A couple posts ago I described the menubar at the top of the screen. I said it always began with the icon of the apple, followed by the application name and it's menu system. Further to the right on that menubar is additional information that, like the Apple Icon, is present for all applications. Today we're going to describe in detail the apple icon menu as well as the other system information on the menu bar.
Beginning at the far left of the menu bar you will see an icon of a magnifying glass. This is called "spotlight" and clicking on it (or pressing ALT SPACE) will bring up the Spotlight window. Spotlight allows you to search for any word in a file or any part of a name of a file or folder. If you begin typing Spotlight will show you the list of things that correspond to what you're typing. The first entry in the list is "show all", which brings up a window with all the search results in it. You don't need to use "show all" if you can see the file you want and scroll to it in the spotlight popup window. You should notice that spotlight attempts to categorize the types of files, so you can see what results were folders, what results were documents, what results were message, what were web pages and so forth, to help you find something. If you searched for something that comes up as the first item, just press enter to get it.
After the spotlight, you will find a "time" icon. Click it and you will see a little calendar to give you the day of the week. This clock is configurable in several ways from System Preferences, which we'll describe later.
Other icons that appear in this area (the exact order is dependent upon your particular setup) are a "sound" icon which lets you raise and lower the sound (additionally there are keys that let you do that which I'll describe later), a wireless icon if you are on a wireless network, a "spaces" icon if you've set spaces up (described later) and a host of other possible icons depending upon the programs you've installed. The possibilities are too broad to describe here so, I'll just describe the ones that I happen to have.
I'm running a special application that shows me the actual date on the menubar, so I have that showing. I have Time Machine activated (a macintosh feature that backs your computer up to an external hard drive, so I see an icon that shows me its status and lets me control it. I have a .mac account so I can see status and activity for that account. I have an icon that synchs my address book with a program called plaxo and I have a couple icons that synch the music that I play to an online system that tracks what people play. The possibilities for this space are broad and too broad to cover in depth here. Suffice it to say that software can instantiate itself here much like it can in Windows in the system tray, and I can see both status information and control some aspects of the program from these icons. If you are in doubt, click it and see what it is.
Finally, I want to cover the Apple icon menu, on the far left. So, I'll do that tomorrow!
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1 comment:
Don, this is damned fine stuff. Can't wait for the next installments.
Already like this little beast very much.
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