Chapter 4
In This Chapter
Introducing the highlights of the Finder
Discussing that missing button on your pointing device
Launching and quitting applications
Identifying and selecting icons
Using keyboard shortcuts to speed things up
Managing windows in Mavericks
Ah, the Finder — many admire its scenic beauty, but don’t ignore its unsurpassed power nor its many moods. And send a postcard while you’re there.
Okay, so the OS X Finder might not be quite as majestic as the mighty Mississippi River, but it’s the basic toolbox that you use every single day while piloting your iMac. The Finder includes the most common elements of Mavericks: window controls, common menu commands, icon fun (everything from launching applications to copying files), network connections, keyboard shortcuts, and even emptying the Trash. In fact, one could say that if you master the Finder and find how to use it efficiently, you’re on your way to becoming a power user! (My editor calls this the Finder “window of opportunity.” She’s a hoot.)
That’s what this chapter is designed to do: This is your Finder tour guide, and we’re ready to roll.
This is a hands-on tour, with none of that “On your right, you’ll see the historic Go menu” for you! Time to get off the bus and start the tour with Figure 4-1, in which I show you around the most important elements of the Finder. (In the upcoming section “Performing Tricks with Finder Windows,” I give you a close-up view of window controls.)
The popular attractions include
In case you’re brand-new to computers, a menu is simply a list of commands. For example, you click the File menu and then choose Save to save a document. When you click a menu, it extends down so that you can see the commands it includes. While the menu is extended, you can choose any enabled menu item (just click it) to perform that action. You can tell that an item is enabled if its name appears in black. Conversely, a menu command is disabled if it is grayed out — clicking it does nothing.
When you see a menu path, like this example — File⇒Save — it’s just a visual shortcut that tells you to click the File menu and then choose Save from the drop-down menu that appears.
You can easily customize your Desktop. For example, you can use your own images to decorate the Desktop, organize it to store new folders and documents, arrange icons how you like, or put the Dock in another location. Don’t worry — I cover all this in other areas of the book — I just want you to know that you don’t have to settle for what Apple gives you as a default Desktop.
Sometimes you click an icon to watch it do its thing (like icons in the Dock, which I cover next), but usually you double-click an icon to make something happen.
If you’re using a late-model iMac, you may be able to share files with other Macs on your local network using the AirDrop feature in Mavericks. For the full scoop on AirDrop, visit Chapter 21.
Mavericks takes a visual approach to everything, and what you see in Figure 4-1 is designed for point-and-click convenience. You click (or double-click) an item, it opens, you do your thing, and life is good. If you’ve grazed on the other side of the fence — one of Those Who Were Once Windows Users — you’re probably accustomed to using a mouse with at least two buttons. This brings up the nagging question: “Hey, Mark! Where the heck are my mouse buttons?” Or perhaps you’re thinking even farther out of the box, and you ordered a Magic Trackpad as your pointing device of choice — again, no buttons!
In a nutshell, the “buttons” on your iMac’s Magic Mouse (or Magic Trackpad) are the entire top surface! Although you won’t see any separate buttons for clicking, your Magic pointing device can tell when you tap with one finger (to single-click). Owners of a Magic Trackpad should think “tap” whenever they read “click” in the Apple world. If you’ve used an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, the idea of tapping something onscreen makes perfect sense.
Speaking of right-clicking, you can easily configure your Apple pointing device to recognize a right-click (also called a secondary click) within System Preferences. Tapping the top-right corner (of a Magic Mouse) or tapping with two fingers (on the Magic Trackpad) performs the same default function in Mavericks that clicking the right mouse button does in Windows. Namely, when you right-click most items — icons, documents, even your Desktop — you get a shortcut menu of things. That is, you get more commands specific to that item. (To keep familiar things familiar, I call it the “right-click menu,” and I promise to refer to it as such for the rest of the book.)
Figure 4-2 illustrates a typical convenient right-click menu within a Finder window.
But that’s not all. Apple’s series of Multi-Touch gestures for your Magic Mouse or Trackpad includes all sorts of handy time-saving commands! Depending on the changes you make within the Mouse and Trackpad panes in System Preferences, these gestures can include
I know all these gestures sound like a kids’ gymnastics meet, but they’ll soon become second nature to you. I recommend that you visit the Mouse and Trackpad panes in System Preferences and simply experiment with the possibilities of Multi-Touch — each gesture is demonstrated with a video clip, making the gestures very easy to learn!
Now it’s time for you to pair your newly found mouse and trackpad acumen with the Mavericks Finder window. Follow along this simple exercise. Move your cursor over the iTunes icon on the Dock (the round blue icon bearing a musical note), and click once. Whoosh! Mavericks launches (or starts) the iTunes application, and you see a window much like the one in Figure 4-3.
Besides the Dock, you have several other ways to launch an application or open a document in Mavericks:
Double-clicking a device or network connection on your Desktop opens the contents in a Finder window. This trick works for CDs and DVDs that you’ve loaded as well as for external hard drives and USB flash drives. Applications and documents launch from a CD, a DVD, or an external drive just the same as they launch from your internal drive (the one that’s named Macintosh HD), so you don’t have to copy stuff from the external drive just to use it. (You can’t change the contents of most CDs and DVDs; they’re read-only, so you can’t write to them.)
I cover Login Items in detail in Chapter 20.
After you finish using an application, you can quit that application to close its window and return to the Desktop. Here are a number of ways to quit an application:
A running application displays a small blue ball under its icon in the Dock.
Finder windows aren’t just for launching applications and opening the files and documents that you create. You can also use the icons within a Finder window to select one or more specific items or to copy and move items from place to place within your system.
Not all icons are created equal. Earlier in this chapter, I introduce you to your iMac’s hard drive icon on the Desktop, but here is a little background on the other types of icons that you might encounter during your iMac travels:
alias
at the end of its name.
You have three ways to create an alias. Here’s one:
Figure 4-5 illustrates a trio of typical alias icons.
Here’s another way to create an alias:
Note that this funky method doesn’t add the alias tag to the end of the alias icon name (unless you drag it to another location in the same directory)!
Another option for creating an alias is to right-click the original icon and choose Make Alias.
So why bother to use an alias? Three good reasons:
Often, the menu commands or keyboard commands that you perform in the Finder need to be performed on something: Perhaps you’re moving an item to the Trash, or getting more information on the item, or creating an alias for that item. To identify the target of your action to the Finder, you need to select one or more items on your Desktop or in a Finder window. In this section, I show you how to do just that.
Mavericks gives you a couple of options when selecting just one item for an upcoming action:
You can also select multiple items with aplomb by using one of these methods:
Want to copy items from one Finder window to another, or from one location (like a CD) to another (like your Desktop)? Très easy. Just use one of these methods:
To put a copy of an item within a folder, just drop the item on top of the receiving folder. If you hold the item that you’re dragging over the destination folder for a second or two, Mavericks opens a new window so that you can see the contents of the target — this feature is called spring-loaded folders, and you can turn it on by clicking Finder⇒Preferences.
To help indicate your target when you’re copying files, Mavericks highlights the location to show you where the items will end up. (This works whether the target location is a folder or a drive icon.) If the target location is a window, Mavericks adds a highlight to the window border.
The items are copied to the top level, or root, of the target drive.
If you try to move or copy something to a location that already has an item with the same name, Figure 4-7 illustrates the answer: You get a confirmation dialog that prompts you to decide whether to replace the file or to stop the copy/move procedure and leave the existing file alone. Good insurance, indeed.
Moving things from one location to another location on the same drive is the easiest action you can take. Just drag the item (or selected items) to the new location. The item disappears from the original spot and reappears in the new spot.
If you need more than one copy of the same item within a folder, use the Mavericks Duplicate command. I use Duplicate often when I want to edit a document but ensure that the original document stays pristine, no matter what. I just create a duplicate and edit that file instead.
To use Duplicate, you can
The duplicate item has the word copy
appended to its name. A second copy is named copy2
, a third is copy3
, and so on.
Your iMac keyboard might not be as glamorous as your mouse, but any Macintosh power user will tell you that using keyboard shortcuts is usually the fastest method of performing certain tasks in the Finder, such as saving or closing a file. I recommend committing these shortcuts to memory and putting them to work as soon as you begin using your iMac so that they become second nature to you as quickly as possible.
The Apple standard keyboard has a number of special keys that you might not recognize — especially if you’ve made the smart move and decided to migrate from the chaos that is Windows to OS X! Table 4-1 lists the keys that bear strange hieroglyphics on the Apple keyboard as well as what they do.
Table 4-1 Too-Cool Key Symbols
Action |
Symbol |
Purpose |
Media Eject |
|
Ejects a CD or DVD from your optical drive (if you have one) |
Audio Mute |
|
Mutes (and restores) all sound produced by your iMac |
Volume Up |
|
Increases the sound volume |
Volume Down |
|
Decreases the sound volume |
Command |
|
Primary modifier for menus and keyboard shortcuts |
Control |
|
Modifier for shortcuts |
Option |
|
Modifier for shortcuts |
The Finder is chock-full of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to take care of common tasks. Some of the handiest shortcuts are included in the online Cheat Sheet for this book, which you’ll find at
www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/imac
In this section of your introduction to OS X, I describe basic windows management within Mavericks: how to move things around, how to close windows, and how to make ’em disappear and reappear like magic.
Can you imagine what life would be like if you couldn’t see more than a single window’s worth of stuff? Shopping would be curtailed quite a bit — and so would the contents of the folders on your hard drives!
That’s why Mavericks adds scroll bars that you can click and drag to move through the contents of the window. By default, scroll bars don’t appear until you move your pointer close to them, but when they’re visible, you can either
Figure 4-8 illustrates both vertical and horizontal scroll bars in a typical Finder window.
You can also resize most Finder and application windows by enlarging or reducing the window frame itself. Move your pointer over any edge of the window and then drag the edge in any direction until the window is the precise size you need. You can also drag a corner of the window diagonally to resize two dimensions at once.
Resizing a window is indeed helpful, but maybe you simply want to banish the doggone thing until you need it again. That’s a situation for the Minimize button, which also appears in Figure 4-8. A minimized window disappears from the Desktop but isn’t closed; by default, it simply reappears in the Dock as a miniature icon. Minimizing a window is easy: Move your pointer over the Minimize button at the top-left corner of the window — a minus sign appears in the button to tell you that you’re on target — and then click.
To restore the window to its full size again (and its original position on the Desktop), just click its window icon in the Dock.
Perhaps you want to move a window to another location on the Desktop so that you can see the contents of multiple windows at the same time. Click the window’s title bar (that’s the top frame of the window, which usually includes a document or application name) and drag the window anywhere you like. Then lift your finger. (Don’t click the icon in the center of the title bar, though. You won’t move the window, just the icon itself.)
To see all that a window can show you, use the Zoom feature to expand any Finder or application window to its maximum practical size. Note that a zoomed window can fill the entire screen, or (if that extra space isn’t applicable for the application) the window might expand only to a larger part of the Desktop. To zoom a window, move your pointer over the button (as shown in the earlier Figure 4-8) at the top-left corner of the window. When the plus sign appears in the Zoom button, click to claim the additional territory on your Desktop. (You can click the Zoom button again to automatically return the same window to its previous dimensions.)
When you’re finished with an application or no longer need a window open, move your pointer over the Close button at the top-left corner of the window. When the X appears in the button, click it. (And yes, I can get yet another reference out of Figure 4-8, which I’m thinking of nominating as Figure of the Year.)
With the introduction of Mavericks, OS X now has a powerful new feature you can use to display multiple locations in the same window: Finder Tabs, which work just like the tabs in Safari (as well as other popular browsers for both Macs and PCs). To open a new tab in a Finder window, you have a wealth of choices:
For example, if you’re working on an iMovie project, you might create tabs using the Applications item in the Finder window sidebar and a folder (or even a DVD disc or shared drive) named Work that contains your video clips. The location appears as a new tab immediately under the toolbar. You can open as many tabs as you like. To close a tab, hover your cursor over it and click the X button that appears. And you guessed it, the incredibly hardworking Figure 4-8 illustrates three Finder Tabs at work.
So why all the hullaballoo? Think about switching between multiple locations on your Mac instantly, and you start to understand why this crusty old Mac fanatic is so excited! Just click a tab to switch to that location; you can even drag files and folders from tab to tab. You can drag the Finder Tabs themselves to reorder them as you like.
You can also set new folders to open in tabs instead of windows. Just click the Finder menu at the top of your Desktop, choose Preferences, and then select the Open Folders in Tabs Instead of New Windows check box to enable it.