Mac OS X

Finder Screen

Dock + Finder

The Dock in Mac OS X provides fast, one-click access to frequently used applications, folders and even downloads from the Internet. The Finder makes working with your files and documents as easy as browsing your iTunes library.

What is the Dock?

The Dock at the bottom of the screen gives you quick access to your most frequently used applications and files. With its visually appealing, high-resolution icons, the Dock practically begs to be clicked. When you do, your applications spring to life instantly and a bright signal tells you which applications are open.

You can set the Dock to remain at the bottom of the screen, framing your desktop picture and always visible. Or you can set it to tuck itself away, ready to return when you move the pointer to the bottom of the screen.

Dock screen

What’s in your Dock.

The Dock comes loaded with icons for many of the applications included with your Mac — Dashboard, Mail, iCal, iPhoto and so on. But as you’d expect, it’s easy to customise. To add a new application or folder, just grab it from the Finder and move it onto the Dock. The Dock expands to make room for the new item and if you have a lot of items, the icons scale to fit on your desktop. Removing and rearranging items is just as simple: Click and drag.

Stacked in your favour.

Stacks screen

A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder of files. When you click a stack, the files within spring from the Dock in a fan or a grid, depending on the number of items (or the preference you set). Mac OS X starts you off with two premade stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The Downloads stack automatically captures files you download from Safari, Mail and iChat and the Documents stack is a great place to keep things like presentations, spreadsheets and word processing files. You can create as many stacks as you wish simply by dragging folders to the right side of your Dock.

Introducing the Finder.

The Finder is like home base for your Mac. Represented by the blue icon with the smiling face, it’s one of the first things you see when you start working on your Mac. It lets you organise, view and access practically everything on your Mac, including applications, files, folders, discs and shared drives on your network.

Meet the sidebar.

Sidebar screen

The sidebar in the Finder window is your starting point when browsing your Mac. If you’ve used iTunes, you’ll feel right at home. Like iTunes, the sidebar is organised into categories to make it easy to locate your stuff — frequently accessed folders, CDs and DVDs, computers on your local network and so on. With a few clicks, you’re on your way to finding what you need. The sidebar also features a handy Search For section. It uses Spotlight search to let you quickly find files you’ve modified today, yesterday or in the past week, or find all images, movies or documents. Just click one of the folders and you’ll see an up-to-the-minute list of files. You can also create your own search folders and add them to the sidebar.

See your files in Cover Flow.

Mac OS X helps you navigate everything on your Mac visually with an innovation called Cover Flow. Using Cover Flow, you can flip through your documents as easily as you flip through music in iTunes. Each file is displayed as a large preview of its first page, so you can actually see the contents of a document before opening it.

Three more ways to view.

You can also see your files in list view, which lets you easily sort them in different ways, including by file name, date modified or file type. You can see them as icons. Or you can see them in column view, which lets you navigate through multiple folders quickly.

Instant networking.

Any Mac or PC on your home network automatically appears in the sidebar, allowing you to easily share files between them and even use Spotlight and Cover Flow to search the other computers. And when you click a connected Mac, you can use screen sharing (if authorised), which lets you see and control another Mac as if you were sitting right in front of it.