Stacks

A stack is a Dock item that gives you fast access to a folder. 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). OS X starts you off with two default Stacks: one for downloads and the other for documents. The Downloads Stack contains files you download from Safari, Mail, and iChat. The Documents Stack is a great place to keep things such as 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.

Tip: Within the Stack, you can click and drag on the icons in your fan or grid stack to another folder, the Trash, an external disc icon, your desktop, or other locations.

Fan
Fan Stacks shows a portion your folder content and arrange the icons so that the closest icon to the Dock is based on the order of the “Sort by” option you have selected.

For example, if you select the “Sort by” option of “Date Added”, the Fan Stack will expand showing the icons of the most recently added items closest to the Dock. This is the default setting of your Downloads folder, making it easy to open, copy or move your latest download.

Fan Stack elements

Grid
Grid Stacks will show the folder content as a matrix of icons arranged by your “Sort by” option.

Grid Stacks are scrollable and allow you to navigate folders. You can click a folder in the Stack to open that folder. An arrow button will appear in the upper left of the Stack you just opened. Click it to go back to the folder you came from. If there are more icons that can be shown, a scroll bar will appear.

Grid Stack elements

Return to parent folder arrow top-left corner. Click it to return to the parent folder.
Scroll bar – Present only when there are more icons to show.

You can customize a Stack by right-clicking or control-clicking on the stack. The customize menu will include the following options:

1. Sort by – You can select to have items sorted by Name, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, or Kind.
2. Display as – Displays the icon in the Dock as the folder’s actual icon or as a stack of icons of the folder contents.
3. View content as – Determines what Stack type is used when you click the icon:
4. Fan – Shows folder content in the Fan stack, organized by your sort option.
5. Grid – Shows folder content in the Grid stack, organized by your sort option.
6. List – Shows the folder contents as a list, organized by your sort option. Each sub-folder will open another list and so on, until you reach the end of the directory structure. To open an application or document, simply click it.
7. Automatic – This lets Lion determine the best view content option. When there are a few items, the Fan stack is used. Once you have loaded your folder with enough items, Lion will change your view content type to the Grid stack.

Customizing Your Mac

Customize Your Mighty Mouse:

Whether you’re using a wired or wireless Mighty Mouse, you can customize it easily:

1. Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
2. Click Keyboard & Mouse; then click the Mouse tab.
You can program the four buttons on your Mighty Mouse, set scrolling options, and set response sensitivities for tracking, scrolling, and double-clicking.

Customize Your Mac with a Screen Saver:

Screen savers offer a great way to customize — and enjoy — your Mac. You have a variety of screen savers to choose from:

1. Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
2. Click Desktop & Screen Saver; then click the Screen Saver tab.
The column on the left lists the possibilities. You can also tell Mac OS X to generate a screen saver automatically based on the album art in your iTunes library or the photos in your iPhoto or Aperture photo libraries.

Simply click any of the available options to choose a screen saver. You can try it by clicking Test below the Preview screen.

Quickly Activate Your Screen Saver:

By designating a Hot Corner, you can have your screen saver start whenever you move the mouse into that corner. Here’s how:

1. Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
2. Click Desktop & Screen Saver and click the Screen Saver tab.
3. Choose one Screen Saver option and click the Hot Corners button.
4. Use the pull-down menus to indicate the corner you’d like to use to activate your screen saver.

Open Applications Automatically on Startup:

If you frequently listen to music, surf the web, get your email, or chat with friends, you may want your computer to open those applications every time you start up. On a Mac, it’s simple to do. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu, then:

1. Click Accounts (in the System row of the System Preferences window).
2. Click the Login Items tab.
3.Click the Add (+) button.
4. Scroll down and click Applications
5. Select iTunes and click the Add button.

The next time you start up your Mac, iTunes will start up, too. In addition to opening applications at Start Up, you can have Mac OS X open documents.

Quickly Switch Between Applications:

The Mac makes it easy to have multiple applications — Mail, Safari, iTunes, Pages, iChat, iPhoto, and others — open at the same time. So how do you quickly switch from Safari, let’s say, to Mail?

Just hold down the Command key and press the Tab key (Command-Tab). Mac OS X immediately displays a mini-Dock with icons for each of your open applications. At the left side of the mini-Dock, you’ll see the icon for your current application. Next to it (and highlighted), you’ll find the icon for the application you last used. Each time you press the Tab key (without releasing the Command key), you can cycle through your open applications.

One more tip: You can also use the Left Arrow and Right Arrow keys to navigate your open applications.

Get Dictionary Definitions in One Click:

You’re using Safari to research a paper on climate change and you find the phrase “anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” What exactly does “anthropogenic” mean?

Here’s a fast way to get the definition of a word you’re not familiar with.

1. Hover your Mighty Mouse over the word and right-click.
2. Choose Look Up in Dictionary from the menu that appears.
3. Mac OS X immediately opens Dictionary and finds the meaning of “anthropogenic” for you.

Stored in the Applications folder, Dictionary works with all Mac OS X applications.

Go Home:

Whether you share a Mac with others or have one all to yourself, you can find all your personal data — documents, downloads, music, and more — in the home folder Mac OS X created for you when you set up your Mac (or when someone created an account for you).

You can spot your home folder easily: It’s the one with the icon of a house and your account name. And if you place it in the Dock, you can open it quickly without having to open any folders. Here’s how:

1. In the Finder, click the icon for your hard drive. (Unless you’ve renamed it, it’s probably called Macintosh HD.)
2. Open the Users folder.
3. Then drag your home folder from the Users folder into the Dock and release the mouse button.

Now, whenever you need anything in your home folder, you can access it quickly from the Dock.

 

Back Up Your Music, Photos, and Documents:

Time Machine is the fabulous backup application that’s part of Mac OS X Leopard. To use Time Machine, simply connect an external hard drive to your computer. The first time you connect it to your Mac, Leopard displays a dialog asking if you’d like to use it as your backup location. If the dialog doesn’t appear, don’t worry:

1. Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu.
2. Click the Time Machine icon.
3. Click Choose Backup Disk.

Time Machine toggles on, changes the image for your backup disk, and indicates when the next (in this case, the first) backup will occur). For best results, you should use a drive that’s at least as large as your Mac startup drive. (If your internal hard drive can hold up to 250GB of data, your Time Machine volume should hold at least 250GB.) And it’s a good idea not to store any other data on your Time Machine drive. That way, you maximize the amount of space you have to backup your files.

Take a Quick Look:

How do you quickly find a photo without opening them one at a time?

Let Quick Look help you. A new feature in Leopard, Quick Look lets you browse files — photos, Pages documents, Keynote presentations, QuickTime movies, Microsoft Word and Excel files — without having to open an application. Here’s how:

In the Finder, open the folder that contains the item you hope to find.
Select a photo; then click the Quick Look button in the folder’s toolbar (or press Command-Y).
Leopard instantly opens a Quick Look window with the photo you selected.

Not the photo you were looking for? Just click another. Quick Look keeps the preview window open, letting you click photos until you find the one you want.

Capture Screen Shots:

In Mac OS X, you can use simple keyboard shortcuts to do all sorts of things, including capturing images of what’s on your Mac screen. For example, you can take a screen shot of your entire screen by holding down the Command and Shift keys and pressing a 3.

If you hold down the Command and Shift keys and press 4, Mac OS X turns the cursor into crosshairs you can use to select whatever portion of your display you’d like to capture in a screen shot.

If you immediately hit the Spacebar after typing Command-Shift-4, Mac OS X replaces those crosshairs with a little a camera. Using the camera, you can take a screen shot of the Dock, the entire menu bar, a single open menu, the desktop, or any open window.