The OS X Leopard Desktop

May 06

Series, Switcher Add comments

This entry is part 7 of 10 in the series Switching From Windows To Macintosh.

This is the OS X Leopard Desktop as configured after setting up Leopard for the first time. There really isn't all that much, and most importantly, notice that there are no program icons on the desktop part of the screen (this would be under the Hard Drive icons over on the right side there). Apple doesn't subsidize their hardware by selling their soul to adware/crapware programs like Windows based computer manufacturers do. Maybe this is a big reason that Macintosh computers cost a little more than Windows based systems do, but I'll tell you what, I would much rather pay the extra money for a well designed computer that doesn't put adware/crapware on my new computer than to have to pay a computer manufacturer "protection money" to have them not install adware/crapware on my new computer.

I want to basically break down what you see on your desktop so that you know when someone tells you to add a program to your Dock, you will understand what they are talking about. So lets get started...

Dock

The "Dock" is the tray of icons at the bottom of the screen (by default) that shows running application icons as well as application icons that you place on the Dock yourself on the left side of the dashed line separator and "Stacks", documents and minimized application windows on the right side. I need to mention here that the image of the Dock in the above screen shot is not the default Dock graphics. I have used a program to change the image of the Dock to my liking.

When you see the desktop of your new computer for the first time, the Dock contains icons from iLife as well as a couple of system applications. The list of applications on the above Dock are as follows:

Finder
Dashboard
Mail
Safari
iChat
Address Book
iCal
Preview
iTunes
iPhoto (part of iLife)
iMovie (part of iLife)
GarageBand (part of iLife)
Spaces
Time Machine
System Preferences

You might notice that there is something a little different under the Finder icon than all the rest of the icons. That glowing blue circle under the Finder icon tells you that Finder is currently running.

The left side of the Dock is used to allow the user to easily launch programs (similar to Windows "Quick Launch" Toolbar). Adding applications to the Dock can be done in several ways. The most popular ways are to find the application in your Hard Drive (Application folder by default or the folder that you copied the application to), then drag the icon from the Finder window to the Dock. When you do this, the other icons on the Dock will separate to make room for the new icon to be dropped. Then when you drop the icon, it will be there from that point on.

You can also add an application to the Dock after running it. If you right-click (or hold down the Control key and click) on the application icon that you want to stay on the Dock, a pop-up menu will appear:

As you can see, the popup menu item "Keep in Dock" allows you to add an application icon to the Dock. You can also tell OS X Leopard to launch the application when you log in to your account with the item "Open at Login". You can go to where the application is stored on your Hard Drive by using "Show in Finder". "Hide" allows you to make the application window disappear from the screen. You can make it reappear by clicking on the application icon again. The final item "Quit" allows you to quit the application from the Dock.

If there are menu items above "Keep in Dock", those are added by the application. In the above screen shot, Safari allows you to create a new browser window and if there are more than one browser window open, you can select the active window with a list of items that will appear at the very top of the Safari popup menu. In the above example, there was only one Safari browser window open.

OS X Menu Bar

This is the only Menu Bar you will ever find on a Macintosh running OS X. Well, so long as you are not running a Java application or running an application that uses X11. (Don't ask)

There are two sections of the Menu Bar. On the left side of the Menu Bar is the application menu. Actually, there are 2 sections of the left section of the Menu Bar. The first is the Apple Menu Bar Item. This is the menu bar item that uses the '' (Apple symbol). This menu bar item is always there. It contains items like Software Update, System Preferences, Log out, Restart, Shutdown, etc...

The rest of the left side of the menu bar is for the active application. For example, in the above screen shot, you see "Finder" right next to the Apple Menu Bar Item. This is because the Finder is the active application. So all the Menu Bar items on the left side in that screen shot are for the Finder.

The right side of the Menu Bar are for what are called Menu extra's. These are little applications that can be used to give you status information, date and time, your account and the ability to switch to a different account in OS X, and most importantly, Spotlight.

Spotlight is the small icon that looks like a magnifying glass. Spotlight is the way cool tool that helps you locate files, documents, mail messages, PDF's, Dictionary definitions, and even calculate simple formulas. For Example:

When you put words or file names into Spotlight, you will be given a list of items found in various locations on your account. As you can see from the screen shot on the left, Spotlight finds Definitions, Applications, System Preferences, Documents, Folders, Email Messages, Images, PDF Documents, Webpages, Movies, etc... You can configure Spotlight to display that list in a specific order and you can also tell Spotlight not to search in specific folders. You can also use Spotlight to do quick and dirty calculations as seen on the right side screen shot. It's great for times when you don't want to bring up the Calculator application to get the answer to a simple formula.

The right side of the Menu Bar is something like Windows "Notification Area or System Tray". It's not exactly like it, but it's darn close.

Desktop Icons

Actually the area for Desktop Icons is pretty much the entire desktop and I have a small section highlighted in the screen shot. I just wanted to show where the icons start displaying from since it's different from Windows. With OS X, desktop icons will start appearing from the upper right side of the desktop flow down till there is no more room and then flow left. In Windows, they start appearing in the upper left of the desktop flowing down till there is no more room and then flow to the right.

Also like Windows, you can configure "Finder" to make certain items appear first. I say Finder because the Desktop and all it's icons are a part of the Finder at this point. Displaying the Finder's Preferences will give you a ton of options.

$Preferences dialog for Apple\'s Finder$

In the first pane (or General pane) of the Preferences window here, you can see for checkbox items. Hard disks, External disks, CDs, DVDs, and iPods, and Connected servers. Each item allows you to either display or not display those items on the desktop if they are present. This is a much easier setting to find than in Windows when you want to either show or hide the My Computer or Network Neighborhood icons.

Finder Window or Application Windows

Finally, this is a Finder application window. When OS X starts up for the very first time, it opens a Finder window pointing to your "Home" folder. The Home folder is a folder that OS X sets up for each user account created. The above screen shot shows "Guest" because I logged into the Guest account to take the screen shots for this article. Your Home folder will be named whatever you used for the "short" version of your account name.

The Home folder contains all kinds of other folders. In the picture above, you can see that the Desktop folder is stored there as well as a Documents folder, a folder where files downloaded from Safari will be stored called Downloads, a Movies folder, a Music folder where iTunes stores all the music you buy or add to iTunes (If you have iTunes configured to keep track of the files for you), Pictures is where iPhoto keeps your pictures (again, if you have iPhoto configured to handle storing pictures for you, and a few other folders like Sites which you probably won't use unless you are going to use OS X's built-in Apache web server.

The Public folder is a place to put files that you may want to share with other users of the computer. You see, only you can access your Home folder. Other users can't even open the folder to look inside. They can see your Public folder, so if you have a picture you want to copy to a different user, you can put that picture in your Public folder. The other user can then go to /Users/{your home folder}/Public and see the files you have placed there.

The Library folder is also a very special folder. This is where OS X stores all kinds of information from programs you have run and System Preferences you have set. If you look inside the Library folder, you will see a whole bunch more folders. If you use GarageBand for instance, you will find a lot of files that GarageBand can use like Loops and Sounds in /Users/{your home folder}/Library/Audio. Program preferences are mostly stored in the /Users/{your home folder}/Application Support folder.

That pretty much covers the OS X Leopard Desktop. In the next installment, I'll cover some of the major applications that come free with your new computer.