Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
As its name indicates, the View menu is for changing the way Finder items look. The majority of these commands apply to the appearance of windows and their contents. The remaining commands address the ways items are arranged on the desktop.
The next four commands change depending on their current state. If a command reads 'Show' something, and you select it to show whatever that thing is, the command will change to Hide so that you can later hide that thing.
Show Path Bar: Curious about where an item is located in the Finder’s hierarchy? Choose this command and select a file or folder. At the bottom of a Finder window you’ll see the path to it, such as Macintosh HD > Users > Chris > Documents > My Document. You can click on any item in the path bar to move to that directory.
The toolbar customization palette
Go menu
Finally, a Finder menu that needs very little explanation.
Back and Forward: These commands serve the same purpose as the arrow buttons in a window’s toolbar. If you can’t go back or forward because you’ve opened a window for the first time, these commands will be grayed out.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
When last we met, we began exploring Mountain Lion’s Finder menus. We’ve polished off the Apple and Finder menus so let’s continue our march to the right in the menu bar.
File menu
Edit menu
I know that was a lot to swallow. Fortunately the Edit menu is short, sweet, and very helpful. Even more than the File menu you’ll find those commands included in the Finder’s Edit menu routinely appear in the menus of other applications you use.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
When we met the Finder a few weeks ago, you learned that OS X offers a menu bar, as well as menus to populate it. In one of the many instances of “we’ll discuss this at a later time,” I mentioned that we would soon dive into the workings of OS X’s menus. That time has arrived. Let’s get started with the contents of Finder menus.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
For the last few weeks I’ve casually thrown around phrases like “hover your cursor over,” “press the Command key,” and “swipe to the side on your trackpad.” And while I’m fairly confident that such suggestions are well within your powers to understand, it’s possible (likely, even) that you, your keyboard, mouse, and trackpad are not on entirely intimate terms. Let’s do something about that now.
Very broadly, we term any device you manipulate that causes letters to be typed, the cursor to move, external sounds recorded, or lines drawn an input device. The most common are the Mac’s keyboard, mouse, and trackpad. But a digital drawing tablet with stylus, trackball, or even a microphone could be considered input devices. We’ll concentrate on the most common devices, starting with the keyboard.
Key notes
Beyond modifier keys, the Mac’s keyboard has a few other keys you should be aware of.
Esc: This is the Escape key. In many cases if you see a window that includes a Cancel button, you can simply press Escape to cancel rather than click on the button.
Eject (⏏): If you have a Mac with a media drive (for CDs and DVDs) and you have a disc in the drive, pressing Eject will usually eject the disc. If you have a Mac whose media tray pops out (as you would on a Mac Pro) pressing this key causes exactly this popping. Pressing it again sucks the tray back into the Mac.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
If you’ve just come to the Mac from a PC you may have wondered where Microsoft got the name “Windows” for its operating system. Without delving into the politics of the thing (because some people are still sore about it), let’s just say that Microsoft was inspired by one of the Mac OS’s most prominent features: virtual windows that gave users a visual metaphor for the way their files were organized on their computers. Microsoft, much to Apple’s chagrin, thought this a wonderfully descriptive name for its graphical user interface (known by its initials, GUI) and so Microsoft Windows was christened.
Let’s just go over this “visual metaphor” business in a bit more depth. As I’ve mentioned in a past column, much of the Mac GUI is based on analogies: You have a "desktop," and "folders" on that desktop contain other folders as well as "files." In essence, the OS X interface offers a virtual filing cabinet for your stuff.
In truth, under the hood is some variety of storage media (a hard drive that stores its data on magnetized platters or a solid state drive that stores information on computer chips) with information scattered all over it. If it was possible to look at this media with a magnifying glass and see all the bits of data on it, you wouldn’t see files and folders all neatly lined up. Rather, one portion of a file would be here, another bit over there, and yet one more bit way over yonder. And its host folder would be somewhere else altogether. So, all this talk of folders and files is really just a way to simplify a complicated reality by packaging it in a more familiar form. Scattered bits and bytes of data written to media we don’t understand. Files and folders, we do.
You can use these buttons only when you’ve already traveled through a portion of the folder hierarchy. You can’t very well open a brand new folder as we’ve done and expect either the Back or Forward buttons to do anything. You haven’t navigated anywhere so there’s nowhere to go “back” to. Likewise, as you haven’t yet visited another folder within this window, there is no forward as far as the Mac is concerned. Providing a strong hint that these buttons do nothing in such a case, the buttons will be grayed out. If one or the other is black, it means you can click on it to navigate back or forward, depending on your previous travels within this folder.
Up to this point I've avoided providing tips, but I think you can now be trusted with one. Hold down the Command key (the one just to the immediate left or right of the space bar) and click the window name at the top of the window. A menu will appear that shows you the hierarchical path to the folder you're currently working with. This is one way to move up the hierarchy when you can't use the Back button.
View buttons: While looking at the contents of a window, you can view that content in four different ways—as indicated by the four View buttons. The first is Icon view. This shows any items within the folder as rectangular thumbnail images.
Favorites: Apple places commonly used folders (or directories) under the Favorites heading. (In some earlier versions of the Mac OS this was called Places.) If you’re running OS X Mountain Lion, under this heading you’ll see, by default, All My Files, AirDrop, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music, and Pictures. Click any of these items except All My Files and AirDrop and you’ll be taken to a folder within your user account folder that contains the suggested items—for example, your images within the Pictures folder and song library within the Music folder.
A Finder window's sidebar
Click All My Files and you can view all your readable files, sorted by file type. This All My Files view includes not only files that you’ve stored on your Mac but also any files you’ve saved to iCloud. We’ll look at saving files in another column.
Window behaviors
This has gone on quite long enough, but before I give you a hint about next week’s column, a couple of pointers about how windows behave.
First, you can open more than one window at a time. For example, you have one window open now. Click the Finder’s File menu and choose New Finder Window to create another window. It will open in the default view (which, again, is All My Files). In this window click the Downloads item in the sidebar. You now see the contents of the Downloads folder—if you’ve just configured your new Mac, this folder will contain a single About Download file. Your original window will still display the contents of your All My Files directory.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
In the last Mac 101 column, you finished configuring your new Mac. At long last, it's up and it's running OS X Mountain Lion—you’ve arrived! But where exactly are you? And what’s all that stuff on the screen?
Your Mac is running an application (also known as a program or an app) called Finder. More often than not, you’ll hear it referred to as the Finder. Given its name, is it a tool for searching your Mac?
Not exactly. Way back when the Mac was first born, Apple used a desktop metaphor to help people imagine the way their files were organized. You could think of the Finder as your desk. Inside that desk were folders that held other folders or files. So, by opening a series of nested folders, you’d eventually locate the file (or document) you were interested in working with. So, in this way, the Finder earned its name: It was the starting point for finding your files.
The desktop
That vast empty area in the middle of the Mac’s display is known as the desktop. Like a real desk’s top, you’re welcome to place items on this desktop, though Apple encourages you to place your files in more appropriate places—your pictures in a Pictures folder and documents in a Documents folder, for example, or on Apple's online syncing and storage service, iCloud.
As you’re just starting out, I’ll plant this seed: Place files where they belong rather than dumping them on the desktop. (And yes, we’ll talk about file management eventually.) Not only is it difficult to find files when there are hundreds scattered across your screen, but overloading the desktop with certain kinds of files can actually slow down your Mac.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Welcome to Mac 101, Macworld’s new guide for the new Mac user. Our plan is to use this weekly column to explain how to use Apple’s computers—starting with the most basic of the basics and, over the course of time, to touch on virtually every aspect of the Mac and its operating system.
The primary audience for these stories will be people switching from PCs to Macs or those who have decided to explore Macs after using an iPhone or iPad. But I think even if you already have some Mac savvy, you'll benefit too—not only because we might fill some gaps in your knowledge, but also because you'll now have a place to send your Cousin Bob when you get one of his regular “How do I do this?” calls. So let’s get to it.
Starting your new Mac for the first time
Enable Location services
When your Mac is within range of wireless networks, it can tell where it is—no, not in the sense of "in the kitchen" or "outside in the garden," but where specifically it is on earth: 123 Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A., for example. In order for it to do this, however, you have to grant it permission.
Your Mac can perform some remarkable tricks when it knows where it isRead more »
