It’s part of the Mac’s user-friendly heritage: You can do practically everything using only the mouse. Everything is out front, unhidden, and clickable, whether it’s an icon, button, or menu.
But as in Windows, you can shave seconds and steps off your workload if you master shortcut menus: short menus that sprout out of things you click, offering commands that the software thinks you might want to invoke at the moment (Figure 3-10).
To summon one, just right-click something—an icon, the desktop, a window, a link in Safari, text in a word processor, whatever. You can also trigger these shortcut menus with special clicks on your trackpad or Magic Mouse; see Logging Out, Shutting Down for additional options.
Figure 3-10. These pop-up entities used to be called contextual menus, but Apple started calling them “shortcut menus” a few years ago, perhaps because that’s what they’re called in Windows and Unix.
In any case, a menu drops down listing relevant commands: Get Info, Move to Trash, Copy, and so on. You can click the command you want, or type the first couple of letters of it and then tap the space bar.
These menus become more useful the more you get to know them. The trouble is, millions of Mac fans never even knew they existed.
That’s why there’s a second way to access them. At the top of
every Finder window, you’ll find a 
pop-up menu that’s technically called the
Action menu (shown in Figure 3-10).
It lists the same sorts of commands you’d find in the shortcut menus, but it’s visible, so novices stand a better chance of stumbling onto it.
The Finder shortcut menus offer some of the most useful Mac features ever. Don’t miss these two in particular:
Imagine this: You’ve got a bunch of scattered icons on your desktop, or a mass of related files in a window. You can now highlight all of them; right-click any one of them; and from the shortcut menu, choose “New Folder with Selection (12 items)” (or whatever the number of icons is).
With a cool animation, the Finder visibly throws the selected icons into a brand-new folder. It’s initially named New Folder With Items (duh), but the hard part is over. All you have to do is rename it—and be grateful that you were spared the 736 steps it would have taken you to do the same job manually.
Here’s one of Mountain Lion’s headliner features: a handy pop-up menu filled with ways to send whatever’s highlighted to somebody else. In the case of selected Finder icons, you can zip it away to someone using any of these three methods (see Figure 3-11):
UP TO SPEED: Compressing, Zipping, and Archiving
OS X comes with a built-in command that compresses a file or folder down to a single, smaller icon—an archive—suitable for storing or emailing. It creates .zip files, the same compression format used in Windows. That means you can now send .zip files back and forth to PC owners without worrying that they won’t be able to open them.
To compress something, right-click a file or folder and
choose “Compress [the icon’s name]” from the shortcut menu. (Of
course, you can use the File menu or menu instead.)
OS X thoughtfully creates a .zip archive, but it leaves the original behind so you can continue working with it.
Opening a .zip file somebody sends you is equally easy: Just double-click it. Zip!—it opens.
Email. It’s the “email this file right off the desktop” command. It whips open Mail and creates a new, outgoing message with the selected file (or files) already attached. Address and send, and make a sacrifice to the right-clicky gods.
Figure 3-11. The new Share menu in every Finder window offers direct access to three ways of transmitting a selected file icon to somebody else. Top: For example, you can send a file to somebody’s cellphone or iMessage account. Just specify the lucky winner’s name here—and add a smiley face, if the mood strikes you (use the pop-up menu in the lower right). Bottom: Alternatively, you can send a file to a nearby Mac (running Lion or later) without having to fiddle with network or sharing settings. Just type the name of the Mac you want and then click Send.
Message. This command lets you send a file—a photo or video clip, for example—to somebody’s iPhone. Type a little message and then click Send. Off it goes, just as though you’d sent an iMessage from the Messages app described in Chapter 12.
AirDrop. AirDrop is a slick, simple way to shoot a file from one Mac to another without involving any setup, network settings, or user accounts. Most people use the AirDrop window for this, as described on AirDrop.
But you don’t have to budge from your current window. Click the file(s) you want to send, click Share→AirDrop, click the name of the nearby destination Mac, and click Send. Off it goes!
This menu may also offer to send your file to Twitter, Facebook, or (if it’s a photo or video (Flickr or Vimeo).
For details on these and other Share-menu options, see The Mountain Lion Share Button.
