Mac OS X Snow Leopard Course

Welcome to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, version 10.6 of the great Macintosh OS X Operating System. What I'm going to do is to walk you through the Operating System starting from a high level and then delving down into the details of what's going on underneath and the power that is there for you to use. So what we'll do in this section is to take a high-level view of what's going on in Mac OS X. I'm going to focus on Mac OS X for you, no matter what perspective you have. If you are new to Mac OS X and to the Macintosh, then we'll show you how to use the Operating System, it's as simple as that. If you're not new to Mac OS X or to the Macintosh, if you've used it before, or if you feel you want to brush up your skills, what I'm going to do is show you some of the new features in Snow Leopard and some productivity tricks and advanced techniques you can use to get the most out of Mac OS X and your computer. So, right now we'll look at the very high level. I'm looking at the Desktop here. There's an image here which you can change. By default, it's an image of an aurora. Up here at the top I have a Menu Bar and it has a very common format. It always starts with an Apple Menu and then a menu for the current application, and we'll go into how it's organized. Over here at the right I have a feature called Spotlight which lets you search, and this is my user ID, and this indicates the Bluetooth is active. Just about everything over here can be customized and down here at the bottom we have something called the Dock where I have images of some of my applications. You can see that as I move the mouse over them I can see what they are. Certain of the applications in the Dock have these little buttons underneath them and what the button means is that that application is running and you'll see how that works. There's a divider here and then I have folders over here and the Trash can. And you can customize the Dock, you can move it to different sides of the screen, and you can determine what happens in it. So these are the very basics you start with: a Desktop, a Menu Bar at the top, and the Dock. And what I'm going to do is go down into the Dock and demonstrate that you can park documents down here in the Dock as well as open windows and I want to show you the basics of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and what I've done is to go right to the source. I've gone to Apple's website where they have a page that talks about Snow Leopard. In fact, they have several pages that go deeper and deeper and deeper into Snow Leopard. And you can see here I've got this blue. here; this is a minimized window. I'll click on it and here I am on that window. I'm in Apple's browser Safari that comes as part of Mac OS X. Notice up here, as I switch from one application to another this first item changes to be the name of the application and then these are the commands for that application. Previously, I was in the Finder which lets me navigate through files and folders, now I'm looking at Safari. Don't worry, we'll come back to all of this in great detail, but I want to show you what Apple is doing in describing Snow Leopard because they are actually the primary source for what's new in Snow Leopard. I can come here and look at What's New and there's going to be a theme that you see over and over in Apple's documentation and in the discussion in this tutorial, and what that is, is that in Snow Leopard what we're getting is a lot of refinements and a lot of, they talk about unleashing the power of your hardware, what we're doing is we're moving to things that are a lot faster and a lot snappier, so tweaks around the edges and some major enhancements to tools that are part of the Operating System, but basically the goal for Snow Leopard was to make the most of the hardware which has changed over the years. It's changed even since Leopard came about and now everything, as you can see here, more responsive. This 64 is an important symbol. What we've done with Snow Leopard is to move more to what is called 64-bit addressing. You don't need to go into the details of that, but we have gone from small addresses to large addresses and the size of the address happens to be directly related to how much memory the Operating System can deal with. As computers get more and more memory they need to be able to address those memory locations. Now that you have enormous amounts of memory in the computer you need the Operating System to be able to access it, otherwise it's useless. Now what's happening is we've gotten to more memory so all of the operating systems need to be enhanced and they're bumped up to be able to handle much larger amounts of memory and this happens over and over and over in the computer world. You get a lower price for memory and people predict that memory will be more available for computers and then the operating systems are revised to be able to use that amount of memory and much more. It's sort of a bump in the road and once you're over it you can work with a lot more memory and you can run a lot faster. And what Apple has done, they've been preparing for 64-bit addressing for a while, but now more of the Operating System and what's built into it runs in what's called 64-bit mode, so it works as fast as possible and takes advantage of the hardware that you have. And one of the things you can see that Apple pinpoints here is more responsiveness in the Finder, the tool that lets you go to Files and Folders. You can see things are faster. Then we have some new features for tools like Expose and Stacks. These are ways in which you can organize your information. As you have more memory, more disk space, and more information you need better ways to organize it. What you also need is a way to prevent catastrophic loss and you'll see that Time Machine is built into Snow Leopard, as it was to Leopard, and what Time Machine does is to automatically back up your files to an external hard drive in a very efficient manner. So, Apple is making it much easier for you to work with more data, more memory, and it takes both ends of it. It has the ability to address larger amounts of data and, at the same time, it has the ability to back up all of the data that you've stored on your hard disks. So, that's an overview of some of the major features of Snow Leopard. Now let's drill down and take a look at some of the things that you can do in Snow Leopard that you may never have seen before on the computer.