Overview
Dock + Finder
Exposé
Quick Look
Spotlight
Safari
Mail, iCal, Address Book
iChat
iTunes
QuickTime X
Photo Booth
Time Machine
Core Foundation
Scripting
Graphics and Media
The Dock in Mac OS X provides fast, one-click access to frequently used applications, folders, files, and even downloads from the Internet. The Finder makes working with your files and documents as easy as browsing your iTunes library.
What is the Dock?
The Dock at the bottom of the screen gives you quick access to your most frequently used applications, files, and folders. With its visually appealing, high-resolution icons, the Dock practically begs to be clicked. When you do, your applications spring to life instantly, and a bright signal tells you which applications are open. You can also use Exposé from the Dock to instantly see all the open windows for an application.
You can set the Dock to remain at the bottom of the screen, framing your desktop picture and always visible. Or you can set it to tuck itself away, ready to return when you move the pointer to the bottom of the screen.
What’s in your Dock.
The Dock comes loaded with icons for many of the applications included with your Mac — Dashboard, Mail, iCal, iPhoto, and many more. But as you’d expect, it’s easy to customize. To add a new application or folder, just grab it from the Finder and move it onto the Dock. The Dock expands to make room for the new item, and if you have a lot of items, the icons automatically scale to fit on your desktop. To make them easy to identify, the icons can magnify as you move your mouse over them. Removing and rearranging items is simple: Click and drag.
Stacks for your stuff.
A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast, direct access to folders and files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Mac OS X starts you off with premade stacks for downloads, applications, and documents. The Downloads stack automatically captures files you download from Safari, Mail, and iChat. The Applications stack gives you fast access to all your applications. And the Documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets, and word processing files. The files in each stack can appear as large icons that preview their contents, so it’s easy to find the right one before you click.
Stacks are scrollable, so you can easily view all items, and you can navigate through folders in a stack to see all the files inside the stack. Create as many stacks as you wish simply by dragging folders to the right side of your Dock.
All-new: Exposé in the Dock.
With Exposé now integrated into the Dock, you can view the open windows of a particular application with a click. Just click and hold any application icon in the Dock, and Exposé tiles the open windows of that application while causing the windows of other applications to fade away. The clutter cleared, you can easily find the document you need. A click makes it the active window, and pressing the Space bar gives you a full-screen preview of the window. That’s not all you can do with Exposé in the Dock. When you drag a file onto a Dock icon, all the application’s open windows pop up, so you can place the file in the right window — perfect if you want to attach a document to an email message.
Introducing the Finder.
The Finder is like home base for your Mac. Represented by the blue icon with the smiling face, it’s one of the first things you see when you start working on your Mac. It lets you organize and access practically everything on your Mac, including applications, files, folders, discs, and shared drives on your network. You can also see rich, high-quality previews of the contents of your files. The Finder takes full advantage of the advanced technologies in Mac OS X — such as 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch — so it responds more quickly to your actions.
Meet the sidebar.
The sidebar in the Finder window is your starting point when browsing your Mac. If you’ve used iTunes, you’ll feel right at home. Like iTunes, the sidebar is organized into categories to make it easy to locate your stuff — frequently accessed folders, CDs and DVDs, computers on your local network, and so on. With a few clicks, you’re on your way to finding what you need. The sidebar also features a handy Search For section. It uses Spotlight search to let you quickly find files you’ve modified today, yesterday, or in the past week, or find all images, movies, or documents. Just click one of the folders and you’ll see an up-to-the-minute list of files. And just like the Dock, you can customize the sidebar with your own search folders.
Instant networking.
Any Mac or PC on your home network automatically appears in the sidebar, allowing you to easily share files between them and even use Spotlight search and Cover Flow to search the other computers. And when you click a connected Mac, you can use screen sharing, which lets you see and control another Mac as if you were sitting in front of it — useful, for example, when you want to show someone how to use an application or feature.
See your files in Cover Flow.
Mac OS X helps you navigate everything on your Mac visually with an innovation called Cover Flow. Using Cover Flow, you can flip through your documents as easily as you flip through music in iTunes or bookmarks in Safari 4. Each file is displayed as a large preview of its first page, so you can actually see the contents of a document before opening it.
Three more ways to view.
You can also see your files in list view, which lets you easily sort them in different ways, including by file name, date modified, or file type. You can see them in column view, which lets you navigate through multiple folders quickly. And you can see them as large icons, up to 512 by 512 pixels in size. Icon view lets you thumb through a multipage document or watch a QuickTime movie right in the Finder, an easy way to find and view your stuff.
