Mac OS X includes a number of utilities and applications that enable you to start working as soon as your Mac is up and running. This software includes a calculator, an application called Stickies to place short notes on your desktop, a PDF viewer called Preview, and a basic text editing program called TextEdit,. Because they require no installation or additional setup, we recommend giving each of these applications a try as a way to familiarize yourself with the Mac OS X desktop.
The Mac’s system Calculator, shown in Figure 6.1, is located in the Applications folder. You can toggle between basic view and advanced view, which supports trigonometry functions and exponents, under the View menu.
You can operate the Calculator by clicking the buttons in the window or by using your numeric keypad. The number keys on your keypad map directly to their Calculator counterparts, and the Return key is equivalent to clicking the equal button.
If you want to view a record of your calculations, choose View, Show Paper Tape. This opens a separate window to display inputs, as shown in Figure 6.2. You can print the tape by choosing File, Print Tape (or even save it by choosing File, Save Tape As) from the menu.
Another useful, if unexpected, feature is the Calculator’s Conversion function. It enables you to easily perform conversions of currency, temperature, weight, and a variety of other measurement units. Simply enter a value in the Calculator and then choose the desired conversion type from the Convert menu.
Watch Out!
Currency exchange rates fluctuate over time—be sure to check the time they were last updated, and update as needed, in the Convert menu before making your calculations.
In the sheet that appears from the top of the Calculator, choose the units to convert from and those to convert to and click OK. Figure 6.3 depicts a currency conversion.
Stickies, also located in the Application folder, is a digital version of a Post-It notepad. You can store quick notes, graphics, or anything you might want to access later. Stickies offer several formatting features, such as multiple fonts, colors, and embedded images. The screen displayed in Figure 6.4 is covered with sticky notes.
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The Stickies application installs a service that’s accessible from many other applications running in OS X. Through this service, you can quickly store selected text from an application in a sticky note. To do this, select the desired text and then look in the application menu for the Services submenu and choose the option Make New Sticky Note. (Alternatively, select the desired test and use the key command Shift-Command-Y.) The Stickies application will become active and you will see your new sticky onscreen along with any other notes that had previously existed.
To make a new Sticky, choose File, New Note from the menu. You can then type anything you want in it—or even drag in images, as shown in Figure 6.5.
The Stickies application does not use the standard Mac OS X window. Instead, each window appears as a colored, borderless rectangle when it isn’t selected. When a window is active, three controls appear:
Close box—. The close box in the upper-left corner of the sticky note closes the active note. If the note has been edited, a dialog appears asking whether you want to save the note. If you choose Don’t Save, the contents of the sticky won’t be saved; if you choose Save, an Export window, as shown in Figure 6.6, appears in which you can name and choose a location for the file. You can also choose a basic file format: plain text, rich text file (RTF), or rich text file with attachments, such as images (RTFD).
Cleanup—. In the upper-right corner is a triangle that moves the box to the lower left of your screen. If you click this control for all open Stickies, you will end up with a somewhat compact pile, freeing up the rest of your desktop. Figure 6.7 shows the change in Figure 6.4 if all the stickies are moved to the left corner.
Grow box—. Dragging the grow box, located in the lower-right corner, dynamically shrinks or expands the window.
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If you move your mouse cursor over the title bar of a selected Sticky, it displays the creation and modification dates for the active note. To dismiss this information, click outside the current note.
In addition to the three visible controls, Mac OS X Stickies also supports windowshading. Double-clicking the title bar of an active window shrinks it to the size of the title bar. Double-clicking the title bar a second time returns the window to its previous size. When in windowshaded mode, the sticky note displays the top line of text from its contents in the title bar of the collapsed window. An example is visible at the lower right in Figure 6.4.
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Strangely enough, you cannot minimize Stickies into the Dock. Choosing Window, Minimize Window from the menu windowshades the active note.
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The Stickies and Calculator applications are unusual because they have no application preferences, which would typically be located under their application menus.
Sticky notes are not, as you might think, individual documents. All the notes are contained in a single file that’s written to your Library folder. The File menu in Stickies enables you to create new notes, export individual notes to text files, and print the contents of notes:
New Note (Command-N)—. Creates a new blank note.
Close (Command-W)—. Closes the active sticky note.
Save All (Command-S)—. Saves changes to all notes.
Import Text—. Imports a text file into a new note. Text can be in plain text or rich text format (RTF). Font style information is retained if you use rich text format.
Import Classic Stickies—. Imports note files from Mac OS 8/9.
Export Text—. Exports the active note to a text file in plain text, rich text (.rtf), or rich text with images (.rtfd) formats.
Page Setup—. Configures printer page setup.
Print Active Note (Command-P)—. Prints the active note.
Print All Notes—. Prints all notes.
In addition to the normal Edit menu items are three components you might not expect in a simple Post-It application: Find, Spelling, and Speech. The Find option helps you to search for specific words or phrases in your notes, and the Spelling option checks your spelling. Under the Speech submenu, you can start, and then stop, your system from speaking the selected sticky aloud.
The Font menu offers control over the text formatting in each note, including font and text formatting and colors. Copy Style is an unusual selection that copies the font style from the current text selection (size, font face, color, and so on) so that you can easily apply it elsewhere by using the Paste Style command.
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When choosing font colors, you will be working with the Colors window, a common element of OS X shown later in Figure 6.10.
In the Note menu, Floating Window enables you to set the chosen note to float in front of all other windows, even when other applications are active. Translucent Window makes the selected note transparent so that whatever is behind it will show through. The Use as Default option enables you to apply the current setting as the default for new notes.
What would a sticky note be without a bright-colored background? The Color menu contains the common Post-It colors for your enjoyment (yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, and gray).
The Window menu lists all active notes using the first several words that appear on them.
Stickies, unlike many of the applications we’ll be discussing in upcoming chapters, has no application preferences.
For viewing PDF files and images of all sorts, Mac OS X comes with the Preview application, which can be found in the Applications folder.
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Since version 10.2, the standard graphic file format in Mac OS X has been the PDF. One nifty result is that you can make a PDF of nearly any document on your system. Simply choose File, Print from the menu and click the Save As PDF button at the bottom of the Print sheet window.
Preview can be launched in a number of ways. First, you can double-click the application icon. Doing so starts Preview, but doesn’t open any windows. You must then choose File, Open from the menu to select a file to view.
Second, you can open Preview by dragging the image or PDF files onto the Preview icon in the Finder or Dock.
Third, Preview is integrated into the Mac OS X printing system, so clicking Preview in any Print sheet window starts it.
Did you Know?
If you want to view a series of images in one Preview window, select them all and drag the set on top of the Preview icon in the Applications folder or in the Dock.
When you open an image or PDF document in Preview, it shows up in a window with a toolbar across the top, as shown in Figure 6.8. The following options are located in the toolbar:
Drawer—. Opens and closes a drawer, shown in Figure 6.8, which displays either a list of page headings or or a series of thumbnail images representing the pages or files open in the current Preview window. Clicking a page heading or thumbnail image shows that page the main viewing area. (For text documents, you can choose whether the drawer contains text or thumbnails using the view buttons at the top of the drawer.)
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You can search text-based PDFs using the search box at the top of the drawer. Just start typing your search term, and pages containing the string you’ve typed will appear in the drawer for your convenience.
You’ll know whether a document is text-based by whether search box appears at all. Not all documents that contain text are encoded as text; some are more like “pictures” of a page. In those cases, you’ll have to search without Preview’s assistance (There is an exception to using the appearance of the search box to determine whether a PDF is text-based—if you use the selection tool as discussed later, the resulting PDF won’t be text-based, but the search box will be present.)
Back/Forward—. If you’ve viewed several pages in a multipage file out of sequence, you can page back and forth through in the order you visited using the Back/Forward arrows.
Page—. When you’re viewing a multipage PDF file, Page Number enables you to enter a page number to jump directly to that page.
Page Up and Page Down—. If you’re viewing a multipage file, you can move through the pages sequentially using the Page Up and Page Down arrows.
Zoom In and Zoom Out—. These two options enable you to view a larger or smaller version of the selected image or PDF. If the image is larger than the Preview window, scrollbars appear.
Tool Mode—. This set of buttons, which varies depending on whether you are viewing a text or image file, contains the following tools:
Scroll Tool—. Allows you to scroll within a selected page by clicking and dragging in the main viewing area. To move between pages, you still need to use the Page Up/Page Down controls or select another page in the drawer. (The mouse cursor appears as a hand icon while in this mode.)
Text Tool—. Allows you to select text in a PDF. When selected, the text can be copied and pasted to another document using standard commands under the Edit menu. (Note, this tool is available only in text-based documents.)
Select Tool—. Allows you to select a portion of a page, which you can then copy using Edit, Copy command from the menu. When copied, you can create a new PDF document containing only the selected area by choosing File, New from Clipboard from the menu. Unlike the Text Tool, you can select either text or images with the Select Tool, but the result when copied will be an image-based PDFformat, not editable or searchable text.
Just as you can for Finder windows, you can hide the Preview toolbar by using the toolbar button at the upper right of the window’s title bar. Note, however, that you can’t simply scroll to reach another page of the PDF unless you activate Continuous Scrolling from the View menu.
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In addition to viewing files, you can use Preview to convert a file to one of several common file types and export it to a new location. To do this, choose File, Export from the menu and enter a filename. Then choose a location to save in and a file format. The Options button reveals additional settings for color depth and filter options.
As you learned in Chapter 1, “Introducing Mac OS X,” one of the standard items in an application menu is Preferences, which allow you to customize some aspects of how an application responds.
The General pane of the Preview Preferences, shown in Figure 6.9, allows you to choose how Preview uses the thumbnails it displays. You can choose a size, whether to show thumbnail images and/or their names, and whether to load all thumbnails or wait until they are needed.
You can also choose a background color for the window using the Colors window, as shown in Figure 6.10.
In the Images and PDF preference panes, you can choose the default size at which images and PDF documents are opened—fit to screen or some other size. You can also choose some aspects of how images or text are rendered on screen.
Mac OS X comes with the text editor TextEdit installed in the Applications folder. TextEdit can save files in plain text or the RTF format and uses many built-in Mac OS X features to give you advanced control over text and fonts. Its RTF files can be opened in popular word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, and display all formatting attributes. Even better for some, the current version of TextEdit can open, edit, and save Word documents, which allows documents to be traded back and forth between Word and TextEdit users.
When you start it, TextEdit opens a new Untitled.rtf document for you to begin working, as shown in Figure 6.11.
If you want to open an existing document, choose File, Open (Command-O) from the menu. To read a file, however, it must be a supported document type, such as plain text, Hypertext Markup Language, Microsoft Word documents, or RTF. Figure 6.12 demonstrates TextEdit’s rich text editing capabilities.
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By default, TextEdit opens HTML documents and displays the styled information similar to the way a Web browser would display it. To open an HTML file and edit the source code, you must adjust the Application preferences to ignore rich text commands in HTML files.
You will find the options to change the size or font style of text using TextEdit under the Font item of the Format menu. Choose Show Fonts to launch the OS X Font window, where you can choose between any of the fonts installed on your system. (We’ll talk more about fonts in Chapter 20, “Printing, Faxing, and Working with Fonts.”)
To change the text color, choose Format, Font, Show Colors from the menu. This launches the Colors window shown previously in Figure 6.10.
If you change your mind about all the fonts and color modifications you’ve made and just want to stick with simple, unadorned text, choose Format, Make Plain Text from the menu. Figure 6.13 shows the plain text version of the document displayed in Figure 6.12. (Also notice that the ruler at the top of the document window has disappeared; to bring it back, choose Format, Make Rich Text from the menu.)
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The ruler is only available for Rich Text Documents. Using the ruler, you can visually adjust tabs and other layout features of the active document. You can also use it to easily and visually change formatting and placement of text.
For the most part, you should be able to open TextEdit and start creating and editing text documents. However, you can use a number of preferences and features to customize its appearance and functionality.
The TextEdit Preferences window, shown in Figure 6.14, controls the default application preferences. Most of these options can be chosen from the menu bar and stored on a per-document basis as well as for the entire application.
The New Document Attributes section of the preferences includes an option for Rich Text or Plain Text. It enables you to select the Wrap to Page check box so that lines will fit the page width. You can also choose the default width in characters and height in lines of new windows.
Use the Set buttons in the Default Fonts section to choose new default fonts for rich text and plain text documents. The default fonts are Helvetica 12 and Monaco 10, respectively.
To disable rich text commands in HTML and RTF files, click the corresponding check box in the Rich Text Processing section. Ignoring the style information opens the document as a plain text file, showing all the control codes and tags used to embed the original styles. This is required for editing HTML tags within a Web page.
The options for Default Plain Text Encoding require a bit of explanation. By default, TextEdit attempts to read style information in whatever file it opens. Allowing automatic detection enables TextEdit to open files created on other operating systems, such as Windows, and transparently translate end-of-line characters. When opening or saving a document, TextEdit gives you the opportunity to override automatic detection of the appropriate file encoding type to use. To choose an alternative encoding, such as Unicode, use the pop-up menus in the Default Plain Text Encoding section.
To have TextEdit automatically check your spelling as you type, select the Check Spelling as You Type check box in the Editing section. Misspelled words will be underlined in red. Ctrl-click the misspelled word to open a contextual menu that enables you to choose from a list of corrections, ignore the word, or add it (the Learn option) to the Mac OS X dictionary. You can also choose to show the ruler in the TextEdit window.
The options in the Saving section include
Delete Backup File—. Removes the TextEdit backup file after a document is successfully saved.
Save Files Writable—. Saves read-only files with write permissions turned on; that is, they can be edited later.
Overwrite Read-only Files—. Overwrites files, even if their permissions are set to read-only.
Append “.txt” Extension to Plain Text Files—. Adds a .txt extension to the end of plain text files for cross-platform compatibility and ease of recognition.
To save your settings, close the TextEdit Preferences panel. To revert to the original configuration, click the Revert to Default Settings button.
As you learned earlier, the TextEdit menus provide control over fonts. They also control other document-specific information. Most of the application preferences can be overridden on a per-document basis from the main menus.
You can open, save, and print documents by using the File menu.
The Edit menu contains the basic copy and paste functions, along with the find, replace, and spell-checking features introduced in Stickies.
The Format menu enables you to control your font settings, colors, and text alignment. In addition, you can toggle wrapping modes, rich text and plain text, and hyphenation.
The Window menu allows you to choose among open TextEdit windows or bring all to the front.
Mac OS X includes a wealth of applications and utilities, ranging from the simple (but not so simple!) Stickies to a versatile PDF viewer. The experience of using one application applies to others you will encounter. This is especially true for TextEdit, which uses the Mac OS X system-level color-picker, spell-checking, and font controls.