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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eraZqrw0sIg

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zde66N9z2oA

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.

Updated October 2010 – This used to be a list of my 10 favorite apps, I find I’m using a lot more each day to make my life easier.

After you have time to play around with the applications built into the Mac, you might be wondering what else is out there. Here is my list of essential applications that I use everyday to make my Macbook more productive. Note that this list contains both freeware and commercial software. Some applications just need to be purchased.

• Adium – Free - great cross platform messaging client. I prefer it to iChat because it cleanly manages all my accounts
• Cyberduck – FTP application. If you manage a website you are going to want this program
• Things – an awesome task list application. It’s great if you follow the GTD methodology. I’ve tried dozens of todo list applications and this one is the best
• Screenflick – Commercial – inexpensive screencasting software. I use it to create the videos for this site
• TweetDeck – I’ve dumped Seesmic for Tweet Deck, I like the layout and the support for multiple accounts
• Transmission – Bittorrent client, download content from the Internet, fast.
• VLC – if you download a video using Transmission and you need to play it, this application plays everything
• 1Password – great password manager, integrates with Firefox and Safari to keep all your passwords in a encrypted safe
• LaunchBar – took over the duties of Quicksilver. Quicksilver, you were fun but sadly, you’re not well supported anymore. LaunchBar was endorsed by the original creator of Quicksilver and it rocks. Allows you to drive your Mac without using the mouse. Get, Love it.
• VMWare Fusion – As much as I love OSX, I still occasionally need to run Windows applications. VMWare Fusion is the way to do it.
• Unison – This is a great program for downloading binaries from USENET news groups. It’s really cool because it supports NZB files. If you don’t know what any of this means, check out newzbin.com.
• Mac Office – the king of all office suites. I use it everyday and well, it’s really the best player out there.
• Skitch – This is my new favorite application for taking screen captures. I use it nearly every day.

If you have any favorite Mac applications that you can’t live without, tell us about them.

If you are following along in order, this is the first post you should read.

Welcome to OS X and your Mac Desktop. If you’ve never used a computer before or if you’ve never used a Mac, this post is going to give you a great overview of the pieces of the Mac OS X desktop. It covers some basic concepts and introduces a few terms that will be using over and over again. The entire tutorial should take you about 10 minutes to read through.

Behold, the Mac OS X Desktop in all it’s glory:

Behold! The Mac OS X Desktop

The desktop is broken into a number of sections. We will touch on each of them briefly here and give them deeper treatment in later articles.

Let’s start at the top of the screen.

The Apple Menu

The Apple Menu designated by the Apple symbol is a system wide menu and contains important menu items like Sleep, Restart and Shutdown. If you have your Mac setup for multiple users it also has a Logout Menu. The additional menu items we will touch on in later articles

The Menu Bar

Your interaction with your Mac is through running Applications When you surf the web, check email, view pictures, etc. you are using specific Applications. These applications are like obstinate children, they must be commanded before they will do anything. Commands are given through the use of application menus. When you are running an application, the commands for that application are always placed in the Menu Bar.

The commands are typically laid out in a logical structure so if you learn commands for one application, you will find similar commands for another application in the same place. Since you are currently reading this article on the Internet, you are probably looking at the Menu for Safari. Go ahead and click through some of the menu items. I’ll wait.

Menu Extras or Menulets

To the left of the Menu Bar is an area that holds Menu Extras or as they are affectionately known, “menulets”. Menulets provide quick access to common System Preferences items. They provide both a menu (click on one and you’ll see) and feedback (note the battery indicator in the screenshot). We’ll discuss these more in a later post.

Desktop

Below the menu area is the Mac Desktop. You can do all sorts of cool customizations to the desktop and we’ll get to those later. For now, know that the Desktop like a real desktop can hold things that you use frequently. In the screenshot above, our desktop contains an icon for a Mac Disk Drive. Keep in mind, you can drag any type of file or folder onto the desktop and if you’re not careful could end up with something like this desktop below.

The Dock

The Dock is the strip of icons at the bottom of your screen. The Dock is broken into two areas, the left side holds program icons, the right side holds everything else including folders and the trash can.

The program area of the dock provides you with one click shortcuts to open your favorite programs. You can add and remove programs to the dock by dragging the icons on and off the dock area.

The right side of the dock contains shortcuts to your Documents and Downloads folders. You can drag additional favorite folders into this area. It also houses the trash can where unneeded items go to die.

Summary

This is the end of our brief tour of the Mac OS X Desktop, additional articles will dive into each of these items in more detail.

The Finder is the main application that you will interact with under OS X. This series of articles explores the very basics of the Finder. In this video we will show you how to manipulate the Finder window itself.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_l9r8tFCI

Open a New Window

You can open a new Finder window a number of ways, right click the Finder icon and select New Window, select New Finder Window under the Finder File menu, or pressing Command-N to open a new Window.

Minimize, Zoom, Close

Each Finder Window has three icons a + – and x. These control zooming, minimizing and closing.

I’ve talked about how much I like 1Password, the password manager and automated form filler, before. Now, version 3 is out and it looks to be a great improvement over it’s earlier versions.

The new version of 1Password boasts over 50 new features, some of the highlights include:

• Password Anywhere which lets you securely use a web version of 1Password, storing your keys on an encrypted flash drive.
• A Software license organizer, so you can keep all of those pesky software licenses out of your email and in something secure
• The ability to edit your password items right from your browser
• Tagging to help you keep your passwords organized

All in all, a great looking release with some really cool new features. Do yourself a favor, pickup this software. It will keep your passwords safe and keep you from having to remember them all.

If you are one of the millions of people traveling through airports this holiday season, you are going to get the opportunity to surf the net for free thanks to partnership deals between WiFi providers and Google.

Before you jump on the internet though, you want to make sure your Macbook is protected from others trying to steal your stuff. Follow the instructions in this older post to get your Macbook Firewall configured.