Downloading Compressed Files

Programs you download from the web (not the App Store) generally arrive in a specially encoded, compressed form (Figure 6-2). And unless you’ve changed the settings, they arrive in the Downloads folder on your Dock.

The downloaded file’s name usually has a file name extension like .zip (the standard compression file format for Windows and Mac files) or .dmg (a disk image file, described below).

You may occasionally run into .tar files (tape archive, an ancient Unix utility), .gz (gzip, a standard Unix compression format), or combo formats like .tar.gz or .tgz.

Fortunately, you generally don’t have to worry about any of this; most web browsers, including Safari, automatically unzip and unstuff downloads of all types.

Figure 6-2. A: This is the downloaded compressed file. Double-click to get…
B: The .dmg (disk image) file. Double-click it to “mount” the disk image.
C: And now, the disk image itself. Double-click to open the installer window. (Dismiss the warning that the software came from the Internet.) “Eject” it after the installation is complete.
D: Here’s the actual installer.
After the installation, you can delete all this stuff (except maybe the .dmg file, if you think you might want to install the software again later).

Uninstalling Software

If you got a program from the App Store, it’s easy to delete from the Launchpad (“Launchpad”).

If you got it from some other source, well, there’s generally no Uninstall program. To uninstall a program, you just drag it (or its folder) to the Trash.

Some programs leave harmless scraps of themselves behind; to check for them, look for preference files or folders bearing the dearly departed program’s name in your Library folders (especially in Application Support) and in your Home→Library→Preferences folder.

Redesigning the Launchpad Screens

If you use Launchpad a lot, it’s worth taking a moment to arrange its icons into logical categories or a sensible sequence. As it turns out, you can freely drag them into new spots; the other icons scoot aside to make room.

You can create additional screens, too. To do that, drag an icon to the right edge of the screen; keep your mouse button down. The first screen slides off to the left, leaving you on a new, blank one where you can deposit the icon.

You can organize your icons on these Home pages by category, frequency of use, color, or whatever tickles your fancy.

Folders

The Launchpad just wouldn’t be like the iPad if it didn’t also let you organize your apps into folders. Folders let you organize your apps, de-emphasize the ones you don’t use often, and restore order to that horribly flat, multipage display of icons.

To create a folder, drag one app’s icon on top of another. MacOS puts both of them into a single new folder (Figure 6-4). If they’re the same kind of app, it even tries to figure out what category they both belong to—and names the new folder accordingly (“Music,” “Photos,” “Games,” or whatever). This new name is only a proposal; an editing window also appears so that you can type a custom name that you prefer.

Figure 6-4. Open a folder by clicking once, or by pressing -. A panel sprouts from the folder icon, revealing its contents; the rest of the screen goes away. Now you can drag the icons around inside it. You can also edit the folder’s name (click it first).

A folder can hold several rows’ worth of icons; if you add more apps than that, Launchpad adds additional “pages” that you scroll horizontally. (Little white dots indicate which page you’re on.)

Take an app out of a folder by dragging its icon anywhere else on the screen. The other icons scoot aside to make room. If you remove all but one app from a folder, the folder disappears.

Move a folder around by dragging, as you would any other icon.

Deleting App Store Programs

If you’ve downloaded some apps from the App Store, you’ll find a bonus feature here in Launchpad: They’re especially fun to delete.

Start by holding the mouse down on any icon until, after about a second, all the icons begin to—what’s the correct term?—wiggle. (If you have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, this should look familiar.)

At this point, you may notice that some of them have sprouted little red ’s. Those are the ones you downloaded from the App Store.

To delete an App Store program you don’t need anymore, click that to make it say bye-bye—instantly and for good. It doesn’t even have a layover in the Trash.

Quitting Programs

You quit a program by pressing -Q, the keyboard equivalent of the Quit command. (The Quit command is always at the bottom of the Application menu.)

But macOS offers two much more fun ways to quit a program:

• Right-click or two-finger click a program’s Dock icon to make its shortcut menu appear. Then choose Quit. (Or, if you do the click-and-hold thing on a program’s Dock icon, a Quit button appears just above your cursor.)

• When you’ve pressed -Tab to summon the “heads-up display” of open programs, type the letter Q without releasing the key. The highlighted program quits without further ado.

Force-Quitting Programs

MacOS is a rock-solid operating system, but that doesn’t mean that programs never screw up. Individual programs are as likely as ever to freeze—or, rather, to hang (lock up and display the “spinning beachball of death” cursor). In such cases, you have no choice but to force-quit the program—the computer equivalent of terminating it with a blunt instrument.

Doing so doesn’t destabilize your Mac; you don’t have to restart it. In fact, you can usually reopen the very same program and get on with your life.

You can force-quit a stuck program in any of several ways:

• Click-and-hold on the program’s Dock icon, or two-finger click it, or right-click it. A Quit button appears just above your cursor. Press the Option key to make the button say Force Quit. Click it. Bingo—that program is outta here.

• Press Option--Esc, the traditional Mac force-quit keystroke, or choose →Force Quit. Either way, proceed as shown in Figure 6-6.

Figure 6-6. When you press Option--Esc or choose Force Quit from the menu, a tidy box listing all open programs appears. Just click the one you want to abort, click Force Quit, and click Force Quit again in the confirmation box. (Using more technical tools like the Unix kill command, there are other ways to jettison programs. But this is often the most convenient.)

The only downside to force-quitting a program is that you lose any unsaved changes to your open documents, along with any preference settings you may have changed while the program was open.

Starting Split Screen Mode, Method 1

There are two ways to get in and out of Split Screen mode, but this one is quickest:

1. Click-and-hold the green button at the top-left corner of Window #1. (See Figure 6-9, top.)

   The weirdest thing now happens: Whichever half of your monitor contains this window (usually the left side) becomes shaded blue (Figure 6-9, second from top). That’s the Mac’s way of telling you: “When you release your mouse or trackpad, this window will snap to fill only this half of the screen.”

   Tip

   At this point, you could, if you liked, drag the window to the opposite side of the screen—still holding down the mouse or trackpad—to make it fill that half.

   

   Figure 6-9. Here’s the complete tutorial for turning on Split Screen mode.
   Top: Hold down the green button in the first app.
   Second from top: That half of your screen gets a blue tint.
   Third from top: Release the mouse; that window now fills half your entire screen. Meanwhile, all other open windows appear in miniature so that you can choose the one you want to fill the other half of your screen. (There may even be a little pile of additional window cards at the bottom corner. These are apps whose software companies have been too lazy to make them compatible with the Full Screen/Split Screen feature.)
   Bottom: And voilà: Two apps, perfectly splitting your screen’s full height and width. Feel free to drag the divider line sideways to adjust the proportions.

2. Release the mouse or trackpad.

   And sure enough: Window #1 now fills exactly half the screen (Figure 6-9, third from top). Meanwhile, all other open windows shrink down into miniature cards. That’s the Mac’s way of telling you: “Please choose Window #2, the one you’d like to fill the rest of the screen.”

3. Click the miniature window you want to fill the remaining half of the screen.

   Now you’ve got two windows sharing your screen space 50-50 (Figure 6-9, bottom).

   If you like, you can now grab the divider line and drag it, thereby adjusting the proportion of the screen occupied by each app.

Figure 6-10. Drag a window onto an existing Full Screen–mode window’s thumbnail. The + shows you which side of the screen this new window will occupy in Split Screen mode. Release the mouse, and then click the split thumbnail to make it fill your screen.

Starting Split Screen Mode, Method 2

The second method makes sense only after you’ve read about Mission Control and Spaces, starting on the next page. Bookmark this spot, go read that, and then return here.

Back so soon? OK, great!

Now that you know what the Spaces bar is, here’s the tip: You can drag a second window onto an existing full-screen app’s thumbnail in the Spaces bar; see Figure 6-10 for details.

Exiting Split Screen Mode

Just as there are two ways to enter Split Screen mode, there are also two ways to exit it.

• The title-bar method. Move your cursor to the top edge of either window and pause; its title bar appears. Now click the green button.

  That window becomes a normal floating window. (The other window remains in Full Screen mode, on its own desktop; you can switch to it as described in “Switching Spaces”.)

• Mission Control method. Enter Mission Control, as described next. (For example, press the key on your keyboard.) Move your cursor to the top of the screen to make the Spaces bar expand. Point to the desktop icon that contains the split screen; click the in the top left.

  In this case, both windows exit Full Screen and become floating windows again.

Starting and Stopping Mission Control

Mission Control is a program, just like any other. So you can open it with a click on its Dock icon, from Launchpad, from the Applications folder, and so on.

But it’s really meant to be opened quickly, fluidly, naturally, whenever the mood seizes you—with a gesture. On the trackpad, that’s a swipe upward with three fingers. (On the Magic Mouse, it’s a double-tap with two fingers—taps, not clicks.)

Or you can press the dedicated key (formerly the Exposé key), if you have one, on the top row of your keyboard.

Or you can press Control-.

And even that’s just the beginning of the ways you can open Mission Control; read on.

Figure 6-11. Top: Quick! Where’s the Finder in all this mess?
Bottom: With a three- or four-finger upward swipe on the trackpad, you can open Mission Control and spot every window, shrunken but not overlapped. These aren’t static snapshots of the windows at the moment you Mission Controlled them. They’re live, still-updating windows, as you’ll discover if one of them contains a QuickTime movie or a web page that’s still loading.

Mission Control keystrokes

You can reassign the Mission Control functions to a huge range of other keys, with or without modifiers like Shift, Control, and Option. To view your options, choose → System Preferences and then click the Mission Control icon.

Here you’ll find four pop-up menus (Figure 6-12). The first, Mission Control, lets you specify how you want to open Mission Control. The other three—Application windows, Show Desktop, and Show Dashboard—correspond to the three functions of the older Exposé and Dashboard features, described later in this chapter.

Figure 6-12. You can trigger Mission Control in any of five ways: by clicking its icon, with a finger gesture, by twitching your cursor into a certain corner of the screen (Hot Corners), by pressing a key (bottom half of this box), or by clicking the extra buttons on a multibutton mouse, including the Apple Mouse. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from setting up all of these ways, so you can press or swipe in some situations and twitch or click in others.

Within each pop-up menu, for example, you’ll discover that all your F-keys—F1, F2, F3, and so on—are available as triggers. If, while the pop-up menu is open, you press one or more of your modifier keys (Shift, Option, Control, or ), then all these F-key choices change to reflect the key you’re pressing; now the pop-up menu says Shift-F1, Shift-F2, Shift-F3, and so on. That’s how you can make Shift-F1 trigger Mission Control, for example.

These pop-up menus also contain choices like Left Shift, which refers to the Shift key on the left side of your keyboard. That is, instead of pressing F9 to open Mission Control, you could simply tap the Shift key.

Note

This is only an example. Repeat: This is only an example. Actually using the Shift key to open Mission Control is a terrible, terrible idea, as you’ll quickly discover the next time you try to type a capital letter. This feature is intended exclusively for hunt-and-peck typists who never use the Shift key on one side.

If you have a laptop, you’ll also find out that you can tap the fn key alone for Mission Control—and this time, it’s a great choice, because fn otherwise has very little direction in life.

If your mouse has more than one button, you’ll see a second column of pop-up menus in System Preferences (Figure 6-12). Each pop-up menu offers choices like Right Mouse Button and Middle Mouse Button. Use these pop-up menus to assign Mission Control (or Exposé or Dashboard) to the various clickers on your mouse: Right-click to hide all windows, middle-click to reveal the desktop, and so on.

Note, by the way, that on a laptop, the wording isn’t “right mouse button”—it’s “secondary mouse button.” Which means “right-click.” Which means that on a laptop, you can set it up so that a “right-click” trackpad gesture triggers one of these functions. See “Notes on Right-Clicking” for all the different ways you can trigger a right-click.

Managing Windows in Mission Control

Once you open Mission Control, you can click any window’s thumbnail to open it.

Or, if you decide to abandon ship and return to whatever you were doing, swipe downward with three fingers on the trackpad (two on the Magic Mouse), or press the Esc key.

The trouble with miniaturized windows is that, well, they’re miniaturized. The more windows you have open, the smaller they are, and the harder it is to see what’s in them.

If you need a little help identifying a window miniature, you have three options:

• Point to a window thumbnail without clicking. MacOS displays a label for that window.

• If that’s not enough information, press the space bar. That, of course, is the Quick Look keystroke, and it works here, too. It magnifies the window you’re pointing to, making it full size—big enough for you to read its contents and identify it.

• Press -~. That keystroke takes you into Exposé, described later in this chapter.

Creating a Desktop

Mission Control generally starts you off with just one Space (or “desktop,” as it’s labeled)—the one you’ve been using all along. If you’ve clicked the button in an app to make it full screen, it fills an additional desktop unto itself.

To create another desktop, enter Mission Control. At the top edge of the screen, the gray strip—the Spaces bar—is the command center for creating, deleting, rearranging, and configuring your virtual desktops.

Figure 6-13. Top: When you enter Mission Control, the Spaces bar is thin and collapsed.
Middle: Click the button to create a new blank desktop, numbered sequentially.
Bottom: Drag one of the window miniatures onto this new desktop. Or several.

Once you’re in Mission Control, you can proceed in either of two ways:

• The long way. See Figure 6-13 for the step-by-steps of clicking the + button in the upper-right corner.

• The short way. Drag one window thumbnail onto any blank spot on the Spaces bar. The Mac creates a new desktop to hold it.

Switching Spaces

Once you’ve got Spaces set up and turned on, the fun begins. Start by moving to the virtual screen you want; it’s like changing the channel. Here are some ways to do that:

• Swipe horizontally on your trackpad with three fingers. (On the Magic Mouse, it’s two fingers.) If you have a trackpad or a Magic Mouse, this is definitely the method to learn; it’s fast, fluid, and happy.

  You can change this gesture so that it requires an additional finger, if you like, in System Preferences→Trackpad (or Mouse)→More Gestures.

• While pressing the Control key, type the number of the desktop you want. For example, hit Control-3 to jump to your third screen. (You have to turn on this feature first, though. See Figure 6-14.)

  

  Figure 6-14. To control Spaces from the keyboard, open → System Preferences→Keyboard. Click Keyboard Shortcuts and then Mission Control. As shown here, Apple has preassigned keyboard shortcuts to your various Spaces—but they’re not turned on yet. Turn on the checkboxes for the shortcuts you want. (You can change those shortcuts here, too.)

• Enter Mission Control, and then click the desktop you want.

• Press Control- or Control- to rotate to the previous or next desktop.

When you make a switch, you see a flash of animation as one screen flies away and another appears. Now that you’re “on” the screen you want, open programs and arrange windows onto it as usual.

Deleting a Desktop

To delete a desktop, enter Mission Control. Point to one of the screen thumbnails without clicking until a appears in its corner; click it. The desktop disappears, and whatever windows were on it get shoved onto your main desktop.

In apps using Full Screen mode, the symbol is different; instead of , it looks like this: . When you click, the desktop flies off the Spaces bar into the main part of your screen. That app is now a plain-vanilla window thumbnail , just like all the others in Mission Control.

The Finer Points of Spaces

Yes, Spaces is an advanced feature. But there are actually advanced features within this advanced feature. For example:

• Rearrange your Spaces. Open Mission Control, and then drag the Space thumbnails around horizontally.

• Multiple monitors. If you have a second monitor connected to your Mac (or even several), each one can have its own set of Spaces.

  If “Displays have separate Spaces” is turned on in the Mission Control panel of System Preferences (Figure 6-12), then each monitor has its own set of Spaces. When you use one of the gestures or keystrokes for switching Spaces, you affect the Spaces on only one monitor: the one that contains your cursor at the moment.

• Move a window to a different Space. Of course, you can always move a window to a different Space by dragging its tiny icon within Mission Control. But there are two faster ways.

  First, you can drag a window (using its title bar as a handle) all the way to the edge of the screen. Stay there with the mouse button still down. After about a second, the adjacent screen slides into view; you’ve just moved the window.

  Second, switch to the new Space. Hold your mouse down on the app’s Dock icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Options→Assign To→This Desktop. The Mac whisks that app’s windows from whatever other screen they’re on to this screen.

• Move a window to all Spaces. Usually, you slap each app (or each window) onto only one Spaces desktop. Your web browser on Space 1. Email on Space 2. And so on.

  Sometimes, though, you might want one app’s windows on all your desktops—perhaps because you use it so often, you want it always with you. The Finder and System Preferences are great examples. Or maybe your calendar app, your browser, or your email program.

  To do that, hold the mouse button down on the program’s Dock icon until the shortcut menu appears. From this menu, choose Options→Assign To→All Desktops.

• Wallpaper for every desktop. Coolly enough, though, you can set a different wallpaper photo (desktop photo) to each Space. You might find it easier to get your bearings that way. When you restart the computer, the Mac will remember not just which Spaces you had open and what was on them, but also what pictures lay behind them.

  You can go about assigning desktop pictures in two ways. First switch to the Space whose picture you want to change. Then either open System Preferences→Desktop & Screen Saver→Desktop, or right-click or two-finger click a blank spot on the existing desktop background, and choose Change Desktop Background.

  Note

  In both cases, you may have to move the System Preferences window onto your current Space. You can do that by popping into Mission Control.

  Either way, you wind up in the Preferences panel for choosing desktop wallpaper. Click the backdrop you want for this screen. Then switch to the next Space and repeat.

Two Eccentric Spaces Settings

In System Preferences→Mission Control, two settings govern the way Spaces works:

• Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use. If this option is turned on, then macOS will constantly rearrange your virtual desktops so that the most recently used ones are first. (The most recent one becomes Desktop #2, since Desktop #1 is always your main desktop.)

  The point, of course, is to make it quick and easy to return to whatever you were doing most recently. But if you find it disorienting to have your desktops constantly changing their sequence, you can turn this option off.

• When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application. There must be some clearer way to write this checkbox.

  In any case, it means that when you click the Dock icon for a running program, you jump to the Space that contains that program’s open windows already, instead of leaving you on the current Space.

  For example, suppose you’re working in your browser on Desktop #3. Then you click the Mail icon on the Dock. If this option is turned on, you jump to Desktop #2 (or wherever you’ve been already working in Mail). If it’s not turned on, Mail jumps to the foreground, but you won’t see any windows—they’re stranded back on Desktop #2.

Turn on the Dashboard Feature

Open System Preferences→Mission Control. From the Dashboard pop-up menu, choose either As Space (the Dashboard will appear on its own desktop) or As Overlay. That option makes the Dashboard widgets float on top of whatever you’re doing.

Opening the Dashboard

Once you’ve brought the Dashboard back from the dead, here’s how you open it:

• If you’ve set up the Dashboard as a Space, well, it’s one of your virtual desktops. Swipe to the left with three fingers on your trackpad—repeatedly, if necessary—until you reach the far-left “desktop.” (On a Magic Mouse, swipe with two fingers.)

  Or just open Mission Control, and then click the Dashboard thumbnail at the top left of the screen.

• If you’ve set up the Dashboard as an overlay, press the Dashboard keystroke.

  On older Macs, that would be F4, bearing the Dashboard logo (). On more recent Macs, where the F4 key bears a Launchpad icon () instead, the keystroke is F12. (If F12 adjusts the volume when you press it, then you must hold down the fn key as you press F12.) In all of these cases, you can change the Dashboard keystroke to whatever you like, as described in “Dashboard Preferences”.

Using Dashboard

If you do, in fact, manage to open Dashboard, you now see the display shown in Figure 6-15. Welcome to the Dashboard.

These weird, hybrid entities are like little web pages. They’re meant to display information, much of it from the Internet, and they’re written using web programming languages like HTML and JavaScript.

Mastering the basics of Dashboard won’t take you long at all:

• To move a widget, drag it around the screen. (Click anywhere except on a button or a control.)

• To close a widget, press the Option key as you move the mouse across the widget’s face. You’ll see the button appear at the widget’s top-left corner; click it.

• To open a closed widget, click the big button at the bottom of the screen. Now the Widget Browser appears (Figure 6-16), as described in the next section. Open the widget you want by clicking its icon.

• To hide one of Apple’s widgets, or to delete one you’ve installed yourself, use the Widget Browser described next.

The Widget Browser

The Widget Browser screen appears when you click the big button at the bottom of the Dashboard. As shown in Figure 6-16, it’s simply a master collection of every widget on your Mac, even the ones that you haven’t dragged onto the main Dashboard screen. Its goal in life: managing all your other widgets.

For example, you can enter icon-deleting mode by holding your cursor down on any one of them; they all start wiggling—and displaying the button at the top-left corner.

Figure 6-16. The Widget Browser works exactly like the Launchpad. Move widget icons around by dragging. Drag one widget on top of another to create a folder. Search using the box at the top of the screen. Start them wiggling, for ease of mass deletion, by holding your cursor down on any icon, or by clicking the big button. Read “Launchpad”–“Windows That Auto-Reopen” again, taking care to mentally substitute the word “widget” for “app.”

But what you’ll do here most often is simply click a widget’s icon to install it onto the main Dashboard screen.

(To close the browser without pulling a new icon out of it, click anywhere on the background.)

The Widget Browser also harbors the godlike power of the More Widgets button, described in Figure 2-2.

Dashboard Tips

Dashboard is crawling with cool tips and tricks. Here are a few of the biggies:

• To refresh a certain widget—for example, to update its information from the Internet—click it and press -R. The widget instantly twist-scrambles itself into a sort of ice-cream swirl (you’ve got to see it to believe it) and then untwists to reveal the new data.

• You can open more than one copy of the same widget. Just click its icon more than once in the Widget Browser. You wind up with multiple copies of it on your screen: three World Clocks, two Stock Trackers, or whatever. That’s a useful trick when, for example, you want to track the time in more than one city, or when you maintain two different stock portfolios.

• If you keep the Shift key pressed when you click the big button, the Widget Browser fades in, in gorgeous slow motion. Aren’t you just glad to be alive?

Dashboard Preferences

To change the Dashboard keystroke to something other than F4 or F12, open System Preferences→Mission Control.

Here you’ll discover that you can choose almost any other keyboard combination to summon and dismiss the Dashboard, or even choose a screen corner that, when your mouse lands there, acts as the Dashboard trigger. This works exactly as described in “Mission Control keystrokes”.

Widget Catalog

Apple starts you off with 15 standard widgets: Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Dictionary, ESPN, Flight Tracker, Movies, Stickies, Stocks, Tile Game, Translation, Unit Converter, Weather, Web Clip, and World Clock. They look awfully simple, but some of them harbor a few secrets.

For a detailed guide to each of these widgets, see the free downloadable appendix, “Dashboard Widgets,” on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.

More Widgets

Thousands of new widgets, written by other people, are available on the web: games, chat and email notifiers, gas-price reporters, calculators and translators, news and sports updaters, finance and health trackers, and on and on.

To see Apple’s current list of goodies, use one of these tactics:

• The short way. Right-click or two-finger click the Dashboard icon in the Dock. From the shortcut menu, choose More Widgets.

• The long way. In Dashboard, open the Widgets browser; click More Widgets.

Either way, you go to the Apple Dashboard downloads page. Here you’ll find offerings like the Yahoo Local Traffic widget (gives you the traffic conditions in your area), Air Traffic Control (identifies wireless AirPort base stations within range of your laptop), and TV Tracker (shows what you could be watching on TV right now instead of working). There are also FedEx package trackers, joke-of-the-day widgets, comic-strip-of-the-day widgets, and many other varieties.

When you download a widget, macOS asks if you’re sure you want to install it. If you confirm, macOS downloads it and then displays it proudly in the Widget Browser. Click it to open. (Behind the scenes, it’s been copied into your Home→Library→Widgets folder. Only you will see that Dashboard widget, because it’s been copied into the Widgets folder of your account. Anyone else who has an account on this Mac won’t see it.)

One-App Exposé

When you trigger Mission Control, you see the thumbnails of all windows in all apps.

But sometimes it’s useful to see only the windows of one app arrayed before you—the app you’re using.

That’s great when you’re web browsing or word processing. This Exposé function makes the program’s windows spread out, and shrink if necessary, so you can click the one you want (Figure 6-17, top).

Here’s how Apple intends for most people to trigger this option:

• Swipe down on your trackpad with three fingers. You’re shown the miniatures of your current app’s windows. If you point to an icon on the Dock before you swipe, you trigger Exposé for that app instead. (There’s no equivalent on the Magic Mouse—although if you install the free BetterTouchTool, you can dream up a gesture of your own.)

• Press Control-F3 (). That’s the keystroke on aluminum keyboards. (If you have a plastic keyboard, press F10.)

• Enter Exposé from the heads-up display. The heads-up display is the macOS application switcher—the row of “These are your open programs” icons—which appears when you press -Tab.

  

  Figure 6-17. Top: When you trigger one-app Exposé, you get a clear shot at any window in the current program (TextEdit, in this example). In the meantime, the rest of your screen attractively dims. In model Apple apps, like TextEdit and Preview, you even get a little row of icons at the bottom. They represent recently opened files, ready for clicking.
  Bottom: Trigger desktop Exposé when you need to duck back to the desktop for a quick administrative chore. Here’s your chance to find a file, throw something away, eject a disk, or whatever, without having to disturb your application windows.
  Tap the same key again to turn off Exposé.

  The cool thing is that once you’ve got that heads-up display open, you can press or to enter Exposé for whatever program’s icon is highlighted! From there, release the keys and hit Tab to cycle through your open apps.

• Use Dock Exposé. Click the program’s Dock icon and hold the button down for half a second. (Or, for faster service, right-click or two-finger click the program’s Dock icon.)

  This feature has one chief advantage over the keystroke method: You can Exposé-ize any program’s windows, not just the one you’re using at the moment.

• Shove your mouse into whatever corner of the screen you’ve chosen. See “Screen corners” for instructions.

Once you’ve triggered Exposé, you’re not quite finished yet. As shown in Figure 6-17, beneath the window thumbnails, you get to see the icons of documents you’ve worked on recently in this app (at least in enlightened Apple programs like TextEdit).

Desktop Exposé

The other flavor of Exposé is surprisingly handy. It sends all windows in all programs cowering to the edges of your screen, revealing the desktop beneath in all its uncluttered splendor (Figure 6-17, bottom).

Here’s the keystroke scheme:

• Current keyboards: Press -F3 (). That’s the trigger for current aluminum keyboards and laptops.

• Plastic keyboards: Press F11.

The windows fly off to the edges of the screen, where they remain—forever or until you tap the keystroke again, click a visible window edge, double-click an icon, or take some other window-selection step.

This trick saves headache and hassle in situations like these:

• You’re writing an email message, and you want to attach a file. Tap the desktop Exposé keystroke, and then root around in the Finder until you locate the file you want. Begin to drag it, and then, without releasing the mouse button, tap the desktop Exposé keystroke again to bring back your email window. (Or drag the attachment directly onto your email program’s icon on the Dock and pause until its window thumbnails appear.)

  Move your cursor, with the file in mid-drag, directly over the outgoing message window; release the cursor to create the attachment. You’ve just added an attachment from the desktop in one smooth motion.

• You want to open a different document. For many people, having access to the entire Finder beats having to use the Open dialog box. Double-clicking the icon you want automatically opens it and turns off Exposé.

• You’re on the web, and you want to see if some file has finished downloading. Trigger desktop Exposé to survey the situation on your desktop.

If the layer of open programs is the atmosphere, the Finder is the earth below—and the ability to teleport back and forth is a huge time-saver.

Exposé Tip-O-Rama

Just having your world o’ windows spread out like index cards is magic enough. But these windows are live. You can work with them. Let us count the ways:

• Tab through Exposé’d apps. Once you’ve started one-app Exposé and a program’s windows are arrayed before you, press the Tab key. With each tap, you cycle through the open apps, each getting the Exposé treatment in turn. It’s an informative way to inspect what’s happening in each open program without losing your way. (Pressing -~ does the same thing.) Shift-Tab, as usual, cycles through the programs in the opposite direction.

• Hold down instead of two presses. Most of the time, you’ll probably use Exposé in two steps. You’ll tap the keystroke once to get the windows out of the way and tap it again to bring them back (if, indeed, you haven’t clicked a window to bring them back).

  In some cases, though, you may find it easier to hold down the relevant key. For example, hold down -F3 (Show Desktop) to see if a file is finished copying to the desktop, and then release the keys to bring back all the windows. (Actually, you can let go of the key as soon as you’ve entered Exposé.) For quick window-clearing situations, that method saves you the step of having to press the keystroke a second time to turn off Exposé.

• Use the spring-loaded Dock. This trick is great when you want to drop a file from one program into a particular window belonging to another.

  The most common example: You want to add an attachment to an outgoing email message. In the Finder, locate the file’s icon. Drag it directly onto your email program’s Dock icon—and pause with your finger still on the button. After a half-second, Exposé happens, showing all your email program’s open windows. Now continue your drag onto the miniaturized window of the outgoing message so it’s highlighted, tap the space bar to open it, and then release. Presto! The file is attached.

  This trick also works great when you want to drop a photo into a newsletter, for example, or a text clipping into a word-processing document.

• Dip into Quick Look. Once you’ve got shrunken windows on the screen, tap your arrow keys to highlight a window (or point with your mouse at one without clicking). A bright-blue border moves from window to window.

  At any point, you can press the space bar to make that one window return to life size. You haven’t really activated it—you can’t edit it—but at least you can see it at full size.

  And here’s the very cool part: Once you’ve triggered Quick Look like this, you can press the arrow keys to zap other miniwindows back to full size, without having to exit Quick Look. Or, again, point to other windows without clicking. Each zooms in to 100 percent size. (All of this is much easier to do than to imagine.)

  You can keep examining your windows at full size until you spot the one you’re after; now tap Return (or click the mouse in the window) to exit Quick Look and Exposé. You’ve just opened that window, and you’re ready to roll.

Hiding the Program You’re Using

For the purposes of this discussion, when a program is hidden, all its windows, tool palettes, and button bars disappear. You can bring them back only by bringing the program to the front again (by clicking its Dock icon, for example).

If your aim is to hide only the frontmost program, macOS offers a whole raft of approaches. Many of them involve the Option key, as listed here:

• Option-click any visible portion of the desktop. The program you were in vanishes, along with all its windows.

• Option-click any other program’s icon on the Dock. You open that program (or bring all its windows to the front) and hide all the windows of the one you were using.

• Option-click any visible portion of another program’s windows. Once again, you switch programs, hiding the one you were using.

• From the Application menu, choose Hide Photos (or whatever the program is). The Application menu is the boldfaced menu that bears the program’s name.

• From the program’s Dock icon shortcut menu, choose Hide. You open the shortcut menu, of course, by right-clicking or two-finger clicking. You also get a Hide button if you click-and-hold on the Dock icon for half a second.

• When you’ve highlighted a program’s icon by pressing -Tab to rotate through the running programs, press the letter H key. The program hides itself instantly. Leave the key down the whole time and, after pressing the H, press Tab again to move on to the next program. If you release the keys while “stopped” on the program instead, you’ll bring it forward rather than hiding it.

• Press -H. This may be the easiest and most useful trick of all (although it doesn’t work in a few oddball programs). Doing so hides the program you’re in; you then “fall down” into the next running program.

To unhide a program and its windows, click its Dock icon again, choose the Show All command in the Application menu, or press -Tab to summon the heads-up application display.

Hiding All Other Programs

Choosing Hide Others from your program’s Application menu means, of course, “Hide the windows of every program but this one.” It even hides your Finder (desktop) windows, although desktop icons remain visible.

Better yet, there’s a keystroke for this command: Option--H. That’s one small step for keystrokes, one giant leap for productivity geeks.

If this trick interests you, then you might also enjoy its corollary, described next.

The Bring-Forward, Hide-All-Others Trick

Here’s a terrific technique that lets you bring one program to the front (along with all its open windows) and hide all other windows of all other open programs—with one click.

You might think of it as Hero mode, or Front-and-Center mode, or Clear My Calendar mode.

In any case, the trick is to Option--click the lucky program’s icon on the Dock. As it jumps to the fore, all other windows on your Mac are instantly hidden. (You can bring them back, of course, by clicking the appropriate Dock icons.)

Hiding (Minimizing) Individual Windows

You can also hide or show individual windows of a single program. In fact, Apple must believe that hiding a window will become one of your favorite activities, because it offers at least three ways to do it:

• Choose Window → Minimize Window, if your program offers such a command, or press -M.

• Click the Minimize button on the window’s title bar.

• Double-click the window’s title bar. (If this doesn’t work, choose → System Preferences→Dock. Make sure “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize” is turned on.)

In any case, the affected window shrinks down until it becomes a new icon on the right side of the Dock. Click that icon to bring the window back.

Reassigning Documents to Programs

Unfortunately, file name extensions aren’t always especially specific. Suppose you’ve downloaded a graphic called Sunset.jpg. Well, almost any program these days can open a JPEG graphic—Photoshop, Pages, Word, Preview, Safari, and so on. How does macOS know which of these programs to open when you double-click the file?

Fortunately, you can decide. You can reassign a document (or all documents of its kind) to a specific program. Here’s the rundown.

Reassigning a certain document—just once

Double-clicking a graphics file generally opens it in Preview (“Preview”). Most of the time, that’s a perfectly good arrangement. But Preview has limited editing powers. What if you decide to edit a graphics file more substantially? You’d want it to open, just this once, into a different program—Photoshop Elements, for example.

Figure 6-18. Top: In the Info window, open the Name & Extension pane. Now you can see what macOS really thinks your file is called. Turn on “Hide extension” if you’d rather not see the file name suffix in the Finder.
Bottom: If you try to add a suffix of your own, macOS objects, in effect saying, “Hey—I’ve already got a file name extension for this, even if you can’t see it. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” (And you can turn off this warning, if you like. Choose Finder→Preferences→Advanced pane. Turn off “Show warning before changing an extension.”)

To do so, you must access the Open With command. You can find it in three places:

• Highlight the icon and then choose File → Open With (Figure 6-19).

• Highlight the icon and then open the menu. In the menu, choose Open With.

• Right-click or two-finger click the file’s icon. From the shortcut menu, choose Open With.

Study the submenu for a moment (Figure 6-19, top). The program whose name says “(default)” indicates which program usually opens this kind of document. From this pop-up menu, choose the name of the program you’d rather open this particular file, right now, just this once.

Control the Menus

When you press Control-F2, the menu is highlighted. At this point, you can “walk” to another menu by pressing the or keys (or Tab and Shift-Tab). When you reach the menu you want, open it by pressing , space, or Return.

Walk down the commands in the menu by pressing or , or jump directly to a command in the menu by typing the first couple of letters of its name. Finally, “click” a menu command by pressing Return or the space bar.

You can also close the menu without making a selection by pressing Esc or -period.

Control the Dock

Once you’ve pressed Control-F3, you can highlight any icon on the Dock by pressing the appropriate arrow keys (or, once again, Tab and Shift-Tab).

Then, once you’ve highlighted a Dock icon, you “click” it by pressing Return or the space bar. Again, if you change your mind, press Esc or -period.

Cycle Through Your Windows

Every time you press Control-F4, you bring the next window forward, eventually cycling through every window in every open program. Add the Shift key to cycle through them in the opposite order.

You may remember that macOS offers a different keystroke for cycling through the different windows in your current program (it’s -~, the tilde symbol at the upper left on your keyboard). Control-F4, on the other hand, tours all windows in all programs. Both keystrokes are useful in different situations.

Control Tool Palettes

In a few programs that feature floating tool palettes, you can highlight the frontmost palette by pressing Control-F6. At this point, use the arrow keys to highlight the various buttons on the palette. You can see the effect when, for example, you’re editing text in TextEdit and you’ve also opened the Font palette. Pressing Control-F6 highlights the Font palette, taking the “focus” off your document.

Control Menulets

Here’s a gem you may not have heard about: You can operate menulets—those menu-bar status indicators for your speaker volume, wireless networks, and so on—from the keyboard, too.

This time, the trick is to hit Control-F8. That highlights the leftmost Apple menulet. Now you can use your and arrow keys to move around the menu bar; when you’ve highlighted the one you want, press Return or the space bar to “click” that menu and open it.

Control Dialog Boxes

You can also navigate and manipulate any dialog box from the keyboard.

See the dialog box shown in Figure 6-20? If you turn on “All controls” at the bottom, then pressing the Tab key highlights the next control of any type, whatever it may be—radio button, pop-up menu, and so on. Press the space bar to “click” a button or to open a pop-up menu. Once a menu is open, use the arrow keys (or type letter keys) to highlight commands on it, and use the space bar to “click” your choice.

Changing a Menu Keyboard Shortcut

Suppose you love Photos (and who doesn’t?). But one thing drives you crazy: The Revert to Original command, which discards all the changes you’ve ever made since taking the photo, has no keyboard shortcut. You must trek up to the menu bar every time you need that command.

This is why macOS lets you add keyboard shortcuts to menu commands that lack them—or change the commands in programs whose key assignments break with tradition. (It works in any program that uses the standard macOS menu software, which rules out older versions of Microsoft Office.) Here’s the routine:

1. Choose → System Preferences→Keyboard. Click the Shortcuts tab, and then click App Shortcuts in the left-side list.

   You’re shown a list of any keyboard assignments you’ve created so far.

2. Click the + button just beneath the list.

   The dialog box shown in Figure 6-20 appears.

3. Indicate which program needs behavior modification.

   In this example, you’d choose Photos from the Application pop-up menu. (If the program’s name doesn’t appear in the pop-up menu, then choose Other; navigate to, and double-click, the program you want.)

   

   Figure 6-20. If you choose All Applications from the top pop-up menu, you can change the keyboard combo for a certain command wherever it appears. You could, for example, change the keystroke for Page Setup in every program at once. (Beware the tiny yellow triangles; they let you know if a chosen keystroke conflicts with another macOS keystroke.)

4. Carefully type in the name of the menu command whose keyboard shortcut you want to change or add.

   Type it exactly as it appears in the menu, complete with capitalization and the little ellipsis (…) that may follow it. (You make the ellipsis character by pressing Option-semicolon.)

5. Click in the Keyboard Shortcut box. Press the new or revised key combo you want.

   For example, press Control-R for Photos’ Revert to Original command. You’ll see the Mac’s notation of your keystroke appear in the Keyboard Shortcut box—unless, of course, the combo you selected is already in use within that program. In that case, you hear only an error sound that means “Try again.”

6. Click Add.

   The dialog box closes. By scrolling down in your Keyboard Shortcuts list, you see that the keystroke you selected has now been written down for posterity under the appropriate program’s flippy triangle. (To get rid of it, click its name and then click the — button beneath the list.)

   The next time you open the program you edited, you’ll see that the new keystroke is in place.

Redefining a Keystroke

As you’ve no doubt become painfully aware, there are hundreds of keyboard combinations for the various macOS functions and settings. That’s good, because keyboard shortcuts are efficient and quicker than using the mouse. But that’s also bad, because there’s no way you’ll be able to remember all of them—and some of the most useful shortcuts are ridiculous, multikey affairs that you’ll never remember at all.

In the keyboard-shortcut center, shown in Figure 6-21, you can look over all the common macOS hidden keyboard functions—for Mission Control, Exposé, Spotlight, Dashboard, the Dock, and many others—and change them.

Here’s how it goes:

1. Choose →System Preferences. Click Keyboard. Click the Shortcuts tab.

   You arrive at the dialog box shown in Figure 6-21.

   

   Figure 6-21. The keyboard-shortcut center lets you redefine the keystrokes that trigger many basic macOS features, menu commands in your programs, and software you’ve built yourself using Automator.

2. In the left-side list, click the category or function you want.

   Your choices include Launchpad & Dock, Mission Control, Keyboard, and so on. When you click a category name, you see the available shortcuts.

   Tip

   You don’t have to be content with changing one of these keyboard shortcuts. You can also turn it off by clicking the corresponding checkbox. That’s great if one of Apple’s predefined keystrokes—for a function you don’t even use—is interfering with one in a program you like.

3. Click the command you want to change. Then click the current keyboard combination (or the “add shortcut” button, if there is no existing shortcut).

   Suppose, for example, that you wish the Show Desktop Exposé keystroke were something easier to remember, like Control-D. So in step 2, you’d click Mission Control. In this example, you’d click Show Desktop. Then you’d click where it currently says “F11.”

4. Press a new key combination.

   In this example, you’d press Control-D.

   Be careful, though. MacOS keystrokes take precedence over all others. So if you choose a keystroke like -P for something, well, by golly, you’ll no longer be able to use -P to print anything in any of your programs. Think before you assign. Run a couple of tests afterward.

Sheets

In the days of operating systems gone by, the Save dialog box appeared dead center on the screen, where it commandeered your entire operation. Moreover, because it seemed stuck to your screen rather than to a particular document, you couldn’t actually tell which document you were saving—a real problem when you quit out of a program that had three unsaved documents open.

Figure 6-22. Top left: The Save dialog box, or sheet, often appears in its compact form.
Top right: If you open the Where pop-up menu, you’ll find that macOS lists all the places it thinks you might want to save your new document: online (iCloud), on the hard drive, in a folder you’ve put into your Sidebar (“Favorites”), or into a folder you’ve recently opened.
Bottom: If you want to choose a different folder or to create a new folder, click the ∨ button (next to the Save As box) to expand the dialog box. Here you see the equivalent of the Finder—with a choice of icon, list, or column view. Even the Sidebar is here, complete with access to other disks on the network.
Tip: In most programs, you can enlarge the Save or Open dialog box by dragging one of its edges. You can also adjust the width of the Sidebar by dragging its right edge.

In most Mac programs, there’s no mystery regarding which document you’re saving, because a little Save dialog box called a sheet slides directly out of the document’s title bar.

Better still, this little Save box is a sticky note attached to the document. It stays there, neatly attached and waiting, even if you switch to another program, another document, the desktop, or wherever. When you finally return to the document, the Save sheet is still there, waiting for you to type a file name and save the document.

The Mini-Finder

Of course you, O savvy reader, have probably never saved a document into some deeply nested folder by accident, never to see it again. But millions of novices (and even a few experts) have fallen into this trap.

When the Save sheet appears, a pop-up menu shows you precisely where the Mac proposes to put your newly created document: usually in the Documents folder of your own Home folder. For most people, this is an excellent suggestion. If you keep everything in your Documents folder, it will be extremely easy to find, and you’ll be able to back up your work just by dragging that single folder to a backup disk.

As shown at top in Figure 6-22, the Where pop-up menu gives you direct access to some other places where you might want to save a newly created file. (The keystrokes for the most important folders work here, too—Shift--H for your Home folder, for example.)

In any case, when you save a file, the options in the Where pop-up menu have you covered 90 percent of the time. Most people work with a limited set of folders for active documents.

But when you want to save a new document into a new folder, or when you want to navigate to a folder that isn’t listed in the Where pop-up menu, all is not lost. Click the ∨ button identified in Figure 6-22. The Save sheet expands into a very familiar sight: a miniature version of the Finder.

You might be shocked to find out just how many Finder features are available, all within this little Save dialog box. The whole Save box is getting to be more Findery every year. For example:

• Navigate with the Sidebar. It’s here, complete with access to the other computers on your network and your iCloud Drive.

• Navigate with keystrokes. All the usual keyboard shortcuts for navigating your Mac work within the Open and Save boxes. You can press -D to see what’s on your desktop, Shift--H for your Home folder, Shift--A for your Applications folder, and so on.

• Switch views with the toolbar buttons, like / and icon, list, column, and even Cover Flow views.

• Search for files. The search box at the top of the Open or Save dialog box is a clone of the Finder’s search box (Chapter 4). Press -F to make your insertion point jump there. Type a few letters of the name of the file or folder you’re looking for, and up it pops, regardless of its actual hard-disk location.

• Delete a document or folder right from this list. Just right-click or two-finger click it and choose Move to Trash.

• Rename a document or folder. Right-click or two-finger click it; from the shortcut menu, choose Rename.

• Create a new folder. Click New Folder (or press the usual New Folder keystroke, Shift--N) to create a new folder inside the folder you’re looking at.

  You’re asked to type the new name for the folder. After you’ve done so, click Create (or press Return). The new folder appears and opens before you, empty. You can now proceed with saving your new document into it, if you like.

• Use Quick Look (“Quick Look”). Select a file or folder in the list and tap the space bar to view it in a full-size window.

• Add folders to the left-side Favorites list. Drag them into the Sidebar here, either from the desktop, if it’s visible, or right out of the dialog box in front of you. You can remove things from the Sidebar, too; just drag them away.

• Navigate from the keyboard. Most of the familiar Finder navigation shortcuts work here, too. Press the and keys to navigate the columns, or the and keys to highlight the disk and folder names within a column. Once you’ve highlighted a column, you can also type to select the first letters of disk or folder names.

• Get Info. Even in the Save or Open dialog box, you can highlight an icon (or several) and then press -I. You switch back to the Finder, where the Get Info box is waiting with the date, size, and other details about the selected icons.

When you’re finished playing around, open the folder where you want to save your newly created document and then click Save to store it there.

The next time you save a new document, the Save sheet reappears in whatever condition you left it. That is, if you used column view the last time, it’s still in column view. You can collapse it into simplified view, shown at top in Figure 6-22, by clicking the ∧ button to the right of the Save As pop-up menu.

Insta-Jumping to a Folder Location

Whether you’re using the mini-sheet or the expanded view, you can save yourself some folder-burrowing time by following this very weird tip: You can specify a folder location by dragging the icon of any folder or disk from your desktop directly into the Save or Open sheet. MacOS instantly displays the contents of that folder or disk. This feature is totally undocumented—but well worth learning.

The File Format Pop-Up Menu

The Save dialog box in many programs offers a pop-up menu of file formats below the Save As box. Use this menu when preparing a document for use by somebody else—somebody whose computer doesn’t have the same software. For example, if you’ve used a graphics program to prepare a photograph for use on the web, this menu is where you specify JPEG format (the standard web format for photos).

The Open Dialog Box

The dialog box that appears when you choose File→Open is almost identical to the expanded Save File sheet. Because you encounter it only when you’re opening an existing file, this dialog box lacks a Save button, a Tags box, a file name field, and so on.

But the Open box adds a special Sidebar category called Media (see Figure 6-23), which gives you direct access to all your photos, music, and movies. Apple figures you might want to import these items into a document you’re working on.

Figure 6-23. The Media Browser is built right into the Open box. You get miniature listings of your iTunes, Photos, and movie files right in the Sidebar, for convenience in importing them into (for example) Keynote, PowerPoint, or a web design program.

Most of the other Save File dialog box controls are equally useful here. That handy Spotlight search bar is still there, only a -F away. Once again, you can begin your navigation by seeing what’s on the desktop (press -D) or in your Home folder (Shift--H).

Once again, you can find a folder or a disk by beginning your quest with the Sidebar and then navigate using icon, list, or column view. And, once again, you can drag a folder, disk, or file icon off your desktop and directly into the dialog box to specify where you want to look. (If you drag a file icon, then you’re shown the folder that contains it.)

When you’ve finally located the file you want to open, double-click it or highlight it (which you can do from the keyboard), and then press Return or -O.

In general, most people don’t encounter the Open File dialog box nearly as often as the Save File dialog box. That’s because the Mac offers many more convenient ways to open a file—double-clicking its icon in the Finder, choosing its name from →Recent Items, and so on—but only a single way to save a new file.

Versions

In those enlightened programs that work with Auto Save, there’s a more complicated but more powerful feature at work: Versions. It’s an invisible paper trail of every in-progress condition of your document—and you can return to any earlier version at any time. You can even return to an earlier version and copy just a chunk of it into the current version, which is great when one paragraph of your previous draft was gold but the rest was junk.

The Versions world of document management is quite a bit different from the old setup. Here’s what you need to know:

• All the version information is stored in the same original document file. (It’s not like there’s a rat’s nest of icons for each thing you’re working on.) But when you send the document to somebody else (by email or network, for example), the Mac sends only the current version, stripping out all the history. Nobody will ever know how much you labored over your work (or how little).

• MacOS creates a new snapshot of your document once an hour. You can also create new snapshots manually at even shorter intervals—by using the File→Save command (-S), as you always have.

  These snapshots, or versions, represent rewind points that you can return to later, even months or years after you first created the document. Thoughtfully enough, the Mac records, invisibly, only what’s changed between versions, so your files don’t get all big and bloated.

• There’s a secret menu in the title bar. Point to the name of your document. In Auto Save–compatible files, a little ∨ appears in the title bar (Figure 6-24).

  

  Figure 6-24. Point to the title of your document to see this secret menu. It lets you rename the document, change its tags, or file it into a new folder, without ever leaving the window.

• The Save As command is hidden in these programs. It appears in the File menu only when you hold down the Option key.

  Apple is hoping that you’ll learn to use the new way. When you want to spin off a different version of a document—to experiment with taking it into a radical new direction, for example—choose File→Duplicate. Before your very eyes, a copy of the open window springs into existence. If the original was called “Kumquat Tarts,” then the new one is called “Kumquat Tarts copy”—but that name is highlighted, selected, right in the title bar.

  To leave your duplicated document in the same folder as the original, just type a new name and press Return. To file it in a different folder, choose File→Save. You get the standard Save dialog box, where you can choose a name and a folder for it.

Rewinding to an earlier version

The point of all this, of course, is to make it easy to go back in time—to undo the mediocre work you’ve done, or to resurrect some genius work that you later deleted.

The quick way is to choose File→Revert to→Last Saved (or Last Opened). That command restores the document to the last snapshot version (or to the way it was when you most recently opened it, if no new versions have been created). You can revert your document to any snapshot, even an ancient one from weeks or months ago.

To do that, choose File→Revert to→Browse All Versions.

After a moment, you see the stunning display shown in Figure 6-25. On the left, you see your document in its current condition. On the right, you see a stack of windows that represent all the different snapshots of your document, going back in time.

You can have all kinds of productive fun in this version browser:

• Compare the current version (on the left) with the next-most-recent one (on the right). These are live documents, so you can scroll through them as necessary. If you decide to stick with the latest edition on the left, just click Done. You leave the version-history world and go back to editing.

• Zoom back in time to inspect older versions (snapshots) of your document. On the right side of the screen, you see earlier versions of the document—maybe even dozens of them, stretching back in time.

  You can click individual windows’ title bars to see what’s in them. You can also click or drag your cursor through the notches at the right side. It’s like a time ruler that flies through the windows into the past. (As you go, the time/date stamp below the right-side window identifies where you are in time—that is, which version you’re examining.)

• Restore an earlier version. If you finally find the incarnation of the document you consider superior to your current one, click Restore. You leave Blurry Versionland and return to your document, which has now been rewound to its earlier condition.

  If you later decide you should not have gone back to that earlier version, no problem. Your later version—the one you started out with—is still in the version browser, too. So you can fast-forward back to it, if necessary.

Tip

If you press Option, the Restore button changes to say Restore a Copy. In other words, you’ll create a previous-version duplicate of the document, without disturbing the current condition of the one you’ve just been working on.

Figure 6-25. If you’ve ever used macOS’s Time Machine feature, this display should look familiar. It’s your chance to go back in time to recover an earlier, better version of your document (or just a part of it).

• Restore part of an earlier version. Often, the current version of your work is generally good, but you really wish you could recover one magical sentence or paragraph or section—something you’ve since edited or deleted.

  You can do that in Blurry Versionland, too, because Copy and Paste work here!

  Use the time ruler to find the earlier edition of your document, the one containing the good stuff. Then drag through the desired text or graphics in the window on the right, as shown in Figure 6-25. Now copy the highlighted material (either press -C, or move your mouse to the top of the screen so that the menu bar appears, and choose Edit→Copy). Click in the current version of the document, the one at left, and now paste (-V, or use the menu bar). Click Done to complete this astonishing act of salvation.

• Delete a version. Once you’ve found a draft you never want to see again, move your cursor to the top of the screen; the menu bar appears. Choose File→Revert To→Delete This Version.

Tip

If you press Option, the command changes to Delete Old Versions; it gets rid of all old versions of the file.

iCloud Drive Defined

iCloud Drive, part of Apple’s iCloud suite of services, is like a magic folder. In the Finder, it’s represented by an iCloud Drive icon () in the Sidebar of every window.

Whatever you put into it appears, almost instantly, in the iCloud Drive folders on all your other machines: Macs, iPhones, iPads, and even Windows PCs. In fact, your files are even available at iCloud.com, so you can grab them when you’re stranded on a desert island with nothing but somebody else’s computer. (And Internet access.)

(If this concept reminds you of the popular free program Dropbox, then you’re very wise.) Figure 6-26 shows the idea.

This is an incredibly useful feature. No more emailing files to yourself. No more carrying things around on a flash drive. After working on some document at the office, you can go home and resume from right where you stopped; the same file is waiting for you, exactly as you left it.

iCloud Drive also makes a gloriously simple, effective backup disk. Anything you drag into this “folder” is instantly copied to all your devices and computers. And, as you know, the more copies that exist of something (and in the more locations), the better your backup. Even if your main Mac is stolen or burned to aluminum dust, your iCloud Drive files are safe.

Your drive holds 5 gigabytes of files for free. You can pay extra for more space: $1 a month for 50 gigs, $3 a month for 200 gigs, or $10 for 2 terabytes (2,000 gigs).

Putting Files onto the iCloud Drive

On the Mac, you use the iCloud Drive just as you would a folder or a flash drive. Click its name in the Sidebar to see what’s in there. Drag files into its window to copy them there. Make folders, add files, delete files, rename them—whatever. Any changes you make are reflected on your other Apple (and Windows) gadgets within seconds. Inside a program, you can choose File→Save in the usual way. When the Save box appears, click iCloud Drive in the Sidebar. Or choose an iCloud Drive folder’s name, if you’ve made one.

Figure 6-26. Left: The iCloud Drive icon appears in the Sidebar of every Finder window and Save/Open dialog box.
Right: It also appears on every iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch you have. (Assuming they’re running iOS 8 or later and are signed into the same iCloud account.)

Sharing iCloud Drive Files

It’s new in macOS High Sierra, and it’s super-handy: You can now share individual files in your iCloud Drive with other people electronically, so that you can collaborate across the Internet. It’s exactly like the same feature in popular services like Dropbox and Google drive, except that, inconveniently, it limits your collaborators to other people using High Sierra (or iOS 11).

In the Finder, in the iCloud Drive, click the file (not a folder); from the menu, choose Add People. (That option also appears when you right-click or two-finger click the document and, from the shortcut menu, choose Share.) The box shown in Figure 6-27 appears. Here you have three decisions to make:

• How to invite people. You can welcome your collaborators to this document by Messages, Email, AirDrop (if they’re nearby)—or using the Copy Link button. That command puts a web link on your Clipboard, so that you can share it in any other electronic way—in a Facebook post, in Slack, or whatever.

• Who can access. Of course, if you post the invitation link online somewhere, you might wind up with hundreds of people descending on your document. If you’re posting a flier advertising a garage sale, maybe that’s just what you want. But if you’re sharing the first draft of your screenplay, maybe you want to be more selective. That’s why, in Share Options, you can specify either that “Only people you invite” have access, or “Anyone with the link.”

  

  Figure 6-27. Sharing a document from your iCloud Drive means that you can either publish a document to the entire web from the convenience of a desktop folder, or collaborate with coworkers on a single document.

• What they can do. If, from the Permission pop-up menu, you choose “Can make changes,” then your document is editable on both ends, and both of you see the changes the other makes. Great for party planning, coauthoring papers, and editing novels. If you choose “View only,” well, they can see your document but can’t touch it.

Once you click Share, the ball is rolling. An email, text message, or AirDrop notification goes out to your lucky colleagues. Next to the document on your iCloud Drive, the legend “Shared by me” appears, for your reference. As long as you’re all online, anyone can make changes to the shared document, and you all see the results almost immediately.

At any time, you can revisit the list of invitees or how much access they have. Right-click or two-finger click the document’s icon; this time, choose Share→Show People (that command has nothing to do with Broadway performers). You’re right back at the box shown in Figure 6-27, so you can amend the settings or shut off sharing altogether (click Stop Sharing).

iCloud Drive on Other Devices

If the iCloud Drive behaves just like a folder on your Mac, how does it appear on iPhones, iPads, and Windows computers? Like this:

• On the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. iCloud Drive is an app in iOS 9 and 10; in iOS 11, it’s called Files. Just open it to see a list of the folders and files on your iCloud Drive (including the Desktop and Documents folders from your Macs).

• On another Mac. Click the iCloud Drive icon in the sidebar of any Mac (to which you’ve logged in with your iCloud ID), and there’s your stuff.

• On the web. You can pull up iCloud.com, log in, and click the iCloud Drive icon. Presto: a list of the files and folders on your Drive. (Including Desktop and Documents folders, if you’ve turned that on.)

• On a Windows PC. Your computer needs Windows 7 or later, and it requires the iCloud control panel. (You can download it from this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com.) It does just what you’d expect: It creates an iCloud Drive icon in your File Explorer windows, exactly as on the Mac.

iCloud Desktop & Documents

An optional feature makes everything on your desktop and in your Documents folder accessible everywhere—on every Mac you own, every iOS device, every Windows PC, and even online, at iCloud.com.

If you think about it, those are the two places that most people, most of the time, leave their stuff: on the desktop or in the Documents folder. The point of this feature is that you no longer have to remember to copy some file or folder you’ll need onto the iCloud Drive; if you left it on your desktop or in your Documents folder, it’ll just be there. When you need a file you don’t have with you, you’ll be able to grab it from wherever you are.

Of course, you get only 5 gigabytes of iCloud Drive storage, which is shared by all of iCloud’s features. So to use this system, you’ll almost certainly have to pay for additional storage, month after month.

If you didn’t turn on iCloud Desktop & Documents when you installed macOS High Sierra, you can also turn it on at any time:

• In System Preferences→iCloud. Next to the first checkbox, iCloud Drive, click Options; in the resulting dialog box, on the Documents tab, turn on Desktop & Documents Folders. (See Figure 6-28, top.)

• In →About This Mac→Storage→Manage→Store in iCloud (Figure 3-16). Turn on “Store files from Desktop and Documents in iCloud Drive.”

If you don’t have enough iCloud Drive space, you’re cheerfully offered a list of price plans at this moment. The cheapest plan available that will fit your documents is highlighted.

Once that’s all set up, you’ll discover a few alarming changes to your Mac universe:

• Everything on your desktop has disappeared. It’s all been swept into a new folder on your desktop called “Desktop - MacBook Air” (or whatever your Mac’s name is).

  So why does macOS create a new Desktop folder bearing your Mac’s name? Because you might turn on this feature on a second Mac that you own, or even a third. The folder-naming system is designed to separate what’s on the desktop of this Mac from what’s on the desktops of those other Macs. If you have two computers, then, you might see folders on your desktop called Desktop - MacBook Air and Desktop - Kitchen iMac. (Figure 6-28, middle right, shows this effect.)

  

  Figure 6-28. Top: Here’s how you enter the rabbit hole known as iCloud Desktop & Documents.
  Middle left: Desktop and Documents are now listed under iCloud Drive. The actual folders have moved, too.
  Middle right: You see a separate Desktop folder for each Mac for which you’ve turned this feature on. (Documents, too.)
  Bottom: If you move something from Desktop or Documents into any other folder, you get a warning that you’re actually deleting it from your iCloud Drive (assuming that checkbox is turned on in Finder→Preferences→Advanced).

  Of course, if you primarily use only one Mac, the icons you once kept on your desktop are now in a desktop folder that seems to be on your desktop, which seems silly.

  Fortunately, there’s nothing to stop you from dragging the contents of “Desktop - MacBook Air” right back onto your actual desktop. The only caution here is that, if you do that on more than one Mac, you wind up with a commingled desktop. All the icons from your laptop desktop and all the icons from your iMac desktop are now on the desktops of both machines. You’ve just duplicated them. And any changes you make—any new icons you save to any desktop—get likewise duplicated to your other Macs.

  That may be exactly what you want. Just watch out for disk space.

• Everything in your Documents folder disappears, too. All those icons get shunted into a new folder in your Documents folder called “Documents - MacBook Air.”

• The real Desktop and Documents folders are no longer in your Home folder. And in the Finder sidebar, they’re no longer listed under the Favorites heading; now they’re listed under iCloud Drive (Figure 6-28, middle left), to remind you that their new home is online, in the iCloud Drive.

• You get a warning if you drag something out of Documents or off your desktop. The warning is alarming (Figure 6-28, bottom), but it’s perfectly logical: If you move an icon out of the Documents folder or from your desktop into another folder, you’re removing it from the iCloud Drive. (The iCloud Drive’s only responsibility is to mirror what’s in your Documents and Desktop folders.)

• If you turn off iCloud Desktop & Documents, you get an alarming message. It says: “If you continue, documents on your Desktop and in your Documents folder will be visible in iCloud Drive only. No documents will be deleted from iCloud Drive.”

  What this means is that the icons on your desktop, and in your Documents folder, will disappear!

  OK, be confused, but don’t be hysterical; your files are on your Mac. The message makes it sound like you’ll have to re-download them from iCloud, but that’s not true. They’re already on your Mac—in the iCloud Drive folder.

  Turning off iCloud Desktop & Documents leaves only an empty Desktop folder on your desktop, and an empty Documents folder in your Documents folder. If you want to put your files back where they belong, you have to drag them there manually—out of the iCloud Drive folders.

The Fonts Panel

When you use a Carbon program, you usually access fonts the same way as always: using a Font menu. But when you use a Cocoa program, you get the Fonts panel, which makes it far easier to organize, search, and use your font collection. Chapter 15 describes fonts, and the Fonts panel, in more detail.

Retina Friendliness

In general, Cocoa programs automatically sharpen up their text when you view it on a Retina Display—Apple’s name for super-high-resolution screens like the one on its latest MacBook laptops. Text in Carbonized programs, on the other hand, looks blotchy and awful until software companies make the effort to make their programs Retina-friendly.

Title Bar Tricks

You may remember from Chapter 2 that the title bar of every Finder window harbors a secret pop-up menu. When you Control-click it (or right-click it, or two-finger click it, or -click it), you’re shown a little folder ladder that delineates your current position in your folder hierarchy. You may also remember that the tiny icon just to the left of the window’s name is actually a handle you can drag to move a folder into a different window.

In Cocoa programs, you get the same features in document windows, as shown back in Figure 3-6 (“Dragging from the Title Bar”). By dragging the tiny document icon next to the document’s name, you can perform stunts—like dragging that little icon to the desktop or to the Dock icon of a different program for opening—right from your document’s title bar.

Background Window Control

The key unlocks a slick trick in Cocoa programs: It lets you operate the buttons and controls of an inactive background window without bringing it to the front. You can operate a background window’s resize box, buttons, pop-up menus, and scroll bars, all while another window is in front of it. In fact, you can even drag through text in a background window—and then drag-and-drop it into the foreground window. (Freaky!) In every case, the secret is simply to keep pressed as you click or drag.

Cool Text-Selection Tricks

By holding down certain keys while dragging through text in a Cocoa program, you gain some wild and wacky text-selection powers (especially useful in, for example, TextEdit and Pages):

• Highlight only one column out of several by Option-dragging. Instead of highlighting margin to margin, you get only the text within your selection rectangle.

• Highlight several passages simultaneously by -dragging. Each time you -drag, you highlight another block of text, even though the earlier blocks are still selected.

Secret Keyboard Shortcuts

Most Cocoa apps respond to certain keystrokes left over from the NeXT operating system, which was macOS’s ancestor. If you’re a card-carrying member of KIAFTMA (the Keyboard Is Always Faster Than the Mouse Association), you’ll love these strokes:

• Control-A. Moves your insertion point to the beginning of the paragraph. (Mnemonic: A = beginning of the Alphabet.)

• Control-E. Jumps to the end of the paragraph. (Mnemonic: E = End.)

• Control-D. Forward delete (deletes the letter to the right of the insertion point).

• Control-K. Instantly deletes all text from the insertion point to the right end of the line. (Mnemonic: K = Kills the rest of the line.)

• Control-O. Inserts a paragraph break, much like Return, but leaves the insertion point where it was, above the break. This is the ideal trick for breaking a paragraph in half when you’ve just thought of a better ending for the first part.

• Control-T. Moves the insertion point one letter to the right—and, along with it, drags whichever letter was to its left. (Mnemonic: T = Transpose letters.)

• Option-Delete. Deletes the entire word to the left of the insertion point. When you’re typing along in a hurry and discover that you’ve just made a typo, this is the keystroke you want. It’s much faster to nuke the previous word and retype it than to fiddle around with the mouse and the insertion point just to fix one letter.

Four additional keystrokes duplicate the functions of the arrow keys. Still, as long as you’ve got your pinky on the Control key…

• Control-B, Control-F. Move the insertion point one character to the left or right, just like the left and right arrow keys. (Mnemonic: Back, Forward.)

• Control-N, Control-P. Move the insertion point one row down or up, like the down and up arrow keys. (Mnemonic: Next, Previous.)