “pages.” Figure 0-1 shows the idea.

    Note

    The four-finger pinch gesture opens Launchpad only on trackpads. If you don’t have one, click the Launchpad icon on the Dock instead. It looks like a rocket ship ().

    Launchpad is a new app that displays all of your programs’ icons at once, neatly spaced and ready to open with a single click. To see more pages full of icons, swipe left or right with two fingers on your trackpad (or with one finger on your Magic Mouse).

    Figure 0-1. Launchpad is a new app that displays all of your programs’ icons at once, neatly spaced and ready to open with a single click. To see more pages full of icons, swipe left or right with two fingers on your trackpad (or with one finger on your Magic Mouse).

    Suppose, for the sake of this exercise, that you can’t find the Safari icon. It’s on a different page.

  2. With two fingers on the trackpad, swipe left or right to change “pages.” Stop when you spot Safari.

    If you have a Magic Mouse, swipe left or right with one finger.

    Tip

    This same gesture—swiping left or right—also works as Back or Forward in Safari.

    You could, if you like, customize Launchpad just as you would on an iPhone or iPad. You can drag the icons around, put them on different pages, combine them into folders, or delete them. (See Launchpad.) For now, you just want to open the Web browser.

  3. Click the Safari icon once.

    That’s one difference between opening a program in Launchpad (one click) and in your Applications folder (two clicks).

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