Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Windows that Auto-Reopen

When you open a program, the Mac reads its computer code, which lies on your hard drive’s surface, and feeds it quickly into RAM (memory). During this brief interval, the icon of the opening program jumps up and down eagerly in your Dock.

Tip

You don’t have to wait for the application to finish bouncing—you’re wasting perfectly good computing time. Just switch to another program and get back to work; the newly opened program keeps right on launching in the background. This means you, Photoshop and Final Cut nerds.

UP TO SPEED: When Programs are Actually Folders

OS X programs don’t seem to have 50,000 support files strewn across your hard drive. Most programs just sit there, naked and shivering, in your Applications folder—seemingly unaccompanied by libraries, dictionaries, foreign language components, and other support files and folders.

The question is: Where did all those support files go?

OS X features packages or bundles, which are folders that behave like single files. Every properly written OS X program looks like a single, double-clickable application icon. Yet to the Mac, it’s actually a folder that contains both the actual application icon and all its hidden support files. (Even documents can be packages, including iDVD project files, Keynote files, and some TextEdit documents.)

If you’d like to prove this to yourself, try this experiment. Choose Go→Applications. See the Calculator program? Right-click it. From the shortcut menu, choose Show Package Contents. You’re asking OS X to show you what’s inside the Calculator’s “application icon” folder.

The Calculator package window opens, revealing a Contents folder you’ve never seen before. If you open this folder, you’ll find a handful of strange-looking, Unix-named folders and files that are, behind the scenes, pieces of the Calculator program itself.

The application-as-folder trick is convenient for you, of course, because it means you’re generally free to move the application to a different window—or uninstall the program by dragging this single icon to the Trash—without worrying that you’re leaving behind its entourage of support files. It’s also convenient for programmers, because they can update certain aspects of their applications just by replacing one of these component files, without having to rewrite the entire program.

You can even try out this programmery benefit for yourself. In the case of the Calculator and many other OS X programs, the Resources folder contains individual graphics files—PDF or TIFF files—that serve as the graphic elements you see when using the program. For example, the file lcd.tiff in the Calculator’s Resources folder contains the image of the calculator’s screen (where the numbers appear as you punch the calculator buttons).

Using a graphics program, you can change the background of this light-yellow calculator screen to, say, light blue. The next time you double-click Calculator—which you now realize is actually a folder behind the scenes—you’ll see your modified calculator design.

(P.S. There are still hundreds or thousands of support files that aren’t embedded within their programs’ icons. They’re sitting in your Library→Application Support folder, organized by software company.)

Whatever documents were open when you last quit that program then magically reopen, ready for you to get back to work. Everything is exactly as it was, including your window and palette positions. Any text that was highlighted when you last quit the program is still highlighted, and the insertion point is just where you left it.

This is all extremely handy if you tend to work on the same documents day after day; the auto-reopened document serves as a nice refresher on what you were in the middle of doing. You can skip fussing with the Open command, remembering what you were doing, rearranging the windows the way you like them, and so on.

Then again, maybe you can’t stand this feature.

Fortunately, it’s easy to turn it off, either globally, on a per-program basis, or on a per-Quit basis.

• Turn off auto-reopen for good. Open System Preferences→General, and turn off “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps.”

• Prevent your current setup from being memorized. You can also prevent just one particular program from reopening its documents the next time—at the time you’re quitting it. To do that, press Option while you quit the program (for example, when you choose Safari→Quit or press ⌘-Q). The Quit command magically changes to say, “Quit and Discard Windows.” The next time you open the program, it will have forgotten all about your window setup.

  (On the other hand, if you’ve turned off the “Restore windows” feature in System Preferences, then pressing the Option key makes the Quit command say, “Quit and Keep Windows.”)

• Make a program forget its window setup as you reopen it. If it’s too late for the tip in the previous paragraph, you can force a program to start up in its empty, virginal state by pressing the Shift key as it opens. That forces the program to forget the previous window setup.

• Turn off auto-open for one program. Suppose you like the auto-window-reopening feature in most programs. But there’s one particular program that you never want to memorize your window setup—maybe for security reasons, or maybe because you use that app for something different every day.

  Before long, some shareware program will crop up to make that easy. For now, though, you can do the job manually. See “Turn off auto-open for one program.pdf” on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.