In the Mac world, the icons of your hard drive and any other disks attached to your Mac generally appear on your desktop for quick access.

This row of translucent, almost photographic icons is a launcher for the programs, files, fo lders, and disks you use often—and an indicator to let you know which programs are already open. In Leopard, they now rest on what appears to be a polished, highly reflective shelf.

Because the Dock is such a critical component of Mac OS X, Apple has decked it out with enough customization controls to keep you busy experimenting for months. You can change its size, move it to the sides of your screen, hide it entirely, and so on. The Quick Look Slideshow begins a complete discussion of using and understanding the Dock.

The menu at the top left of the screen houses important Mac-wide commands like Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down. In a sense, it’s like the Start menu on a diet: It lists recent programs, system-wide functions, and includes a quick way to jump to System Preferences.

The first menu in every program, in boldface, tells you at a glance what program you’re in. The commands in this Application menu include About (which tells you what version of the program you’re using), Preferences, Quit, and others like Hide Others and Show All (which help you control window clutter, as described in Moving windows among screens).

The File and Edit menus come next, exactly as in Windows. The last menu is almost always Help. It opens a miniature Web browser that lets you search the online Mac Help files for explanatory text.

In Mac OS X Leopard, it’s easy to set up your preferred look for all folder windows on your entire system. With one click on the “Use as Defaults” button (described below), you can change the window view of 20,000 folders at once—to icon view, list view, or whatever you like.

The "Always open in icon view" option lets you override that master setting, just for this window.

For example, you might generally prefer a neat list view with large text. But for your Pictures folder, it probably makes more sense to set up icon view, so you can see a thumbnail of each photo without having to open it.

That’s the idea here. Open Pictures, change it to icon view, and then turn on "Always open in icon view.” Now every folder on your Mac is in list view except Pictures.

Mac OS X draws the little pictures that represent your icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you (or the Mac) can scale them to almost any size without losing any quality or clarity.

In the View Options window (Figure 2-4), drag the Icon Size slider back and forth until you find a size you like. (For added fun, make little cartoon sounds with your mouth.)

You can control how closely spaced icons are in a window. If you want see a lot of them without making the window bigger, you can pack ‘em in like sardines. Figure 2-4 shows all.

Figure 2-4. Drag the “Grid spacing” slider to specify how tightly packed you want your icons to be. At the minimum setting (top), they’re so crammed that it’s almost ridiculous; you can’t even see their names. But sometimes, you don’t really need to. At more spacious settings (bottom), you get a lot more “white space.”

Using this slider, you can adjust the type size for your icons And for people with especially big or especially small screens—or people with aging retinas—this feature is handy indeed.

Click either Bottom or Right to indicate where you want an icon’s name to appear, relative to its icon. As shown in Figure 2-5, it lets you create, in effect, a multiple-column list view in a single window.

While you’ve got the View Options palette open, try turning on “Show item info.” Suddenly you get a new line of information (in tiny blue type) for certain icons, saving you the effort of opening up the folder or file to find out what’s in it. For example:

You can see some of these effects illustrated in Figure 2-4.

Figure 2-5. The View Options dialog box for an icon view window offers the chance to create colored backgrounds for certain windows or even to use photos as window wallpaper (bottom). Using a photo may have a soothing, annoying, or comic effect—like making the icon names completely unreadable. (Note, by the way, how the icon’s names have been set to appear beside the icons, rather than underneath. You now have all the handy, freely draggable convenience of an icon view, along with the more compact spacing of a list view.)

This option pertains primarily to graphics, which Mac OS X often displays only with a generic icon (stamped with the file type, like JPEG, TIFF, or PDF). But if you turn on “Show icon preview,” Mac OS X turns each icon into a miniature display of the image itself, as shown in Figure 2-5. It’s ideal for working with folders full of digital photos.

For a discussion of this pop-up menu, see the next section.

Here’s another Mac OS X luxury that other operating systems can only dream about: You can fill the background of any icon view window on your Mac with a certain color—or even a photo.

Color-coordinating or “wallpapering” certain windows is more than just a gimmick. In fact, it can serve as a timesaving psychological cue. Once you’ve gotten used to the fact that your main Documents folder has a sky-blue background, you can pick it out like a sharpshooter from a screen filled with open windows. Color-coded Finder windows are also especially easy to distinguish at a glance when you’ve minimized them to the Dock.

Once a window is open, choose View→View Options (-J). The bottom of the resulting dialog box offers three choices, whose results are shown in Figure 2-5.

This harmless-looking button can actually wreak havoc—or restore order to your kingdom—with a single click. It applies the changes you’ve just made in the View Options dialog box to all windows on your Mac (instead of only the frontmost window).

If you set up the frontmost window with a colored background, big icons, small text, and a tight grid, and then you click Use as Defaults, you’ll see that look in every disk or folder window you open.

You’ve been warned.

Fortunately, there are two auxiliary controls that can give you a break from all the sameness.

First, you can set up individual windows to be weirdo exceptions to the rule; see "Always open in icon view,” above.

Second, you can remove any departures from the default window view—after a round of disappointing experimentation on a particular window, for example—using a secret button. To do so, choose View→Show View Options to open the View Options dialog box. Now hold down the Option key. The Use as Defaults button magically changes to say “Restore to Defaults,” which means “Abandon all the changes I’ve foolishly made to the look of this window.”

Mac OS X offers an enormous number of variations on the “snap icons to the underlying rows-and-columns grid” theme:

Note, by the way, that the grid alignment is only temporary. As soon as you drag icons around, or add more icons to the window, the newly moved icons wind up just as sloppily positioned as before you tidied up.

If you want the Mac to lock all icons to the closest spot on the grid whenever you move them, choose View→Show View Options (-J); from the “Arrange by” pop-up menu, choose Snap to Grid.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: The Go to Folder Command

Sometimes a Unix tentacle pokes through the user-friendly Mac OS X interface. Every now and then, you find a place where you can use Unix shortcuts instead of the mouse.

One classic example is the Go→Go to Folder command (Shift--G). It brings up a box like the one shown here.

The purpose of this box is to let you jump directly to a certain folder on your Mac by typing its Unix folder path., Depending on your point of view, this special box is either a shortcut or a detour.

For example you want to see what’s in the Documents folder of your Home folder, you could choose Go→Go to Folder and type this:

/Users/chris/Documents

Then click Go or press Return. (In this example, of course, chris is your short account name.)

In other words, you’re telling the Mac to open the Users folder in your main hard drive window, then your Home folder inside that, and then the Documents folder inside that. Each slash means “and then open.” (You can leave off the name of your hard drive if your path begins with a slash.) When you press Enter, the folder you specified pops open immediately.

Of course, if you really wanted to jump to your Documents folder, you’d be wasting your time by typing all that. Unix (and therefore Mac OS X) offers a handy shortcut that means “home folder.” It’s the tilde character (~) at the upper-left corner of your keyboard.

To see what’s in your Home folder, then, you could type just that ~ symbol into the Go To Folder box and then press Return. Or you could add some slashes to it to specify a folder inside your Home folder, like this:

~/Documents

You can even jump to someone else’s Home folder by typing a name after the symbol, like this:

~chris

If you get into this sort of thing, here’s another shortcut worth noting: If you type nothing but a slash (/), and then press Return, you jump immediately to the Computer window, which provides an overview of all your disks.

Note, too, that you don’t have to type out the full path—only the part that drills down from the window you’re in. If your Home folder window is already open, for example, you can open the Pictures folder just by typing Pictures.

But the Go to Folder trick really turns into a high-octane timesaver if you use auto completion. Here’s how it works: After each slash, you can type only enough letters of a folder’s name to give Mac OS X the idea—de instead of desktop, for example—and then wait a fraction of a second (or, if you’re late for a plane, press the Tab key). Mac OS X instantly and automatically fills in the rest of the folder’s name. It even auto-capitalizes the folder names for you. (In Unix, capitalization matters.)

For example, instead of typing /Applications/Microsoft Office/clipart/standard, you could type nothing more than /ap/mi/cl/st, remembering to press Tab after each pair of letters. Now that’s a way to feel like a Unix programmer.

Even then, though, you’ll soon discover that none of these grid-snapping techniques move icons into the most compact possible arrangement. If one or two icons have wandered off from the herd to a far corner of the window, they’re merely nudged to the grid points closest to their current locations. They aren’t moved all the way back to the group of icons elsewhere in the window.

To solve that problem, use one of the sorting options described next.

If you’d rather have icons sorted and bunched together on the underlying grid—no strays allowed—make a selection from the View menu:

Sometimes there are too many icons in a folder to fit in a fan. In that case, the stack becomes a grid instead (Figure 2-15, bottom). The grid, of course, holds many more icons than the fan, although it’s not as pretty.

But you can force a certain Dock folder to sprout a fan or a grid all the time, rather than letting Mac OS X decide. From the Dock folder’s shortcut menu (Using the Dock), choose “View content as”→Fan or “View content as”→Grid (instead of the factory setting, “View content as”→Automatic).

From now on, you’ll always get the fan, or always get the grid.

Truth is, though, that both the grid and the fan have limited storage space for icons; the exact number depends on your monitor size. In any case, if there are too many icons to display at once, the last icon says, “24 more in Finder” (or whatever the number is). Click that icon to open the folder’s regular window, where all the contents are available.

Of course, then you’ve defeated the fan’s step-saving purpose.

Maybe that’s why many Mac fans choose View Content As→List from each Dock folder’s shortcut menu (an option in version 10.5.2 and later). Now, when you click a folder in the Dock, you get a simple pop-up list of everything in that folder.

When you first install Mac OS X 10.5, you get a couple of starter stacks just to get you psyched. One is called Downloads; the other is Documents. (Both of these folders are physically inside your Home folder. But you may well do most of your interacting with them on the Dock.)

The Downloads folder, new in Leopard, collects three kinds of Internet arrivals:

Unless you intervene, they’re sorted by the date you downloaded them.

It’s handy to know where to find your downloads, and nice not to have them all cluttering your desktop.

Figure 2-15. Top: When you click the icon of a folder or disk on the Dock (just one single click), you get this effect: a rainbow that shows what’s inside. Click an icon to open it, just as though you’d double-clicked it in a window. You can even Option-click one icon after another, opening them all while the stack remains arrayed before you. Or grab an icon and drag it right out of the stack—into another window, say. Bottom: If there are too many icons to fit in the arc (as determined by your monitor size), you get this grid instead. Alas, here, too, space is limited. If there are more than fits on the grid, click the “35 more in Finder” icon at the lower right. You go to the folder’s standard Finder window, where you can see the complete list of icons.

Creating a new stack is easy. Just drag any folder or disk icon onto the right end of the Dock. That’s right: All folders and disks become stacks when clicked on the Dock.

Therefore, to get a stack off the Dock, drag its folder icon away from the Dock and let go. You’re not deleting the actual folder—just its Dock shortcut.

To turn on the Dock’s auto-hiding feature, choose →Dock→Turn Hiding On (or press Option--D).

When the Dock is hidden, it doesn’t slide into view until you move the cursor to the Dock’s edge of the screen. When you move the cursor back to the middle of the screen, the Dock slithers out of view once again. (Individual Dock icons may occasionally shoot upward into Desktop territory when a program needs your attention—cute, very cute—but otherwise, the Dock lies low until you call for it.)

On paper, an auto-hiding Dock is ideal; it’s there only when you summon it. In practice, however, you may find that the extra half-second the Dock takes to appear and disappear makes this feature slightly less appealing.

Many Mac fans prefer to hide and show the Dock at will by pressing the hide/show keystroke, Option--D. This method makes the Dock pop on and off the screen without requiring you to move the cursor.

Depending on your screen’s size, you may prefer smaller or larger Dock buttons. The official way to resize them goes like this: Choose →Dock→Dock Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, drag the Dock Size slider, as shown in Figure 2-16.

There’s a much faster way to resize the Dock, however: Just position your cursor carefully in the Dock’s divider line, so that it turns into a double-headed arrow. Now drag up or down to shrink or enlarge the Dock.

You may not be able to enlarge the Dock, especially if it contains a lot of icons. But you can make it almost infinitely smaller. This may make you wonder: How can you distinguish between icons if they’re the size of molecules?

The answer lies in the →Dock→Turn Magnification On command. What you’ve just done is trigger the swelling effect shown in Figure 2-16. Now your Dock icons balloon to a much larger size as your cursor passes over them. It’s a weird, magnetic, rippling, animated effect that takes some getting used to. But it’s another spectacular demonstration of the graphics technology in Mac OS X, and it can actually come in handy when you find your icons shrinking away to nothing.

Figure 2-16. To find a comfortable setting for the Magnification slider, choose →Dock→Dock Preferences. Leave the Dock Preferences window open on the screen, as shown here. After each adjustment of the Dock Size slider, try out the Dock (which still works when the Dock Preferences window is open) to test your new settings.

Yet another approach to getting the Dock out of your way is to rotate it, so that it sits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:

You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most Mac OS X programs put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the Dock and its labels might get in the way.

The Dock isn’t just a launcher; it’s also a switcher. For example, it lets you:

Each Dock icon has its own very useful shortcut menu (Figure 2-17). For example:

Dock icons are spring-loaded. That is, if you drag any icon onto a Dock icon and pause—or, if you’re in a hurry, tap the Space bar—the Dock icon opens to receive the dragged file.

This technique is most useful in these situations: