Learning OS X

or How I learned to kill my badly behaving OS X apps.

This question comes up a lot so I thought it was worth a dedicated post. On Windows, when an application is in a hung state and your system becomes unresponsive you can press Ctrl + Alt + Del to open the task manager. There is an equivalent key sequence on OS X.

If you have a hung application pressing Alt+Cmd+Esc will bring up a list of running applications with a button to allow you to Force Quit the application. Select the application you want to close and click Force Quit should kill the offending applications. You can also access this dialog by clicking the Apple menu and choosing Force Quit.

That’s it pretty simple. Hopefully the Mac applications you have behave so well you never have to do this.

Dashboard is an application that is used to display mini applications known as widgets. Think of these widgets as little helpers that provide you information at the push of a button.

The Dashboard program runs at system startup and is hidden in the background until you activate it. When you do, the desktop dims and the widgets float into view on top of the applications. OS X comes with some default widgets for displaying the time, calendar, control iTunes, the Weather, sports scores, etc. In addition, 3rd party developers also make widgets that you can download and install into your system.

You can typically invoke the Dashboard in three ways:

• Key press – pressing F4 on your Mac keypard, or F12 if you are using a Macbook
• Clicking the Dashboard Dock icon
• Moving the mouse to a corner of your desktop. This only works if you have setup the System preferences to allow it.

You can move a widget by clicking it and dragging it around the desktop.

You can close a widget by pressing the Option key and moving the mouse over the widget. When you do, an X will appear. Click it and the widget goes away.

Files deleted on OS X aren’t gone forever (at least not initially). They get put into a special place on the system until you are really sure you want to get rid of it. This special place is called, imaginatively enough, the Trash. The video below walks you through how the Trash can works

Files end up in the Trash a number of different ways, you can select delete from the Finder menu, you can drag files into the Trash. Also, some Mac programs support the Trash so for example, when you delete files from iTunes, they first go into the Trash.

The beauty of having a Trash Can is that if you inadvertently delete a file, you can easily recover the file. In order to do this, you just click the Trash can, choose the file from the Finder window and pull it out of the Trash.

Eventually, however, you may want to actually take the trash out. The main reason for this is that you are eventually going to want to reclaim the space needed by the files in the Trash.

There are a few ways to delete files from the Trash. The easiest is to select the Finder menu and click the Empty Trash menu item. You can also do this with the Cmd+Shift+Delete key combination. Finally, you can right click on the Trash icon on the dock and choose Empty Trash. If you don’t have a two button mouse press the Ctrl key while clicking the Trash.

Doing any of this will remove the files from the Trash can. For all intents and purposes, these files are deleted from your system. However, a clever person could figure out a way to retrieve these files. If you have anything that is particularly sensitives and have a laptop, you may want to use the secure delete feature. Think of secure delete a a document shredder. When you secure delete a file a hacker wouldn’t be able to retrieve the contents of the files. To secure delete your files, select the Finder menu and click the Secure Empty Trash menu item.

If you wish, you can enable Secure delete by default, doing so will ensure that your documents are shredded everytime you empty the Trash. The downside to doing this is it takes longer to delete the Trash.

Enabling Secure Delete by default is easy. Click the Finder menu and select the Preferences menu item. Select the Advanced icon and check the Empty Trash Securely checkbox.

Common Problems

You can place an item in the Trash that you are currently using. This is fine until you go and empty the Trash. If that happens, OS X will display a dialog box explaining that the file is in use. You can solved this problem by closing whatever program happens to be using the file and try emptying the Trash again.

This installment of Learning OS X shows you how you can turn on and off the various media icons on your desktop. These icons include network shares, hard disk icons, removable disks, CDs, DVDs and iPods.

If you prefer reading over the video then follow these steps.

1. Open the Finder Preferences
   1. Click the Finder menu click Preferences.
2. Then on the Finder preferences dialog, click the General tab.
3. Then, check or un-check the icons you want to appear on the desktop.

As you toggle the checkboxes you will see the icons appear and disappear.

Address Book is an address book for Apple’s Mac OS X. It features various syncing features and integrations into the rest of the OS.

Address Book has two viewing modes: View Card and Column, and View Card Only. The user can switch between modes with a control in the upper-left portion of the window under the close box.

In View Card and Column, the Address Book window is divided into three panes. The first pane has the title Group. This pane lists All, Directories, and each user-made group. Users can add new groups by pulling the File menu down to New Group, or typing Command-Shift-N.

When selecting All or a user-made group, the second column has the title Name. It lists the names of the people with cards in that group, or all the names if the selected group is All, in alphabetical order by first or last name, depending on user preference.

The third pane has the card corresponding to the selected name. The card can include information, some of which the user can classify into customizable categories like Home and Work. Many of the fields can have duplicate entries, for example, if the person the card describes has several email addresses. The user can edit the fields by pressing the edit button below the bottom-left of the third pane. Default fields include:

• Picture
• Name pronunciation
• First name
• Last name
• Job title
• Company
• Phone number
• Email address
• Home page
• Birthday
• Instant messaging username
• Address
• Related Names
• Note

Address Book can search LDAP (network) directories. Users customize these in the LDAP tab of the preferences. Users search these by selecting Directories in the first pane, selecting a directory or All in the second pane, and typing their search in the search box above the top-left of the third pane. Results appear in the third pane.