You can’t help reacting, one way or another, to the futuristic, sleek looks of Mac OS X the first time you arrive at its desktop. There’s the Dock, looking photo-realistic and shiny on its 3-D mirrored shelf. There are those Finder windows, slick and textureless with their gentle gradient-gray title bars. And then there’s the shimmering, continually morphing backdrop of the desktop itself.
This chapter shows you how to use and control these most dramatic elements of Mac OS X.
For years, most operating systems maintained two lists of programs. One listed unopened programs until you needed them, like the Start menu (Windows) or the Launcher (Mac OS 9). The other kept track of which programs were open at the moment for easy switching, like the taskbar (Windows) or the Application menu (Mac OS 9).
In Mac OS X, Apple combined both functions into a single strip of icons called the Dock.
Apple’s thinking goes like this: Why must you know whether or not a program is already running? That’s the computer’s problem, not yours. In an ideal world, this distinction should be irrelevant. A program should appear when you click its icon, whether it’s open or not.
“Which programs are open” already approaches unimportance in Mac OS X, where sophisticated memory-management features make it hard to run out of memory. You can have dozens of programs open at once in Mac OS X.
And that’s why the Dock combines the launcher and status functions of a modern operating system. Only a tiny white reflective dot beneath a program’s icon tells you that it’s open.
Apple has made it as easy as possible to learn to like the Dock. You can customize the thing to within an inch of its life, use it to control and manipulate windows in elaborate ways, or even get rid of it completely. This section explains everything you need to know.
Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you’ll enjoy: Dashboard, Quick-Time Player, iTunes, iChat, Mail, the Safari Web browser, and so on. But using your Mac without putting your own favorite icons in the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the Dock your own.
The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it (Figure 4-1) is installed there as a button. You can even drag an open window onto the Dock—a Microsoft Word document you’re editing, say—using its proxy icon (Zoom Button) as a handle.
A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, programs, and Internet bookmarks that you access frequently.
Tip
You can install batches of icons onto the Dock all at once—just drag them as a group. That’s something you can’t do with the other parking places for favorite icons, like the Sidebar and the Finder toolbar.
Figure 4-1. To add an icon to the Dock, simply drag it there. You haven’t moved the original file; when you release the mouse, it remains where it was. You’ve just installed a pointer—like a Macintosh alias or a Windows shortcut.
Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:
It has two sides. See the grayish dotted line running down the Dock? That’s the divider (Figure 4-1). Everything on the left side is an application—a program. Everything else goes on the right side: files, documents, folders, disks, and minimized windows.
It’s important to understand this division. If you try to drag an application to the right of the line, for example, Mac OS X teasingly refuses to accept it. (Even aliases observe that distinction. Aliases of applications can go only on the left side, and vice versa.)
Its icon names are hidden. To see the name of a Dock icon, point to it without clicking. You’ll see the name appear above the icon.
When you’re trying to find a certain icon in the Dock, run your cursor slowly across the icons without clicking; the icon labels appear as you go. You can often identify a document just by looking at its icon.
Folders and disks pop up to show what’s inside. If you click a folder or disk icon on the right side of the Dock, a list of its contents sprouts from the icon. It’s like X-ray vision without the awkward moral consequences. Turn the page for details.
Programs appear there unsolicited. Nobody but you (and Apple) can put icons on the right side of the Dock. But program icons appear on the left side of the Dock automatically whenever you open a program, even one that’s not listed in the Dock. Its icon remains there for as long as it’s running.
Tip
The Dock’s translucent, reflective look is something to behold. Some people actually find it too translucent. But using TinkerTool, you can tone down the Dock’s translucence—a great way to show off at user group meetings. See TinkerTool: Customization 101 for details.
GEM IN THE ROUGH: Living Icons
Mac OS X brings to life a terrific idea, a new concept in mainstream operating systems: icons that tell you something. If the Dock is big enough, you can often tell documents apart just by looking at their icons.
Some program icons even change over time. The Mail icon, for example (Chapter 19), bears a live counter that indicates how many new email messages are waiting for you. (After all, why should you switch into the Mail program if you’ll only be disappointed?) The iChat icon lets you know how many chat responses are waiting. You can make your Activity Monitor graph (Utilities: Your Mac OS X Toolbox) show up right on its icon. Toast illustrates the progress of a disc you’re burning. And if you minimize a QuickTime movie while it’s playing, it shrinks down and continues playing right there in the Dock.
Think of the possibilities. One day the Safari icon could change to let you know when interesting new Web pages have appeared, the Quicken icon could display your current bank balance, and the Microsoft Word icon could change every time Microsoft posts a bug fix.
You can move the tiles of the Dock around by dragging them horizontally. As you drag, the other icons scoot aside to make room. When you’re satisfied with its new position, drop the icon you’ve just dragged.
To remove a Dock icon, just drag it away. (You can’t remove the icons of the Finder, the Trash, or any minimized document window.) Once your cursor has cleared the Dock, release the mouse button. The icon disappears in a charming little puff of animated smoke. The other Dock icons slide together to close the gap.
Tip
You can replace the “puff of smoke” animation with one of your own, as described on Replacing the Poof.
Something weird happens if you drag away a Dock program’s icon while that program is running. You don’t see any change immediately, because the program is still open. But when you quit the program, you see that its previously installed icon is no longer in the Dock.
When you click a disk or folder icon on the Dock, you’ll witness one of Snow Leopard’s most enhanced features. The effect is shown in Figure 4-2.
In essence, Mac OS X is fanning out the folder’s contents so you can see all of them. If it could talk, it would be saying, “Pick a card, any card.”
Tip
You can change how the icons in a particular stack are sorted: alphabetically, chronologically, or whatever. Use the “Sort by” section of the shortcut menu (Figure 4-2, top left).
In principle, of course, pop-up folders are a great idea, because they save you time and clicking. Click a folder to see what’s in it; click the icon you want inside; and you’re off and running, without having had to open, manage, and close a window.
In practice, Apple has had a dickens of a time getting this feature to work. Over the generations of Mac OS X, this feature has changed, reverted, and changed again. (In the beginning, these pop-up balloons were called Stacks; nowadays, Apple reserves that name for a Dock folder whose icon changes to resemble what was last put into it, as described below.)
In Snow Leopard, pop-up folders are finally worth another look, thanks to two important tweaks:
Scroll bars. If there are too many icons to fit in the pop-up contents list, you can scroll through them; you don’t have to jump into their Finder window to do that.
Hierarchical folders. Now you can click a folder in the contents display to see what’s inside it, as shown in Figure 4-2.
Anyway, here’s how to operate pop-up Dock folders.
When you click a disk or folder icon on the Dock, you see its contents, arrayed in your choice of three displays:
Figure 4-2. What happens when you click a folder in the Dock? You see its contents in one of three views. Top left: Here’s how you choose which view you want: Fan, Grid, List, or Automatic. In List view, the folder contents appear as a menu; you can “drill down” into subfolders, and you open something by choosing its name. Top right: In Fan view, click an icon to open it. Bottom: In Grid view, many more icons appear than can fit in Fan view.
Fan. The fan is a single, gently curved column of icons that pops out of the disk or folder icon. It’s ideal for folders that contain very few icons, because there’s room for only a handful of items in a fan (the exact number depends on your screen size). After the first few, you see only a “31 more in Finder” button, which you can click to see everything in that folder—but now you’ve wasted time, not saved it.
Grid. If you’ve set a folder to open as a grid, you get to see the icons in a big rectangular window. File names often get abbreviated because there’s not enough horizontal room, but you get to see many more icons this way. Actually, thanks to the scroll bar (or the type-selecting trick described on the facing page), you get to see all the icons this way.
Tip
A cool white-ghostly-highlighting effect is available, which makes it easier to see which icon you’re pointing to as you move your mouse around in a grid or fan. To make it appear, click-and-hold a folder on the Dock—and then, without releasing the mouse, slide onto the grid or fan. The highlighting follows your cursor.
Alternatively, as soon as the grid or fan appears, press the arrow keys on your keyboard to move from icon to icon—complete with ghostly selection square.
List. If you don’t care about seeing the actual icons, you can also opt for a simple list of the folder’s contents, like a pop-up menu. After all, if the folder contains nothing but a bunch of identical-looking audio or database icons, then seeing their icons isn’t going to help you much—and a list appears much faster than a fan or a grid does.
There’s no scroll bar in a list balloon, but you can scroll the list nonetheless just by pointing to the top or bottom of it with your mouse. And, again, you can type-select as described below.
Tip
The List view also displays a little → to the right of each folder within the Dock folder. That is, it’s a hierarchical list, meaning that you can burrow into folders within folders, all from the original Dock icon, all without opening a single new window. You can stick your entire Home folder, or even your whole hard drive icon, onto the Dock; now you have complete menu access to everything inside, right from the Dock.
Automatic. There’s a fourth option in the shortcut menu for a Dock folder, too: Automatic. If you turn this on, then Mac OS X chooses either Fan or Grid view, depending on how many icons are in the folder.
So how do you choose which display you want? Control-click (or right-click) the Dock folder’s icon, and make a selection from the shortcut menu. Each disk or folder icon remembers its own fan/grid/list setting.
Those were the basics of pop-up Dock folders. Here’s the advanced course:
Ever-Changing Folder-Icon Syndrome (ECFIS). When you add a folder or disk icon to the Dock, you might notice something wildly disorienting: Its icon keeps changing to resemble whatever you most recently put into it. For example, your Downloads folder might look like an Excel spreadsheet icon today, a PDF icon tonight, or a photo tomorrow—but never a folder. The annoying part is that you can’t get to know a folder by its icon.
Fortunately, this problem is easy to fix. Control-click (or right-click) the Dock folder. From the shortcut menu, in the “Display as” section, you can choose either Folder (which looks like a folder forever) or Stack (which changes to reflect its contents).
Ready-made pop-up folders. When you install Mac OS X 10.6, you get a couple of starter Dock folders, just to get you psyched. One is Downloads; the other is Documents. (Both of these folders are physically inside your Home folder. But you may well do most of your interacting with them on the Dock.)
The Downloads folder collects three kinds of Internet arrivals: files you download from the Web using Safari, files you receive in an iChat file-transfer session, and file attachments you get via email using Mail. Unless you intervene, they’re sorted by the date you downloaded them.
It’s handy to know where to find your downloads, and nice not to have them all cluttering your desktop.
Tip
Once you’ve opened a stack’s fan or grid, you can drag any of the icons right out of the fan or grid. Just drag your chosen icon onto the desktop or into any visible disk or folder. In other words, what lands in the Downloads folder doesn’t have to stay there. (You can’t drag out of a list, however.)
Hierarchical folders. The fans and grids are hierarchical—that is, you can drill down from their folders into their folders. Figure 4-3 makes this concept clearer.
Tip
Figure 4-3 shows you how to open a folder in a grid or fan using the mouse—but you can do it all from the keyboard, too. Once a folder is selected, press Return, ⌘-O, or ⌘-↓ to see what’s inside it; press ⌘-↑ to backtrack to the original display. When a folder is highlighted, you can press ⌘-Return to open it in a Finder window; add the Option key to open that Finder window without closing the grid or fan.
Type selecting. Once a list, fan, or grid is on the screen, you can highlight any icon in it by typing the first few letters of its name. For example, once you’ve popped open your Applications folder, you can highlight Safari by typing sa. (Press Enter or Return to open the highlighted icon.)
Two ways to bypass the pop-up. If you just want to see what’s in a folder, without all the graphic overkill of the fan or the grid, then Control-click (right-click) the Dock folder’s icon and choose “Open ‘Applications’” (or whatever the folder’s name is) from the shortcut menu. You go straight to the corresponding window.
Actually, if you really value your time, you’ll learn the shortcut: Option-⌘-click the Dock folder’s icon. That accomplishes the same thing.
(You jump immediately to the window that contains that folder’s icon. That’s not exactly the same thing as opening the Dock folder, but it’s sometimes even more useful.)
The bottom of the screen isn’t necessarily the ideal location for the Dock. All Mac screens are wider than they are tall, so the Dock eats into your limited vertical screen space. You have three ways out: Hide the Dock, shrink it, or rotate it 90 degrees.
To turn on the Dock’s auto-hiding feature, choose 
→Dock→Turn Hiding On (or press Option-⌘-D).
Tip
You also find this on/off switch when you choose →Dock→Dock Preferences (Figure 4-4), or when you click the System Preferences icon in the Dock, and then the Dock icon. (Chapter 9 contains much more about the System Preferences program.)
When the Dock is hidden, it doesn’t slide into view until you move the cursor to the Dock’s edge of the screen. When you move the cursor back to the middle of the screen, the Dock slithers out of view once again. (Individual Dock icons may occasionally shoot upward into Desktop territory when a program needs your attention—cute, very cute—but otherwise, the Dock lies low until you call for it.)
On paper, an auto-hiding Dock is ideal; it’s there only when you summon it. In practice, however, you may find that the extra half-second the Dock takes to appear and disappear makes this feature slightly less appealing.
Many Mac fans prefer to hide and show the Dock at will by pressing the hide/show keystroke, Option-⌘-D. This method makes the Dock pop on and off the screen without requiring you to move the cursor.
Depending on your screen’s size, you may prefer smaller or larger Dock buttons. The official way to resize them goes like this: Choose →Dock→Dock Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, drag the Dock size slider, as shown in Figure 4-4.
Figure 4-4. To find a comfortable setting for the magnification slider, choose →Dock →Dock Preferences. Leave the Dock Preferences window open on the screen, as shown here. After each adjustment of the Dock size slider, try out the Dock (which still works when the Dock Preferences window is open) to test your new settings.
There’s a much faster way to resize the Dock, though: Just position your cursor carefully in the Dock’s divider line so that it turns into a double-headed arrow (shown in Figure 4-5). Now drag up or down to shrink or enlarge the Dock.
Tip
If you press Option as you drag, the Dock snaps to certain canned icon sizes—those that the programmer actually drew. (You won’t see the in-between sizes that Mac OS X generally calculates on the fly.)
Figure 4-5. Look closely—you can see the secret cursor that resizes the Dock. If you don’t see any change in the Dock size as you drag upward, you’ve reached the size limit. The Dock’s edges are already approaching your screen’s sides.
As noted in Figure 4-5, you may not be able to enlarge the Dock, especially if it contains a lot of icons. But you can make it almost infinitely smaller. This may make you wonder: How can you distinguish among icons if they’re the size of molecules?
The answer lies in the →Dock→Magnification checkbox. Turning it on triggers the swelling effect shown in Figure 4-4. Now your Dock icons balloon to a much larger size as your cursor passes over them. It’s a weird, magnetic, rippling, animated effect that takes some getting used to. But it’s another eye-popping demonstration of the graphics technology in Mac OS X, and it can actually come in handy when you find your icons shrinking away to nothing.
Tip
You can get Dock magnification à la carte, too. Pressing Shift-Control as your cursor approaches the Dock reverses your setting in the →Dock menu. So if magnification is turned off, you do get icon-swelling; if magnification is turned on, you don’t get icon-swelling. (That makes sense, doesn’t it?)
Yet another approach to getting the Dock out of your way is to rotate it so it sits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:
You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most Mac OS X programs put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the Dock and its labels might get in the way.
Note
When you position your Dock vertically, the “right” side of the Dock becomes the bottom of the vertical Dock. In other words, the Trash now appears at the bottom of the vertical Dock. So as you read references to the Dock in this book, mentally substitute the phrase “bottom part of the Dock” when you read references to the “right side of the Dock.”
Most of the time, you’ll use the Dock as either a launcher (you click an icon once to open the corresponding program, file, folder, or disk) or as a status indicator (the tiny, shiny reflective spots identified in Figure 4-1 indicate which programs are running).
But the Dock has more tricks than that up its sleeve. You can use it, for example, to pull off any of the following stunts.
The Dock isn’t just a launcher; it’s also a switcher. Here are some of the tricks it lets you do:
Jump among your open programs by clicking their icons.
Drag a document (such as a text file) onto a Dock application (such as the Microsoft Word icon) to open the former with the latter. (If the program balks at opening the document, yet you’re sure the program should be able to open the document, then add the ⌘ and Option keys as you drag.)
TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT: Recovering from a MicroDock
What is a MicroDock? It’s what you get when you try to store 300 JPEG files by dragging them onto a folder in the Dock, but you miss the folder (thanks to its tendency to scoot aside). As a result, you drop all the graphics directly onto the Dock. They dutifully appear as shown here, at the size of subatomic particles.
Now you have a problem. How do you get the Dock back to normal? If you dragged the icons off the Dock one at a time, you’d spend two presidential administrations doing it.
The easiest way to return to a normal Dock is to delete the Dock preferences file from your Home→Library→Preferences folder. The file is named com.apple.dock.plist, and you can just drag it into the Trash. (If you’re really obsessive about your Dock setup, you can create a backup of this file now, while everything is working properly. In the event of a MicroDock, you can replace the messed-up preferences file with the backup.)
When you log out and log back in again, you’ll be back to the standard Apple Dock.
Hide all windows of the program you’re in by Option-clicking another Dock icon.
Hide all other programs’ windows by Option-⌘-clicking the Dock icon of the program you do want (even if it’s already in front).
This is just a quick summary of the Dock’s application-management functions; you’ll find the full details in Chapter 5.
If you turn on keyboard navigation, you can operate the Dock entirely from the keyboard; see Control the Menus.
If you Control-click or right-click a Dock icon, you see its very useful shortcut menu (Figure 4-6).
Note
Snow Leopard Spots: You can no longer produce the shortcut menu by click-and-holding on the Dock icon. Doing that turns on Dock Exposé (One-App Exposé).
Figure 4-6. Left: Control-click or right-click a Dock icon to open the secret menu. Right: Control-click the divider bar to open a different hidden menu. This one lists a bunch of useful Dock commands, including the ones listed in the →Dock submenu.
If you’ve clicked a minimized window icon, this shortcut menu says only Open (unless it’s a minimized Finder window, in which case it also says Close).
But if you’ve clicked any other kind of icon, you get some very useful hidden commands. For example:
[Window names.] The secret Dock menu of a running program usually lists at least one tiny, neatly labeled window icon, like those shown in Figure 4-6. This useful feature means you can jump directly not only to a certain program, but also to a certain open window in that program.
For example, suppose you’ve been using Word to edit three different chapters. You can use Word’s Dock icon as a Window menu to pull forward one particular chapter, or (if it’s been minimized) to pull it up—even from within a different program. (The checkmark indicates the frontmost window, even if the entire program is in the background at the moment. A diamond symbol means the window is minimized and therefore not visible on the screen at the moment.)
Options. This submenu contains a bunch of miscellaneous commands. Until Snow Leopard, they appeared as regular shortcut menu items; Apple evidently felt that people used them so rarely that they deserved to be swept away into a space-saving submenu. For example:
Options→Keep In Dock. Whenever you open a program, Mac OS X puts its icon in the Dock—marked with a shiny, white reflective spot—even if you don’t normally keep its icon there. As soon as you quit the program, its icon disappears again from the Dock.
If you understand that much, then the Keep In Dock command makes a lot of sense. It means, “Hello, I’m this program’s icon. I know you don’t normally keep me in your Dock, but I could stay here even after you quit my program. Just say the word.” If you find you’ve been using, for example, Terminal a lot more often than you thought you would, this command may be the ticket.
Tip
Actually, there’s a faster way to tell a running application to remain in the Dock from now on. Just drag its icon off the Dock and then right back onto it—yes, while the program is running. You have to try it to believe it.
Options→Remove From Dock. On the other hand, what if a program’s icon is always in the Dock (even when it’s not running) and you don’t want it there? This command gets the program’s icon off the Dock, thereby returning the space it was using to other icons. (You can achieve the same result by dragging the icon away from the Dock.)
Use this command on programs you rarely use. When you do want to run those programs, you can always use Spotlight to fire them up.
Note
If the program is already running, using Remove From Dock does not immediately remove its icon from the Dock, which could be confusing. That’s because a program always appears in the Dock when it’s open. What you’re doing here is saying, “Disappear from the Dock when you’re not running”—and you’ll see the proof as soon as you quit that program.
Options→Open at Login. This command lets you specify that you want this icon to open itself automatically each time you log in to your account. It’s a great way to make sure your email Inbox, your calendar, or the Microsoft Word thesis you’ve been working on is fired up and waiting on the screen when you sit down to work.
To make this item stop auto-opening, choose this command again so that the checkmark no longer appears.
Options→Show In Finder. This command highlights the actual icon (in whatever folder window it happens to sit) of the application, alias, folder, or document you’ve clicked. You might want to do this when, for example, you’re using a program that you can’t quite figure out, and you want to jump to its desktop folder in hopes of finding a Read Me file there.
Hide/Show. This operating system is crawling with ways to hide or reveal a selected batch of windows. Here’s a case in point: You can hide all traces of the program you’re using by choosing Hide from its Dock icon.
What’s cool here is that (a) you can even hide the Finder and all its windows, and (b) if you press Option, the command changes to say Hide Others. This, in its way, is a much more powerful command. It tells all the programs you’re not using—the ones in the background—to get out of your face. They hide themselves instantly.
Quit. You can quit any program directly from its Dock shortcut menu. (Finder and Dashboard are exceptions.) The beauty of this feature is that you don’t have to switch first into a program to get to its Quit command. (Troubleshooting moment: If you get nothing but a beep when you use this Quit command, it’s because you’ve hidden the windows of that program, and one of them has unsaved changes. Click the program’s icon, save your document, and then try to quit again.)
Miscellaneous. You might find other commands in Dock shortcut menus; software companies are free to add specialty options to their own programs.
For example, the Finder icon’s shortcut menu offers direct access to commands like Find, Connect to Server, and New Finder Window. Microsoft Office programs (Word, Excel, and so on) come with an Open Recent command, with a list of documents you’ve opened recently. The Safari icon sprouts a New Window command. The System Preferences icon sprouts a complete list of the preference panes (Sound, Keyboard, Trackpad, and so on). You get the idea.
When you click an application icon in the Dock, its icon jumps up and down a few times as the program launches, as though with excitement at having been selected. The longer a program takes to start up, the more bounces you see. This has given birth to a hilarious phenomenon: counting these bounces as a casual speed benchmark for application-launching times. “InDesign took 12 bouncemarks to open in Mac OS X 10.5,” you might read online, “but only three bouncemarks in 10.6.”
Tip
If you find the icon bouncing a bit over the top, try this: Choose →Dock→Dock Preferences. In the Dock preference pane (shown in Figure 4-4), turn off “Animate opening applications.” From now on, your icons won’t actually bounce—instead, the little shiny spot underneath it will simply pulse as the application opens.
Dock icons are spring-loaded. That is, if you drag any icon onto a Dock icon and pause—or, if you’re in a hurry, tap the space bar—the Dock icon opens to receive the dragged file.
This technique is most useful in these situations:
Drag a document icon onto a Dock folder icon. The folder’s Finder window pops open so you can continue the drag into a subfolder.
Drag a document into an application. The classic example is dragging a photo onto the iPhoto icon. When you tap the space bar, iPhoto opens automatically. Since your mouse button is still down, and you’re technically still in mid-drag, you can now drop the photo directly into the appropriate iPhoto album or Event.
You can drag an MP3 file into iTunes or an attachment into Mail or Entourage in the same way.
Once you’ve tried stashing a few important folders on the right side of your Dock, there’s no going back. You can mostly forget all the other navigation tricks you’ve learned in Mac OS X. The folders you care about are always there, ready for opening with a single click.
Better yet, they’re easily accessible for putting away files; you can drag files directly into the Dock’s folder icons as though they were regular folders.
In fact, you can even drag a file into a subfolder in a Dock folder. That’s because, again, Dock folders are spring-loaded. When you drag an icon onto a Dock folder and pause, the folder’s window appears around your cursor, so you can continue the drag into an inner folder (and even an inner inner folder, and so on). Spring-Loaded Folders: Dragging Icons into Closed Folders has the details on spring-loaded folders.
Tip
When you try to drag something into a Dock folder icon, the Dock icons scoot out of the way; the Dock assumes you’re trying to put that something onto the Dock. But if you press the ⌘ key as you drag an icon to the Dock, the existing Dock icons freeze in place. Without the ⌘ key, you wind up playing a frustrating game of chase-the-folder.
Now that you know what the Dock’s about, it’s time to set up shop. Install the programs, folders, and disks you’ll be using most often.
They can be whatever you want, of course, but don’t miss these opportunities:
Your Home folder. Many people immediately drag their hard drive icons—or, perhaps more practically, their Home folders (see Your Home Folder)—onto the right side of the Dock. Now they have quick access to every file in every folder they ever use.
The Applications folder. Here’s a no-brainer: Stash the Applications folder here so you’ll have quick pop-up menu access to any program on your machine.
Your Applications folder. As an even more efficient corollary, create a new folder of your own. Fill it with the aliases of just the programs you use most often and park it in the Dock. Now you’ve got an even more useful Applications folder that opens as a stack.
The Shared folder. If you’re using the Mac’s accounts feature (Chapter 12), this is your wormhole among all the accounts—the one place you can put files where everybody can access them (Logging Out).
Tip
Ordinarily, dragging an icon off the Dock takes it off the Dock. But if you press ⌘ as you drag, you drag the actual item represented by the Dock icon from wherever it happens to be on the hard drive! This trick is great when, for example, you want to email a document whose icon is in the Dock; just ⌘-drag it into your outgoing message. (Option-⌘-drag, meanwhile, creates an alias of the Dock item.)
At the top of every Finder window is a small set of function icons, all in a gradient-gray row (Figure 4-7). The first time you run Mac OS X 10.6, you’ll find only these icons on the toolbar:
Back, Forward. The Finder works something like a Web browser. Only a single window remains open as you navigate the various folders on your hard drive.
The Back button (
) returns you to whichever folder you were just looking at. (Instead of clicking , you can also press ⌘-[, or choose Go→Back—particularly handy if the toolbar is hidden, as described below.)The Forward button (
) springs to life only after you’ve used the Back button. Clicking it (or pressing ⌘-]) returns you to the window you just backed out of.Figure 4-7. If you ⌘-click the upper-right toolbar button repeatedly, you cycle through six combinations of large and small icons and text labels. (Three examples are shown here.) Tip: This same ⌘-clicking business cycles through the same toolbar variations in Mail, Preview, and other programs that have toolbars.
View controls. The four tiny buttons next to the
button switch the current window into icon, list, column, or Cover Flow view, respectively. And remember, if the toolbar is hidden, you can get by with the equivalent commands in the View menu at the top of the screen—or by pressing ⌘-1 for icon view, ⌘-2 for list view, ⌘-3 for column view, or ⌘-4 for Cover Flow view.Quick Look. The eyeball icon opens the Quick Look preview for a highlighted icon (or group of them); see Quick Look.
Action (
). You can read all about this context-sensitive pop-up menu on Selecting Icons from the Keyboard.Search box. This little round-ended text box is yet another entry point for the Spotlight feature described in Chapter 3. It’s a handy way to search your Mac for some file, folder, disk, or program.
Between the toolbar, the Dock, the Sidebar, and the large icons of Mac OS X, it almost seems like there’s an Apple conspiracy to sell big screens.
Fortunately, the toolbar doesn’t have to contribute to that impression. You can hide it with one click—on the white, oval “Old Finder Mode” button (Old Finder Mode: The Toolbar Disclosure Button). You can also hide the toolbar by choosing View→Hide Toolbar or pressing Option-⌘-T. (The same keystroke, or choosing View→Show Toolbar, brings it back.)
But you don’t have to do without the toolbar altogether. If its consumption of screen space is your main concern, you may prefer to collapse it—to delete the pictures but preserve the text buttons.
The trick is to ⌘-click the Old Finder Mode button. With each click, you make the toolbar take up less vertical space, cycling through six variations of shrinking icons, shrinking text labels, and finally labels without any icons at all (Figure 4-7).
There’s a long way to adjust the icon and label sizes, too: Choose View→Customize Toolbar (or Option-⌘-click the Old Finder Mode button). As shown in Figure 4-8, the dialog box that appears offers a Show pop-up menu at the bottom. It lets you choose picture buttons, Icon Only, or, for the greatest space conservation, Text Only. You can see the results without even closing the dialog box.
Click Done or press Return to make your changes stick.
Note
In Text Only mode, the four View buttons are replaced by a little pop-up menu called View. Furthermore, the Search box turns into a one-word button called Search. Clicking it brings up the Spotlight window (The Spotlight Window).
Mac OS X not only offers a collection of beautifully designed icons for alternate (or additional) toolbar buttons, but it also makes it easy to add anything to the toolbar, turning the toolbar into a supplementary Dock or Sidebar. This is great news for people who miss having their Home and Applications folder icons at the top of the window, as they were in early Mac OS X versions, or for anyone who’s run out of space for stashing favorite icons in the Dock or the Sidebar. (Of course, if that’s your problem, you need a bigger monitor.)
As noted above, the first step in tweaking the toolbar is choosing View→Customize Toolbar. The window shown in Figure 4-8 appears.
Tip
There’s a great secret shortcut for opening the Customize Toolbar window: Option-⌘-click the Old Finder Mode button in the upper-right corner of every Finder window.
This is your chance to rearrange the existing toolbar icons or delete the ones you don’t use. You can also add any of Apple’s buttons to the toolbar by dragging them from the “gallery” onto the toolbar itself. The existing icons scoot out of your cursor’s way, if necessary.
Figure 4-8. While this window is open, you can add icons to the toolbar by dragging them into place from the gallery before you. You can also remove icons from the tool-bar by dragging them up or down off the toolbar. Rearrange the icons by dragging them horizontally.
Most of the options in the gallery duplicate the functions of menu commands. Here are a few that don’t appear on the standard toolbar:
Path. Most of the gallery elements are buttons, but this one creates a pop-up menu on the toolbar. When clicked, it reveals (and lets you navigate) the hierarchy—the path—of folders you open to reach whichever window is open. (Equivalent:⌘-clicking a window’s title, as described on Title Bar.)
Eject (
). This button ejects whichever disk or disk image is currently highlighted. (Equivalent: The File→Eject command, or holding down the key on your keyboard.)Burn. This button burns a blank CD or DVD with the folders and files you’ve dragged onto it. (Equivalent: The File→Burn Disc command.)
Customize. This option opens this customizing window you’re already examining. (Equivalent: The View→Customize Toolbar command.)
Separator. This gallery icon doesn’t actually do anything when clicked. It’s designed to set apart groups of toolbar icons. (For example, you might want to segregate your folder buttons, such as Documents and Applications, from your function buttons, such as Delete and Connect.) Drag this dotted line between two existing icons on the toolbar.
Space. By dragging this mysterious-looking item into the toolbar, you add a gap between it and whatever icon is to its left. The gap is about as wide as one icon. (The fine, dark, rectangular outline that appears when you drag it doesn’t actually show up once you click Done.)
Flexible Space. This icon, too, creates a gap between the toolbar buttons. But this one expands as you make the window wider. Now you know how Apple got the Search box to appear off to the right of the standard toolbar, a long way from its clustered comrades to the left.
New Folder. Clicking this button creates a new folder in whichever window you’re viewing. (Equivalent: the File→New Folder command, or the Shift-⌘-N keystroke.)
Delete. This option puts the highlighted file or folder icons into the Trash. (Equivalent: the File→Move to Trash command, or the ⌘-Delete keystroke.)
Connect. If you’re on a home or office network, this opens the Connect to Server dialog box so you can tap into another computer. (Equivalent: The Go→Connect to Server command, or ⌘-K.)
Get Info. This button opens the Get Info window (Locked Files: The Next Generation) for whatever’s highlighted.
iDisk. The iDisk is your own personal multigigabyte virtual hard drive on the Internet. It’s your private backup disk, stashed at Apple, safe from whatever fire, flood, or locusts may destroy your office. Of course, you already know this, because you’re paying $100 per year for a Mobile Me account (Chapter 18).
In any case, you can bring your iDisk’s icon onto the screen simply by clicking this toolbar icon.
Search. This item represents the Spotlight Search box described in Chapter 3.
Drag the default set. If you’ve made a mess of your toolbar, you can always reinstate its original Apple arrangement by dragging this rectangular strip directly upward onto your toolbar.
Note
If a window is too narrow to show all the icons on the toolbar, then the right end of the toolbar sprouts a 
symbol. Click it for a pop-up menu that names whichever icons don’t fit at the moment. (You’ll find this toolbar behavior in many Mac OS X programs, not just the Finder: iPhoto, Safari, Mail, Address Book, and so on.)
Millions of Mac fans will probably trudge forward through life using the toolbar to hold the suggested Apple function buttons, and the Sidebar to hold the icons of favorite folders, files, and programs. They may never realize that you can drag any icons at all onto the toolbar—files, folders, disks, programs, or whatever—to turn them into one-click buttons.
In short, you can think of the Finder toolbar as yet another Dock or Sidebar (Figure 4-9).
You can drag toolbar icons around, rearranging them horizontally, by pressing ⌘ as you drag. Taking an icon off the toolbar is equally easy. While pressing the ⌘ key, just drag the icon clear away from the toolbar. It vanishes in a puff of cartoon smoke. (If the Customize Toolbar sheet is open, you can perform either step without the ⌘ key.)
You can also get rid of a toolbar icon by right-clicking it and choosing Remove Item from the shortcut menu.
In some ways, just buying a Macintosh was already a renegade act of self-expression. But that’s only the beginning. Now it’s time to fashion the computer screen itself according to your personal sense of design and fashion.
Cosmetically speaking, Mac OS X offers two dramatic full-screen features: desktop backgrounds and screen savers.
The command center for both of these functions is the System Preferences program (which longtime Mac and Windows fans may recognize as the former Control Panel). Open it by clicking the System Preferences icon in the Dock, if it’s there, or by choosing its name from the menu.
When the System Preferences program opens, you can choose a desktop picture or screen saver by clicking the Desktop & Screen Saver button. For further details on these System Preferences panes, see Chapter 9.
One of the earliest objections to the lively, brightly colored look of Mac OS X came from Apple’s core constituency: artists and graphic designers. Some complained that Mac OS X’s bright blues (of scroll bar handles, progress bars, the menu, pulsing OK buttons, and highlighted menu names and commands), along with the red, green, and yellow window-corner buttons, threw off their color judgment.
These features have been greatly toned down since the original version of Mac OS X. The pulsing effects are subtler, the three-dimensional effects are less drastic, and the button colors are less intense. It’s all part of Mac OS X’s gradual de-colorization; in Snow Leopard, both the menu and the Spotlight menu have gone from colorful to black.
Tip
The Highlight Color pop-up menu lets you choose a different accent color for your Mac world. This is the background color of highlighted text, the colored oval that appears around highlighted icon names, and a window’s “lining” as you drag an icon into it.
But in case they still bother artists, Apple created what it calls the Graphite look for Mac OS X, which turns all those interface elements gray instead of blue. To try out this look, choose →System Preferences; click Appearance; and then choose Graphite from the Appearance pop-up menu.
Desktop sounds are the tiny sound effects that accompany certain mouse drags. And we’re talking tiny—they’re so subdued that you might not have noticed them. You hear a little plink/crunch when you drop an icon onto the Trash, a boingy thud when you drag something into a folder, a whoof! when you drag something off the Dock and into oblivion, and so on. The little thud you hear at the end of a file-copying job is actually useful, because it alerts you that the task is complete.
If all that racket is keeping you awake, however, it’s easy enough to turn it off. Open System Preferences, click the Sound icon, and then turn off “Play user interface sound effects.”
And if you decide to leave them turned on, please—use discretion when working in a library, church, or neurosurgical operating room.
See the menu-bar icons in Figure 4-10? Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans on the Internet have named them menulets. Each is both an indicator and a menu that provides direct access to certain settings in System Preferences. One lets you adjust your Mac’s speaker volume; another lets you change the screen resolution; yet another shows you the remaining power in your laptop battery; and so on.
Figure 4-10. These little guys are the direct descendants of the controls once found on the Mac OS 9 Control Strip or the Windows system tray.
To make the various menulets appear, you generally visit a certain pane of System Preferences (Chapter 9) and turn on a checkbox called, for example, “Show volume in menu bar.” Here’s a rundown of the various Apple menulets you may encounter, complete with instructions on where to find the magic on/off checkbox for each.
Along the way, you’ll discover that secondary, hidden features lurk in many of these menulets, if you happen to know the secret: Press the Option key.
Tip
The following descriptions indicate the official, authorized steps for installing a menulet. There is, however, a folder on your hard drive that contains 25 of them in a single window, so you can install one with a quick double-click. To find them, open your Macintosh HD→System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder.
AirPort lets you turn your WiFi (wireless networking) circuitry on or off, join existing wireless networks, and create your own private ones. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. Click AirPort.
Battery shows how much power remains in your laptop’s battery, how much time is left to charge it, whether it’s plugged in, and more. Using the Show submenu, you can control whether the menulet appears as an hours-and-minutes-remaining display (2:13), a percentage-remaining readout (43%), or a simple battery-icon gauge that hollows out as the charge runs down.
To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Energy Saver.
Note
Snow Leopard Spots: You may see a new item at the top of the Battery menulet that conveys the battery’s health. It might say, for example, “Service Battery,” “Replace Soon,” “Replace Now,” or “Check Battery.” Of course, we all know laptop batteries don’t last forever; they begin to hold less of a charge as they approach 500 or 1,000 recharges, depending on the model.
Is Apple looking out for you, or just trying to goose the sale of replacement batteries? You decide.
Bluetooth connects to Bluetooth devices, “pairs” your Mac with a cellphone, lets you send or receive files wirelessly (without the hassle of setting up a wireless network), and so on. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Bluetooth.
Clock is the standard menu-bar clock that’s been sitting at the upper-right corner of your screen from Day One. Click it to open a menu where you can check today’s date, convert the menu-bar display to a tiny analog clock, and so on. To find “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Date & Time. On the Clock tab, turn on “Show the date and time.”
Displays adjusts screen resolution. On Macs with a projector or second monitor attached, it lets you turn screen mirroring on or off—a tremendous convenience to anyone who gives PowerPoint or Keynote presentations. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Displays→Display tab.
- is the oddball: There’s no checkbox in System Preferences to make this menulet appear. The fact that it even exists is something of a secret.
To make it appear, open your System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder as described above, and double-click the Eject.menu icon. That’s it! The
menulet appears.You’ll discover that its wording changes: “Open Combo Drive,” “Close DVD-ROM Drive,” “Eject [Name of Disc],” or whatever, to reflect your particular drive type and what’s in it at the moment.
ExpressCard is useful only on laptops that have ExpressCard expansion slots. Its Eject command ejects a card that you’ve inserted. To make it appear, open your System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder, and then double-click the ExpressCard.menu icon.
Fax reveals the current status of a fax you’re sending or receiving, so you’re not kept in suspense. (It’s available only on Macs that have dial-up modems. Those are few and far between these days, although of course you can buy an external USB modem, like Apple’s tiny white one, for this purpose.) To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Print & Fax, and then click Fax Modem.
HomeSync is useful only if some friendly neighborhood network administrator has set up Mac OS X Server at your office.
Thanks to a feature called portable Home folders, you can take your laptop on the road and do work—and then, on your return, have the changes synced automatically to your main machine at work over the network. Or not automatically; this menulet’s Sync Home Now command performs this synchronization on demand.
iChat is a quick way to let the world know, via iChat and the Internet (Chapter 21), that you’re away from your keyboard, or available and ready to chat. Via the Buddy List command, it’s also a quick way to open iChat itself. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open iChat; it’s in your Applications folder. Choose iChat→Preferences→General.
Ink turns the Write Anywhere feature on and off as you use your graphics tablet. (That may not mean much to you until you’ve read about the Ink feature, described on VoiceOver.) To find the “Show” checkbox: Open the Ink panel of System Preferences. (Neither that panel nor the menulet appears unless a graphics tablet is attached.)
IrDA is useful only to ancient PowerBooks that have infrared transmitters. That’s something of a Catch-22, since none of them can run Snow Leopard!
Keychain. This menulet isn’t represented by an icon in the Menu Extras folder, but it’s still useful if you use Mac OS X’s Keychain feature (The Keychain). The menulet lets you do things like opening the Security pane of System Preferences and locking or unlocking a particular Keychain. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open your Applications→Utilities folder. Open the Keychain Access program, and then open the Keychain Access→Preferences→General tab.
PCCard ejects a PC card that you’ve inserted into the slot in your laptop, if it has such a slot. To make it appear, open your System→Library→CoreServices→Menu Extras folder, and then double-click the PCCard.menu icon.
PPP lets you connect or disconnect from the Internet if you’ve equipped your Mac with a dial-up modem. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. Click Internal Modem. Click the Modem tab button.
PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) lets you control certain kinds of DSL connections. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. Click Built-in Ethernet. Click the PPPoE tab button.
Remote Desktop is a program, sold separately, that lets teachers or system administrators tap into your Mac from across a network. In fact, they can actually see what’s on your screen, move the cursor around, and so on. The menulet lets you do things like turning remote control on and off or sending a message to the administrator. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Sharing, and then click Remote Management.
Script menu lists a variety of useful, ready-to-run Automator programs (see Change your startup disk). To find the “Show” checkbox: Open the AppleScript Editor program (in your Applications Utilities folder). Choose AppleScript Editor→Preferences→General.
Spaces ties into Snow Leopard’s virtual-screens feature (called Spaces and described in the next chapter). The menulet lets you choose which of your multiple virtual screens you want to see. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Spaces.
Sync is useful only if you have a MobileMe account (Chapter 18)—but in that case, it’s very handy. It lets you start and stop the synchronization of your Mac’s Web bookmarks, Calendar, Address Book, Keychains, and email with your other Macs, Windows PCs, and iPhones across the Internet, and it always lets you know the date of your last sync. (Syncing is described in more detail in Chapter 19.) To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→MobileMe, and then click Sync.
TextInput switches among different text input modes. For example, if your language uses a different alphabet, like Russian, or thousands of characters, like Chinese, this menulet summons and dismisses the alternative keyboards and input methods you need. Details on Keyboard Shortcuts. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Prefer-ences→Language & Text→Input Sources.
Note
You also use this menulet when you’re trying to figure out how to type a certain symbol like ¥ or § or
. You use the menulet to open the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer—two great character-finding tools described in Chapter 9.Time Machine lets you start and stop Time Machine backups (see Network Notes). To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Time Machine.
UniversalAccess offers simple on/off status indicators for features that are designed to help with visual, hearing, and muscle impairments. Chapter 9 has a rundown of what they do. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Universal Access.
User identifies the account holder (Chapter 12) who’s logged in at the moment. To make this menulet appear (in bold, at the far-right end of the menu bar), turn on fast user switching, which is described on Fast User Switching.
Volume, of course, adjusts your Mac’s speaker or headphone volume. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Sound.
VPN stands for virtual private networking, which allows you to tap into a corporation’s network so you can, for example, check your work email from home. You can use the menulet to connect and disconnect, for example. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Preferences→Network. Click the name of your VPN.
WWAN is useful only if you’ve equipped your Mac with one of those glorious cellular modems, sold by Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, or T-Mobile. These little USB sticks get you onto the Internet wirelessly at near-cable-modem speeds (in big cities, anyway), no WiFi required—for $60 a month. And this menulet lets you start and stop that connection. To find the “Show” checkbox: Open System Prefer-ences→Network. Click the name of your cellular modem.
To remove a menulet, ⌘-drag it off your menu bar, or turn off the corresponding checkbox in System Preferences. You can also rearrange them by ⌘-dragging them horizontally.
These little guys are useful, good-looking, and respectful of your screen space. The world could use more inventions like menulets.
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