Chapter 3

Introducing the Apple of Your iMac

In This Chapter

Introducing Mac OS X Lion

Appreciating the Unix core underneath Lion

Recognizing similarities between Windows and Lion

Getting help while exploring Lion

In the other books that I’ve written about Mac OS X Lion, I use all sorts of somewhat understated phrases to describe my operating system of choice, such as elegantly reliable, purely powerful, and supremely user friendly.

But why is Lion such a standout? To be specific, why do creative professionals and computer techno-wizards across the globe hunger for the very same Mac OS X that runs your iMac? Why is Lion so far ahead of Windows 7 in features and performance? Good questions, all!

In this chapter, I answer those queries and satisfy your curiosity about your new big cat. I introduce the main elements of the Lion Desktop, and I show you the fearless Unix heart that beats underneath Lion’s sleek exterior. I also point out the most important similarities between Lion and Windows 7, and I outline the resources available if you need help with Mac OS X.

Oh, and I promise to use honest-to-goodness English in my explanations, with a minimum of engineer-speak and indecipherable acronyms. (Hey, you’ve got to boast about Lion in turn to your family and friends. Aunt Harriet might not be as technologically savvy as we are.)

A Quick Tour of the Premises

Lion is a special type of software called an operating system. You know, OS, as in Mac OS X? That means that Lion essentially runs your iMac as well as allows you to run all your other applications, such as iTunes or Adobe Photoshop. It’s the most important computer application — or software — that you run.

Think of a pyramid, with Lion as the foundation and other applications running on top of it.

You’re using the OS when you aren’t running a specific application, such as these actions:

Copying files from a CD to your hard drive

Choosing a different screen saver

Sometimes, Lion even peeks through an application while it’s running. For example, Lion also controls actions such as these:

The Open and Save As dialogs that you see when working with files in Photoshop

The Print dialog that appears when you print a document in Microsoft Word

In this section, I escort you personally around the most important hotspots in Lion, and you meet the most interesting onscreen thingamabobs that you use to control your iMac. (I told you I wasn’t going to talk like an engineer!)

The Lion Desktop

This particular desktop isn’t made of wood, and you can’t stick your gum underneath. However, your Lion Desktop does indeed work much like the surface of a traditional desk. You can store things there, organize things into folders, and take care of important tasks like running other applications. Heck, you’ve even got a clock and a trash can.

Gaze upon Figure 3-1 and follow along as you venture to your Desktop and beyond.

Meet me at the Dock

The Dock is the closest thing to the pilot’s cabin of a jumbo jet that you’re likely to find on a Macintosh. It’s a pretty versatile combination: one part organizer, one part application launcher, and one part system monitor. From the Dock, you can launch applications, see what’s running, and display or hide the application windows.

Each icon in the Dock represents one of the following:

An application that you can run (or that is running)

An application window that’s minimized (shrunk)

A web page

A document or folder on your system

A network server or shared folder

Your Trash

I cover the Dock in more detail in Chapter 5.

The Dock is highly configurable:

It can appear at different sides of the screen.

It can disappear until you move your mouse pointer to the edge to call it forth.

You can resize it larger or smaller.

Dig those crazy icons

By default, Lion always displays at least one icon on your Desktop: typically, it’s the icon representing your iMac’s internal hard drive. To open the hard drive and view or use the contents, you double-click the icon. Depending on the preferences you choose, other icons that might appear on your Desktop can include

CDs and DVDs

An iPod, iPhone, or iPad

External hard drives or USB flash drives

Applications, folders, and documents

Files you downloaded from the Internet

Network servers you access

Chapter 4 provides the good stuff on icons and their uses within Lion.

There’s no food on this menu

The Finder menu isn’t found in a restaurant. You find it at the top of the Desktop, where you can use it to control your applications. Virtually every application that you run on your iMac has a menu.

To use a menu command, follow these steps:

1. Click the menu title (like File or Edit).

2. Choose the desired command from the list that appears.

Virtually every Macintosh application has some menu titles, such as File, Edit, and Window. You’re likely to find similar commands under these titles. However, only two menu titles are in every Mac OS X application that displays a menu bar:

The Apple menu (which is identified with that jaunty Apple Corporation icon, ).

The application menu (which always bears the name of the active application). For instance, the DVD Player menu title appears when you run the Lion DVD Player, and the Word menu group appears when you launch Microsoft Word.

I cover these two common titles in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

You can also display a contextual menu — regular human beings call it a right-click menu or shortcut menu — by right-clicking (or, as Apple calls it, secondary-clicking) your Lion Desktop or an application, folder, or file icon. I discuss right-click menus in detail in Chapter 4.

There’s always room for one more window

You’re probably already familiar with the ubiquitous window itself. Both Lion and the applications that you run use windows to display things like

The documents that you create

A web page

The contents of your hard drive

Lion gives you access to the applications, documents, and folders on your system through Finder windows.

Windows are surprisingly configurable. I cover them at length in Chapter 4.

What’s going on underneath?

How the core of your operating system is designed makes more of a difference than all the visual bells and whistles, which tend to be similar between Windows and Mac OS X Lion (and Linux as well, for that matter). Time for a Mark’s Maxim:

Sure, Lion’s elegant exterior is a joy to use, but Mac OS X is a better OS than Windows because of the unique Unix muscle that lies underneath!

So what should you and I look for in an OS? Keep in mind that today’s computer techno-wizard demands four requirements for a truly high-powered software wonderland — and Mac OS X Lion easily meets all four:

Reliability: Your OS has to stay up and running reliably for as long as necessary — I’m talking months here — without lockups or error messages. If an application crashes, the rest of your work should remain safe, and you should be able to shut down the offending software.

Performance: If your computer has advanced hardware, your OS must be able to use those resources to speed things up big time. The OS has to be highly configurable, and it has to be updated often to keep up with the latest in computer hardware.

“Mark, what do you mean by advanced hardware?” Well, if you’re already knowledgeable about state-of-the-art hardware, examples include

• True 64-bit computing

• Multicore processors (like the Intel chip in your iMac, which has two or four “virtual” processors on one chip)

• A huge amount of RAM (16GB on the iMac, or far more on today’s Mac Pro computers)

• Multiple hard drives used as a RAID array

If all that sounds like ancient Sumerian, gleefully ignore this technical drabble and keep reading.

Security: You want your stuff to remain your own — which is why Lion offers a strong level of security across your local network and the Internet. If you share your iMac with others, you’ll be happy to know that Lion keeps track of your personal information and private files, and prevents others from accessing them. Heck, Lion even provides parental controls to help safeguard kids using your iMac!

Ease of use: All the speed, security and reliability in the world won’t help an OS if it’s difficult to use.

DOS was the PC OS of choice before the arrival of Windows. It was doomed because it wasn’t intuitive or easy to master, requiring a PC owner to remember all sorts of commands that looked like hieroglyphics. (This is one of the reasons that the Macintosh was so incredibly popular in the days of DOS-based PCs. Macs had a mouse, and they were far easier to master and use.)

Similarities with that Windows behemoth

You might have heard of the Windows Switcher: a uniquely intelligent species that’s becoming more and more common these days. Switchers are former PC owners who have abandoned Windows and bought a Macintosh, thereby joining the Apple faithful running Mac OS X. (Apple loves to document this migration on its website.) Because today’s Macintosh computers are significantly faster than their PC counterparts — and you get neat software, such as Lion and the iLife suite when you buy a new Mac — switching makes perfect sense.

Switchers aren’t moving to totally unfamiliar waters. Windows 7 and Lion share a number of important concepts. Familiarizing yourself with Lion takes far less time than you might think.

Here’s an overview of the basic similarities between the two operating systems:

The Desktop: The Lion Desktop is a neat representation of a real physical desktop, and Windows uses the same idea:

• You can arrange files, folders, and applications on your Desktop to help keep things handy.

• Application windows appear on the Desktop.

Drives, files, and folders: Data is stored in files on your hard drive(s), and those files can be organized in folders. Both Lion and Windows use the same file/folder concept.

Specific locations: Both Windows and Lion provide every user with a set of folders to help keep various types of files organized. For example, the My Videos folder that you can use in Windows 7 corresponds to the Movies folder that you find in your Home folder within Lion.

Running programs: Both Lion and Windows run programs (or applications) in the same manner:

• Double-clicking an application icon launches that application.

• Double-clicking a document runs the corresponding application and then automatically loads the document.

Window control: Yep, both operating systems use windows, and those windows can be resized, hidden (or minimized), and closed in similar fashions. (Are you starting to see the connections here?)

Drag-and-drop: One of the basics behind a GUI (a ridiculous acronym that stands for graphical user interface) like Windows and Lion is the ability to drag documents and folders around to move, delete, copy, and open them. Drag-and-drop is one of the primary advantages of both of these operating systems because copying a file by dragging it from one window to another is intuitive and easy enough for a kid to accomplish.

Editing: Along the same lines as drag-and-drop, both Lion and Windows offer similar cut-and-paste editing features. You’ve likely used Cut, Copy, and Paste for years, so this is familiar stuff.

But what if you feel homesick for your Windows Desktop from time to time? No worries — you can actually run Windows effortlessly on your iMac! I show you how to use Apple’s Boot Camp feature in Chapter 25.

Calling for Help

You can call on these resources if you need additional help while you’re discovering how to tame the Lion.

Some of the help resources are located on the Internet, so your web browser will come in handy.

The Lion built-in Help Center

Sometimes the help you need is as close as the Help title on the menu bar. You can get help for either

A specific application: Just click Help. Then click in the Search box and type a short phrase that sums up your query (such as startup keys). You’ll see a list of help topics appear on the menu. Just click a topic to display more information.

Actions and functions (topics): Click a Finder window and then click Help on the menu bar. Again, you’ll see the Search box, and you can enter a word or phrase to find within the Help system. To display the Help Center window, click the Help Center item under the Search box.

The Apple web-based support center

Apple has online product support areas for every hardware and software product that it manufactures. Visit www.apple.com and click the Support tab at the top of the web page.

The Search box works just like the Mac OS Help system, but the Knowledge Base that Apple provides online has a lot more answers.

Magazines

Many magazines (both in print and online) offer tips and tricks on using and maintaining Mac OS X Lion.

My personal online favorites are Macworld (www.macworld.com) and MacLife (www.maclife.com).

Mac support websites

Numerous private individuals and groups offer support forums on the web, and you can often find help from other Mac owners on these sites within a few hours of posting a question.

I’m very fond of the CNET forum MacFixIt (www.macfixit.com) and Mac OS X Hints (http://forums.macosxhints.com).

Mac newsgroups on Usenet

If you’re familiar with Usenet newsgroups, you can find lots of help (typically dispensed with a healthy dose of opinion) in newsgroups such as comp.sys.mac.system. Simply post a message and then check back within a few hours to read the replies.

Local Mac user groups

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention your local Mac user group. Often, a user group maintains its own website and discussion forum. If you can wait until the next meeting, you can even ask your question and receive a reply from a real-live human being . . . quite a thrill in today’s web-riffic world!