Where is it?

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 in Basic OS Functionality Tagged with: , ,
by admin
You’re used to finding things in certain places on your machine but on a Mac the places are different. Here’s some help finding things. I’m going to go down the list on the left side of Windows Explorer and point out where you’ll find things in the Mac Finder. Desktop: hurray it’s the same name in [...]

File Associations

Posted on March 2nd, 2008 in Built-in Applications, Setup Tagged with: ,
by admin
Associating a program with a file type is important because that is the default program used to open the file when you double click on it in both Windows and the Mac OS. Most files/documents have default associations but sometimes you will want to change them (e.g. because you don’t use the default program to read [...]

Floating Info Window

Posted on February 26th, 2008 in Built-in Applications Tagged with: ,
by admin
While an object (file, directory, disk image, etc.) is selected (most often in the Finder) and you hit Command-I you get an information window for that file. However, here’s a really cool modification: if you hit Command-Option-I the info window floats on your screen and isn’t fixed to the chosen object. Now every time you [...]

Finder: Preview

Posted on January 15th, 2008 in Basic OS Functionality Tagged with:
by admin
Once you have found a file of interest and have selected it in the Finder (by clicking on it with the mouse, the same as in Windows) you can see its contents by running Preview. I don’t know why they call it Preview instead of just View because half the time all you want to [...]

Finder: Viewing files/documents

Posted on January 14th, 2008 in Basic OS Functionality Tagged with:
by admin
Where are your files? On the hard drive, of course, just like on a Windows XP machine but there is no Windows Explorer to look at them. Instead on the Mac you use the Finder. It’s the first icon on the dock: So just click on it and it will bring up a Finder window. The equivalent [...]