As mentioned previously, OS X is a version of Unix (it's technically a variety of Unix). If you were Unix savvy, you wouldn't be reading this dumb tutorial, but if you ever learn any Unix (I doubt I will ever try to mention anything much here) you could access all of that through the use of a terminal window. I'll mention it much later in brief. It's not really important. Suffice it to say there is a way to go behind the "graphical interface" of Macintosh and do intense things with nothing but a text based command line. But you'll have to learn that elsewhere. I know "just enough to be dangerous".
The Mac Screen
The Menubar for all programs
As mentioned previously, there is a menu on the top of the Mac screen. On the extreme left edge is the icon of an apple (see the last post). Click it brings up the menu seen in the last post. I'll go through all these options in more detail in a future post.
Immediately after "Apple" icon is what is called the menubar. Here you will find the most obvious difference between using Mac and using Windows. In Windows, you have a menu bar that is a part of every window. On the Mac, every window that is "active" (which means you have selected it) uses the top menu bar for it's options. This might be somewhat baffling so let's look more closely. Let's say you have a program open (any program but let's say it's a copy of Microsoft Word). You will see to the right of that icon of the apple the name of the program (in this case, "Word") followed by options that whatever program you are running uses for it's basic operations. With Word you would see "File Edit View..." and so forth. Click any of those menubar options brings up a drop down menu that lets you choose an option in the program that is running. Now, for some weirdness for a Windows person, click on the "desktop", that is, outside of all windows. You will notice that the program menubar changes to "Finder". Two important things have happened. You have switched outside of the program you were running (Word) and activated the one program that is always running on a Mac. It's called "Finder" and it is the way you browse the computer and all it's devices (hard drives and other items the computer knows about) and it is the correlary to the Windows "Explorer" that comes up when you select "Start and My Computer".
It's imperative that you grasp this - that clicking on a window in any program changes the menubar to display it's menu and the commands will effect that program. Clicking on the desktop itself will always bring up the Finder. Clicking back on the window you were on before will bring back the original menubar. Once you're used to this it will be perfectly sensible, but for now you might want to pay attention to the menubar if something seems amiss. As soon as you click a different window or the desktop either that application or the finder will be "active".
The Finder
We'll talk about the finder in more detail later, but even the finder operates "in a window", and so it's important you understand the second major difference you will experience on the Mac -- the way you control windows so that's what we'll finish this lesson with.
Active Application Windows
Whatever window you click on (including the finder window itself) is the "active application window". On the top of the active window on the left hand side are three colored circles: Red, Yellow, and Green.
- Red shuts the active window. It is not a "close the program" option (except in rare, poorly done Mac applications like Novell GroupWise), but rather a shut the window option. In this sense it is very different from the Windows "X" option that is in the right hand corner, which sometimes shuts the window and sometimes shuts down the whole program. We'll cover this more later when we talk about the various states programs can be in when we cover the question "Where is my program hiding"?
- Yellow is the minimize option, and will make your program slip down to the "dock" where you can click it's icon to maximize it again. We haven't covered the dock yet, so be patient and we'll get to it.
- Green can be seem somewhat confusing until you grasp what is going on. It basically cycles between optimum viewing state (where the program displays from the top of the screen to the bottom at a reasonable width for viewing) and a customized size where the user has dragged the window to a different size.
The third thing that is most different about a Mac from Microsoft Windows is the way you move programs and size them. On Microsoft Windows, you can essentially size any window using any corner of the application. On the Mac you must size using the lower right hand corner. Move windows around by dragging them with the top of the window (where the colored circles live). You can also double click that top of the window space to minimize the application to the dock. Again, I'll be discussing the dock very soon.
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