The Interface

From the Finder's GO menu select HOME. This opens a Finder window, which allows you to visually see the hierarchy of your HOME FOLDER. Use this folders to store your files. For your convenience a structure of Documents, Movies, Misoc, Pictures has been created by the system, please use only these folders to store your files and prevent data loss. Please take note that files are stored in a diferent location if you have a desktop or if you use a laptop. To know more about the differences on how a desktop differs from a laptop be sure to read the desktop/laptop secction.

Finder windows generally include a sidebar on the left side. Items are grouped into categories: places, devices, shared computers, and searches — just like the Source list in iTunes. Whatever mounted and accessible volumes you have, such as a hard disk, iDisk, network, CD, DVD, or iPod, in the top portion. The bottom portion contains your user account folder, aka Home folder—the folder named after your user account name.

Think of your Mac desktop like any standard office or school desktop, though this one is free of pencil holders, tacky knick-knacks, and coffee ring stains. Then again, your Mac does contain a variety of familiar desktop accoutrements, including sticky notes, a calendar, address book, calculator, and more.

To go back one folder, click the Back button in the toolbar. To close the window, click the round, red button in the upper-left corner. If you don't want to close the window but want it out of your way, click the round, yellow button to minimize the window to the Dock. If a window is chock full of stuff, you can resize it by dragging the lower-right corner to make it bigger, or click the round, green button to maximize the window's size.

If you'd like to change how folder and volume contents appear in the right pane, click one of the view buttons in the toolbar. For example, when we click the list view button, our Finder window magically transforms itself into this:

The menu bar contains some words that represent the menus for the active application. The menu bar also contains a few icons on its right side that represent menus for other features on your Mac, such as Spotlight (the magnifying glass icon) and sound volume (the speaker icon). When you click a menu, it displays a sheet (the actual menu) full of menu items. To perform a task or command that's listed in a menu, just select the item and your Mac will perform the action.

To help get you familiar with how menus and menu commands work, here's how to clean up your desktop using Finder menu commands.

To tidy up your files and folders so that they all line up in nice, neat rows, click on the desktop to make the Finder active.

From the View menu, choose Clean Up.

If you want to organize files and folders by name, kind, or other criteria do this:

1. From the View menu,
2. choose Arrange By,
3. then choose Name or Kind or another choice in the submenu.

The Dock is the bar of icons that sits at the bottom or side of your screen. It provides easy access to some of the Apple applications on your Mac (such as Mail, Safari, iTunes, Address Book, and QuickTime Player), displays which applications are currently running, and holds windows in their minimized state. It's also the place to find the Trash (its icon looks like a waste basket). For your convenience, you can add your own applications, files, and folders to the Dock too.

To select an item in the Dock, just click its icon. For example, if you want to listen to some music, click the iTunes icon (the CD icon with music notes) to open iTunes. When an application is running, the Dock displays a blue light beneath or beside the application's icon. To make any currently running application the active one, click its icon in the Dock to switch to it (the active application's name appears in the menu bar to the right of the Apple logo).