Related Titles
Get more expert help in Take Control of...
Take Control of Customizing Leopard
Come up to speed quickly on Leopard's new features!
Apple boasts of 300 new features in Leopard, but to make the most of those features, turn to Matt Neuburg for a road map on how to customize Leopard so it's right for you. Matt shows you how to protect your data with Time Machine, including instructions for searching through previous files with Spotlight. You'll also learn how to peek at files with Quick Look and Cover Flow, use Spaces effectively, and find tips for customizing Leopard's updated sidebar. This title covers important changes in Mac OS X 10.5.2!
More Info
Contents & Intro
FAQ
Reader Comments
Blog
Matt explains numerous other key customizations, including how to use the much-improved Spotlight interface, set Finder windows to open in your desired view, configure Open and Save dialogs, arrange items on your toolbar for quick access, and turn on the new Path Bar. Also covered are how to work with Expose, Dashboard, status menus, login items, Internet helper applications, zooming controls, double-headed scroll arrows, and lots more.
Read this book to learn the answers to questions like:
What are the major new features in Leopard?
How might I change my work habits to get more out of Leopard?
How can I "bind" the Finder to all my spaces?
How do I customize my Time Machine backups?
What's the best way to use Spotlight to find files on my disk?
How can I best work with and configure stacks?
How do I assign keyboard shortcuts to menu items?
Can I turn off or reassign the Caps Lock key?
How do I turn off all those Services in the application menus?
Book Info
143 pages
Version 1.1
Updated 05-Mar-08
1.6 MB download
ISBN: 1933671270
Free sample with Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts.
About the Author
Matt Neuburg is a TidBITS contributing editor and the author of several books about Mac software, including AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, and Frontier: The Definitive Guide. In 2007 he was voted by MacTech readers as one of the 25 most influential people in the Macintosh community. He is the author of the online help for many prominent Mac applications, such as Script Debugger, Opal, and MacSpeech Dictate. He has been programming computers for 40 years, and has written such widely used Mac freeware as MemoryStick and NotLight.
Appendix A: Use AppleScript to Make Every Window Open in List View, No Matter What
About This Book
Read Me First
Every couple of years, Apple plunges its excited users into a new world with a major revision of Mac OS X. This time, it's Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). So, what's new in Leopard? What's all the fuss about? This book shows you, through a hands-on guided tour of the adjustments, tweaks, and customizations you can make in the System and the Finder. This book was written by Matt Neuburg, edited by Tonya Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.
Introduction
Perhaps on the evening of October 26, 2007, you stood in line to obtain one of the first copies of Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard at your local computer store. Or perhaps you were more cautious and waited until you felt Apple had straightened out the initial kinks inevitable in a new operating system release. One way or another, you wound up with a copy of Leopard.
You stayed up late installing it on your Mac; then you fell asleep exhausted. You woke up the next morning excited as a child on Christmas. You rushed to the computer and started it up. You gaped at its new, improved startup speed—even faster than Tiger, and with no "thermometer" dialog! You gasped with amazement at the transparent menu bar! You shivered at the icy look of the shiny, new, reflective Dock! You squealed with delight as you tried the new Search field in Safari! You gawked as you read a TextEdit document directly from the Finder, without opening TextEdit, using Quick Look! You drooled as you played with the Finder's new Cover Flow view!
Now it's the second day. You're finished playing (and tired of all those exclamation marks), and you want to get back to work. You'd like to Take Control. And, in particular, you'd like to take control of how your computer looks and behaves. But where to start? What needs customization, so that things will go smoothly henceforward?
This book covers these second-day-of-Leopard sorts of things. It introduces you to Leopard by showing ways you can customize your computer—ways that were impossible in previous versions of Mac OS X, or that might not be obvious from a casual inspection, or that experience has shown to be worthy of your attention.
Whether you've upgraded from Tiger or switched from Windows, whether you're new to Leopard or you just want to understand it better, this book is your guide to what you can and should customize in Leopard to get the most out of it. I'm not writing for Unix experts, so I don't talk about clever technical hacks; the customizations pointed out here are those that Leopard wants and expects you to perform directly in its normal interface. I do, however, point out areas where Leopard might need a little help from third-party utilities in order for you to work most comfortably and efficiently.
Now let's meet Leopard and make it change its spots!
Quick Start
This book describes many customizations, not all of which you need to employ, and some of which will be more important to you than others. Naturally, I think that sooner or later you should take the time to read this book from start to finish, but I also understand that you're eager to get working with Leopard and that you live a busy life, and that you might want to know what's most important to do right now, and come back to the rest of the book later. So, I suggest a three-stage approach:
Right away, perform the customizations that will immediately improve your Desktop and interface experience.
Learn about the major new technologies and customizations in Leopard, so that you can get the most out of those technologies in your work.
Catch up on the remaining customizations whenever you have time. This makes sense especially for customizations where you can't know what you want to do until you see over time what your own needs and habits are.
Here, then, is how I suggest you customize and learn about Leopard with the help of this book:
Do these things right away:
If you were already using Tiger and would like to prepare yourself mentally to change your work habits to fit the new Leopard environment, read Know What's New.
Check that you installed Leopard correctly, in accordance with what you want it to do for you; read Install Intelligently.
Set up the overall workspace; read Dominate the Dock and Straighten Out Your System Preferences.
Customize your Finder windows so you can navigate easily to important areas of your disks; read Handle the Hierarchy (and possibly Appendix A: Use AppleScript to Make Every Window Open in List View, No Matter What.
Make the pointer—Apple calls it the cursor in this context—easier to see, the screen easier to read, and generally clear the decks so you have a good view of what you're doing; read Ease Your Eyeballs.
Learn more about Leopard:
Make your computer safer and studlier, thanks to Time Machine, a new Leopard feature that makes backups easy as pie; read Preserve the Past with Time Machine.
Discover Spaces, a new Leopard feature for helping you deal with window overload. Also, explore and configure Expose and Dashboard. Read Wash Your Windows.
Simplify your font access and make Leopard run leaner and meaner; read Fix Your Fonts.
Know about Unicode and how to type special characters and symbols in Mac OS X; read Tackle Your Text.
Do these things as needed and when time permits:
Tweak keyboard shortcuts and keyboard behavior to match your needs and habits; read Control the Keyboard, Master the Mouse.
Make effective use of the icons at the right end of your menu bar; read Customize Status Menus.
Make various additional small customizations; read Perform Miscellaneous Configurations.
Be ready to continue exploring customizations; read Find Other Customizations.
Know What's New
If you're familiar with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Leopard presents interesting changes that you may want to take account of as you adjust your work habits to fit the new environment. Not all of these involve customization, so they don't fit into the overall theme of this book. But in order for you, a habituated Tiger user, to work with Leopard effectively, you may have to customize yourself! Here are some of the biggest Leopard changes that may demand a change in your mental orientation (with reference, where appropriate, to later sections of this book):
The menu bar, the Dock, and windows in general all have a new look. This is largely cosmetic, but it might affect your work habits. For example, the menu bar is now transparent, so certain Desktop pictures behind it can make it more difficult to read (see Set Up the Desktop). The Dock's new look is bold and shiny, and I find it distracting; so to me, and perhaps to you also, hiding the Dock is more important than ever (see Dominate the Dock). Also, the way an application's icon in the Dock is marked to indicate that the application is running is much less discernable than in the past, which (to me) reduces the Dock's importance still further.
Downloads are no longer directed by default to the Desktop; instead, they go to a new Downloads folder in your Home directory. This will help keep the Desktop clutter-free, which is a good thing (see Set Up the Desktop).
A folder in the Dock, if that folder contains any items, is now a stack. A stack's icon in the Dock changes depending on what's in the corresponding folder. When you click a stack, its top-level contents are displayed in a temporary window. Unlike Dock folders in earlier versions of Mac OS X, you can't hold the mouse down on a stack to see a hierarchical menu of the folder's contents, and clicking a stack doesn't directly open that folder. If you don't like the behavior of stacks in the Dock, use of the Finder's sidebar and toolbar for rapid navigation to frequently used folders becomes even more important as a Dock alternative than in the past (see Customize Your Sidebar and Customize Your Toolbar, as well as Adopt a Launcher).
A pervasive feature of Leopard, mostly in the Finder but with implications for other parts of the interface as well, is Quick Look, which displays a large full-length preview of a file's contents without actually opening the document in its associated program. To display the Quick Look view of an item or multiple items selected in the Finder, press Space or Command-Y. Experiment with Quick Look, as it may have valuable implications for exploring files you are thinking of opening, for playing sound files, and for displaying pictures; Quick Look replaces the Tiger "Slideshow" feature of the Finder (see Peek With Quick Look and Cover Flow).
The Finder boasts a new view of a folder's contents, Cover Flow view. You should experiment with this to see how it might be useful to you (see Peek With Quick Look and Cover Flow).
The Finder's sidebar has a new look and boasts some new features. (Among other things, the Network sidebar entry has been replaced by the Shared sidebar region, and some Spotlight searches are included automatically.) This may take some getting used to, and makes it more important than ever to take advantage of your ability to customize the sidebar (see Customize Your Sidebar).
The Spotlight interface has been heavily revised. The Tiger Spotlight window (summoned, by default, with Command-Option-Space), which had a curious, system-wide status, belonging to no application and not listed in any application's Window menu, has been abandoned; it is replaced by the Finder search window, which now provides access to all kinds of Spotlight search (not just files and folders). See Understand Spotlight.
Individual applications now have a Search menu item in their Help menu. This makes it quicker to search the application's Help topics. Observe that Help Viewer no longer appears as a separate application; rather, it's a window floating over everything else on the screen, which unfortunately means that on a small screen you can't read an application's Help and get any other work done at the same time. One nice touch is that an application's Help menu search field can be used to find interface elements of that application, such as menu items; when you select such an element in the found results, you are shown its location in the interface.
To assist with management of the numerous open windows that can easily accumulate as you're working, there is now, in addition to Expose (which was introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther), a splendid new virtual desktop feature, Spaces (see Set Up Spaces in the Wash Your Windows section).
An ingenious new utility, Time Machine, makes it simple to save incremental "snapshots" of the entire contents of your hard disk. Now you have no excuse for not keeping backups (see Preserve the Past with Time Machine)!
In Dashboard, the new Widgets widget allows a modicum of widget management, permitting you to disable and enable installed widgets (see Customize Dashboard).
The Network, Sharing, and Print & Fax preference panes have been heavily reorganized, and the Internet Connect and Printer Setup Utility applications are abandoned.
In general, Leopard's interface takes more advantage of animation than in the past. For example, several applications, including TextEdit and Safari, use an animated form of highlighting to call the user's attention to the stretch of text that is currently selected as the result of a search.
Integration and shared functionality between Apple's own applications is enhanced. For example, Time Machine works inside Mail, To Do items are shared between iCal and Mail, Safari makes Dashboard widgets, both Safari and Mail can display RSS, and so forth.
There's a new, high-quality male text-to-speech voice, Alex.
Leopard has a new, automatically created Guest account; modi�fications to this account are deleted at logout time, making it perfectly suitable for temporary use by, uh, guests.
I have an old version of this ebook, but what I want is the 1.1 update. How do I get it?
Start by opening up the "Customizing Leopard" PDF that you do have, in Apple's Preview or Adobe Reader, for instance. Then, look on page 1—that's the "cover" page that also has the table of contents on it. Look at the upper right. You should see a Check for Updates link. Click it. From there, you can:
Download version 1.1.
See any recent comments from the author, or the publisher, about the topic.
Sign up to get an email message should any new PDFs be available in the future.
If your button won't click, you likely have the wrong "tool" chosen for your mouse. If you have trouble selecting a different tool, consult the _TidBITS_ article Solve Link-Clicking Problems When Reading PDFs
Ask a Question
Feel free to ask us if you have a question about this book!
Shane McRae writes:
My son, who has been a TidBITS fan for many years, highly recommended that I buy Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard and Take Control of Customizing Leopard. So I have him and you to thank. I have spent the whole weekend reading both ebooks and tweaking the computer as suggested. As a result I have a friendlier computer, I understand it better, I've had a number of "Wow!" moments, and it will be quicker to use. Thanks to all of you who made this possible.
Send Us Your Comments!
How could we not publish such kind words? If you'd like to send us your comments (good or bad, though we hope they're all good), just click the Feedback link on the cover of your copy of the ebook. Be sure to let us know if we can publish your comment. Thanks!
Update Plans
August 2009 -- We have no plans to update the Leopard edition of this book, but a new edition about Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is available. The new edition has an expanded scope—it continues to discuss customizing the Finder while going a little further with helping you explore the features. Hence, the new title is Take Control of Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard.
Apple has publicly acknowledged a rare but nasty data-destroying bug related to using the Guest account in Snow Leopard. The bug appears to be associated with having a Guest account already set up before you upgrade to Snow Leopard. While there is currently no fix available, we hope to see one in 10.6.2. To learn more, check out my TidBITS article, Apple Acknowledges Guest Account Data Loss Bug. [This bug was fixed in 10.6.2.]
In the switch to Mac OS X, what's the worst change, overall, that Apple made to the interface? It's clickthrough. At long last, there's a utility that blocks it. Matt Neuburg, author of Take Control of Customizing Leopard, takes a look at Klicko in his TidBITS article Fix Your Clicks With Klicko.
Unsatisfied with Leopard's standard screensaver selection? Fear not! There's a whole world of interesting screensavers out there, ready to customize and enliven your idle screen. I went searching for the best screensavers I could find, and reported back on my favorite ones in the TidBITS article Top 10 Screensavers for the 21st Century. Enjoy!
I recently received an email message asking, "Does your new ebook about customizing Leopard show how to increase the size of the icons in the Finder sidebar? Thanks." Unfortunately, as far as Matt (and I) can figure out, there is no way to increase the size of the icons or of the text. However, if a way of customizing them does come along, we'll certainly want to mention it here and in any future versions of the ebook.
Matt recently did a podcasting session with Chuck Joiner from MacNotables. Listen to this podcast to get more Leopard advice and to hear Matt's take on several topics covered in this ebook
