In short, all the Application menu’s commands actually pertain to the application you’re using. The commands in this Application menu include About (which indicates what version of the program you’re using), Preferences, and Quit, as well as commands like Hide Others and Show All (which control window clutter, as described on “Hiding All Other Programs”).

The first menu in every program, which appears in bold lettering, tells you at a glance what program you’re in (Safari, Microsoft Word, whatever). MacOS menus stay open until you click the mouse, trigger a command from the keyboard, or buy a new computer, whichever comes first.

Details on how to turn on this feature are on “Exposé”.Įvery popular operating system saves space by concealing its most important commands in menus that drop down. If you have a trackpad, you can view miniatures of all open windows in a program by pointing to its Dock icon and then swiping down with three fingers. A shortcut menu of useful commands pops right out. To see the menu, hold the mouse button down on a Dock icon-or right-click or two-finger click it. See Figure 4-2 for more on stacks.Įach Dock icon sprouts a pop-up menu. When you click a folder’s icon, you get a stack-an arcing row of icons, or a grid of them, that indicates what’s inside. When you click a program’s icon, a tiny black dot appears under it to let you know it’s open. Remove a Dock icon by dragging it away from the Dock.Ĭlick something once to open it. You can add a new icon to the Dock by dragging it there. Everything else goes on the right, including documents, folders, and disks. The icons of recently used programs live in the middle. They appear to rest on a sheet of transparent, smoked glass. This translucent row of colorful icons ( Figure 1-2, bottom) is a launcher for the programs, files, folders, and disks you use often-and an indicator to let you know which programs are already open.

Change default folder color mac