[tweetmeme] The core difference in workflow when switching from Windows to the Mac, is the file manager. It’s called Windows Explorer on Windows, and Finder on the Mac. The Finder does things a little differently from what one is used to on a PC, even though on the surface it’s all just files and folders. I asked a bunch of new Mac users what kind of problems they had with adjusting (along with some searches on Forums), and here’s my view on how best to deal with it. I don’t mean to portray myself as an expert on UNIX and file systems, this is just the way I see things. Experts, feel free to correct me.

Organisational Structure

Starting at the top, there is no C drive to deal with. The Mac mounts logical partitions with their names, right on your desktop. The C drive equivalent here, is the startup disk. Owing to the non existence of a boot table, the Mac can pretty much boot into any logical partition as long as it’s bootable and has an OS loaded. Back to the Finder, ‘Devices’ are shown in a single column right at the top. It will show any hard drive partitions, flash drives, disk images, and network servers. There is a way to get right to the top of the directory structure however—the “My Computer” equivalent—and that’s to hit Cmd+Up right till you hit the “YourName’s Mac” with all your drives listed in the main Finder window. Drag that icon into your Devices, and you can have ready access to every disk, thereby being able to delete any aliases in your sidebar you don’t usually require.

So that’s how partitions are organised at the top level. But what about directory structure? Our family PC is a mess of things. There are a bunch of logical partitions, each of which have folders ‘organised’ for different types of data. This requires the need for having to display huge directory trees, sprawling over even an HD display like maggots. I got a little carried away there, I know. I’ve seen many a switcher store files in the Macintosh HD—their pleas for multiple partitions unanswered by Disk Utility. And that’s the wrong way to go about things. You want to store your files, in your user folder and nowhere else (unless you know what you’re doing). Your user folder is located in your MacHD » Users » YourHomeFolder folder. The Mac comes with folders for Documents, Music, Movies, etc, and while each of these may appear to be you average folders, they provide hooks into other applications which can tap into them. For instance, adding video files into the Movies folder makes them available via Front Row, the media center front end. Stick to the organisational structure provided by OS X, and you’ll be greatly repaid (in kind).

There is one thing I should warn you about, before we move on to anything else. Don’t ever attempt to rename the home folder, as you will end up losing all your data. If you rename it, there won’t be any issues until you restart. OS X will find there’s no home folder of the name in its record, and will create a new folder in place. There are ways to recover your data, but you still don’t want to play around. It’s best to leave it as it is.

Another note about organisation, and that’s about virtual aliases. Unlike aliases, or ‘shortcuts’, these aren’t real existing files, but entries in some database. These reside in your Finder sidebar, your Dock, or even the Finder toolbar (yes, you can Cmd+Drag files and folders there). If you accidentally or purposely move one of the places or devices out of the sidebar, it goes *poof*. The real files and folders will never be affected by this action. To restore any lost devices to the sidebar, either drag it from the desktop, or hit up the Finder preferences (Cmd+,), and uncheck and recheck that type of device in the Sidebar tab.

Navigating Finder

There are four main views in Finder. Thumbnail, which is great for viewing pictures; column, to get a detailed view of your files; column, great for moving around; and Coverflow, the glorified view that presents your files as 3D tiles. If you’re ever in need of serious moving around, I’d suggest switching to the Column view. It allows you to drill deep into folders while still keeping a perspective on where you are. It’s also the best view on smaller displays like a 13″ MacBook. Those with the newer iMacs can definitely afford to splurge on the Coverflow view; it’s gorgeous.

How about moving around? The beauty of the Finder sidebar, is that it’s static. No matter which folder you drill down into, you don’t have to navigate back out to get to your flash drive. This makes the absence of “Cut and Paste” totally forgivable, as drag and drop is definitely the superior way to go about things. In fact, we’ve compiled a whole article with screencast on the awesomeness of Drag and Drop on the Mac.

While you’re in Finder, be sure to make use of one of Leopard’s better innovations—Quick Look. Just hit spacebar on any file, and it will immediately spring out with a preview of its contents. You can expand Quick look with easy to install plugins, as listed on a previous article. You can quick look multiple files, even presenting slideshows without having to open images up in an image viewer.

One major UI change in OS X, is the change in the ‘maximize’ button behavior. In fact, on the Mac it’s called the ‘zoom’ button. Instead of taking up the entire screen and wasting screen space, it resizes itself to take up just enough space to display contents. If you zoom while in the “list” view for instance, it will only resize vertically. Column views resize far more, taking as much horizontal space as required. The only problem with the zoom behavior is that it’s not predictable—at first. Once you get the hang of how exactly it functions, it’s all appreciation. You can however, get ‘maximize’ functionality if you check out these third party apps by Irradiated Software. Here’s a little sidetip for the column view. If you need to resize the width of the column to fit display the complete filenames, double click the little resizer at the bottom of the column divider. If you want all columns to display the complete filenames, Option+Double-click on it.

One important addition in Leopard, is the Path Bar functionality. It’s not enabled by default, but you can turn it on from the menubar at View » Show Path Bar. You can then drag and drop files onto the path bar, almost negating the need for the column view. In fact, I hardly ever move out of the List view. Yes, I think the List view is the best view, and that’s why Apple chose it to go along with Coverflow.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The Enter/Return key shows the biggest, most surprising change in behaviour to Windows users. Instead of opening files as it does on Windows, it triggers the rename-file behavior. I mean, which kind of a stupid entity would do such a thing? There’s more to it than meets the eye. The Mac uses Cmd + the arrow keys to effortlessly navigate through the entire directory structure. Cmd+Down to drill down into folders and, ultimately, open files, while Cmd+Up takes you up a level. The shortcut to delete is Cmd+Delete, so you don’t have to deal with an ‘are you really sure?’ confirmation.

Don’t be harrowed by the ‘extra’ Command key. In general, the Command (⌘) key is crucial to Mac operation. While it seems extraneous at first, it becomes a natural extension to the way you work on the Mac. Cmd+W to close windows, +Q to quit, +H to hide, +1,2,3,4 to switch between Finder views, and so many more. And while I don’t mean to sound fanboyish, its position on the keyboard is far better than Control can ever hope to be. Right beside the spacebar, so the idle thumb pretty much rests on it. And then there’s the myriad uses of the Option key, an article written even before we launched SA.

Shortcomings

There are some shortcomings on the Mac however. First of all, is the lack of ‘currently focussed item’. It rarely affects the user, but it’s very annoying nonetheless. If you’re selecting files with keyboard (Shift/Cmd+Arrow keys), and you accidentally select an extra file in that list, reversing the action doesn’t go back a step but instead starts selecting more files from where you started.

Second, is the lack of separation of folders from files. The only way to have folders show up separate is to arrange by Kind or Size. There is also no ‘list-column’ view like in windows, where you have rows of files in columns. On the Mac you have to scroll down.

It’s just a matter of time

When you’ve switched to the Mac, the only way you’ll get comfortable with it is to go with the flow. Trying to find Windows on OS X will only lead to more pain. To me the Finder is clean, uncluttered, and minimal. It doesn’t want to take up your entire screen, and while it certainly forces you to work in a particular way, at the end of the day the little things make up for all of its shortcomings.

Lastly, if you’re looking for more power, you might want to check out Forklift or PathFinder, both very capable file managers.

[tweetmeme] I’m sure every Mac user (who doesn’t have an irrational adoration for the Gmail web interface) is a Mail user. Apple has created one of the most simple, beautiful, and powerful applications on the Mac. Coupled with a few enhancements, it’s a joy to use Mail. Except when it misbehaves. I’ve had my fair share of problems with Mail, and while it’s better in Snow Leopard, there are still frustrations that come about. Okay it’s not as bad as I make it sound, but if you ever run into trouble with the Mail app, here’s a post that will most probably sort it out for you. Fair warning: beginners only.

Understanding how the Mail Library works.

Because without that understanding, you’re at the mercy of Apple’s ingenuity. Mail stores its database in the ~/Library/Mail folder. This is the folder that contains almost everything, from mailboxes, signatures, rules, etc. If you ever need to move your emails from one Mac to another, this is what you’re looking for. The account settings and other preferences however are stored in the Plist file inside the ~/Library/Preferences folder. It’s easily an easily identifiable “com.apple.mail.plist”. This file contains your account information, account specific settings, as well as general preferences.

Restoring a Mail library

Say you lost everything but the Mail folder from your ~/Library. Painting a grim scenario here, but it happens sometimes. First step, make a backup of that Mail folder, lest it should get overwritten while doing something. Then, launch Mail, and add your accounts in. This makes sure Mail has got its library organised, and is ready to be replaced. Quit Mail. Then, drop the backed up Mail folder into your ~/Library folder, replacing the newly created Mail folder.

The main step here: delete the “Envelope Index”. This file contains all the information of which file goes where, and needs to be reset. Launching Mail the next time will prompt you to upgrade the library, and voila, your emails with all their folders will be ready and waiting.

Restoring just a folder

Occasionally Mail has a habit of crashing on launch. It’s usually if you cancelled out on a large attachment, or something like that. You have a Time Machine backup, but to go back in time you need Mail open. So, navigate into your Mail backups in your Time Machine backup, prior to when this crashing started. Copy the folder in question (inbox, usually), and paste it over the respective folder in your ~/Library.

Restoring your account settings

Say you’re traveling abroad, and need to access your email. However, you have no idea what the settings are, and there’s no access to webmail. Just copy the “com.apple.mail.plist” file from the Library/Preferences folder, and launch Mail. It should load all the settings, and then sync down the mail depending on whether you’ve configured it for POP or IMAP access.

Hopefully that covers the meat of what needs to be covered about the Mail library. If you have any handy Mail troubleshooting tips, don’t hesitate in letting us and our readers know. Next is the big one—the iTunes library. Just a few more tests and I’ll be done with that one as well.

[Header img by Brian Burns]

When Steve Jobs said that Quick look was a plugin based extensible technology, I’m sure no one expected the reaction to be so huge. Well, huge for the area it covers. Right from Day 1, to two years later as Snow Leopard is released, developers have pushed quick look plugins or ‘generators’ for almost any extension under the Macintosh umbrella.

How to Install

It’s a simple matter really. Just dump the .qlgenerator file in your Macintosh HD » Library » Quick Look folder. Once activate the plugins you need to log out and log back in (or just Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu). Some plugins might come with a .pkg installer, so just double click that to start the install wizard.

Moving on to the plugins…

Folder Quick Look Generator

Instead of showing you a boring icon of a folder, this plugin will generate a beautiful list of the contents of any folder your spring out.

BetterZip Plugin

Totally independent of its archiving cousin, this quick look plugin generates a detailed list of all the contents of any zip, rar, or one of the many other supported file formats, in a clean list. It’s surprising this plugin is a free download.

FLV Plugin

Generates a quick look video of any .flv files you may have downloaded from the web. I agree it’s getting less and less relevant these days with all the h264 web video floating around.

Suspicious Package

Normally one doesn’t need to check package contents before installing apps, given that most applications come as drag and drop ‘apps’. However, Suspicious Package will help a lot of suspicious users know what’s inside something they’re about to install. It will also let you know if the package will require an admin password, as well as some other details.

SneakPeek Pro

A brilliant plugin I’ve been using since the day it was released. Basically a must have plugin for Adobe Creative Suite users. SneakPeek Pro will generate detailed quick look views for Illustrator, InDesign, and EPS files, including show you the fonts used in an InDesign document, or the colour palette used in an illustrator document. SneakPeek Pro costs $20 for a license. If you’re looking for a simple solution for Illutrator files, you can get this one. EPS also has a free plugin. InDesign users have no other choice.

BrushView

While you can quick look Photoshop documents by default, this plugin will allow you to get a good view of your brushes. If you’re looking for a more robust solution to managing brushes, do check out Brush Pilot.

Qitorrent

Generates a list of files inside a torrent, as well as any other meta data included in the file.

Webarchive

Handy plugin for looking through Safari webarchive files.

TextMate

There’s in fact two plugins for TextMate. One is for Quick Look within TextMate, while the other is for Quick Look for TextMate files. Either ways, if you’re a TextMate user, you’d want to grab these.

QuickCHM

You hardly come across these help manual files, but when you do, it’s better to refer to them within Quick Look rather than use some half baked CHM file reader.

There aren’t that many Quick Look plugins out there for the average user to install, but that’s only because Apple has already covered most of the file extensions by default. For those specialised application formats like medical scans and Adium chat logs, check out QuickLookPlugins.com which lists out almost all the plugins out there.

Did I miss anything important?

“The Mac doesn’t have the ‘send-to’ contextual menu like in Windows” said someone. Well why would you want that in the first place? I can understand the purpose it serves on Windows, since Windows Explorer pretty much sprawls all your folders and drives into tall scrollbars you wouldn’t otherwise be able to navigate into. The Mac however is so streamlined, that everything is just a little drag and drop away. At all times you can see your volumes, and you can jump into any folder in your hard drive by means of spring loaded folders.

If you’re still carrying old school philosophy of moving around, cut-paste, and whatnot, please go through this little guide and screencast on the awesomeness that is drag and drop. Warning: Beginners only.

Spring Loaded

A user interface enhancement found only in Mac OS X, you can jump into a series of folders just by hovering over them. Try it out. From your desktop without a Finder window open, just drag a file onto one of your hard drive icons. A Finder window will spring out. You can then navigate to any folder on your hard drive just by spring loading. To access spring loaded folder settings, go to Finder » Preferences, where you can adjust the delay for action. Oh, and press Spacebar to immediately spring out the folder.

Managing Files in Finder

• Command+Drag between volumes to “move” (by default Finder copies files between volumes)
• Option+Drag between volumes and folders to “copy” (By default Finder moves files between folders on same volume)
• Cmd+Opt+Drag to create an alias.

This last one’s beautiful. Say you’re working on a file in TextEdit, and you want to save that file on your Flash drive. Instead of locating the file, and then dragging it to your flash drive, simply drag the proxy icon you see in your menubar into the flash drive (or any other folder). Take note that you need to hold Option to switch from just creating an alias to actually.

And while we’re on the Proxy icon, say you want to know where this file is located on your hard drive (maybe you want to make sure you’re working on the right one). Simply Cmd+Click the name in the title bar and a path will drop down showing you where the file is located. You can even click one of the path items to drill down into that folder. There’s a wow moment here as well. Say you’re working on your file in Photoshop, and you accidentally saved it on your desktop. All you have to do is move the file from your desktop to your usual projects folder, and then when you save the file the next time, Photoshop (or any other app) will automatically save to the new location!

Open/Save File Dialogs

Say you’re in Photoshop, and you select “File » Open”. Instead of navigating to the file on your hard drive, you can just drag the file from an already open Finder window or desktop stack into that Open dialog box, and it will switch to that folder giving you access to all the files in it (even selecting the file in question). This is unlike Windows, where the Open/Save dialog boxes behave like normal Explorer windows, and doing such an action would copy the file there instead of changing the file path.

Draggy Dock

The Dock is more than just a strip of icons resting on a 3D plane. It’s actually a treasure trove of drag and drop awesomeness.

• You already knew you could drag certain files onto applications to launch them in that app. But what about arbitrary data? Drag text into TextEdit to create a new document with selected text. You can also drop it onto Mail to create a new mail message.
• Drag stuff into dock, and press spacebar on any icon to bring that application to foreground (even launch it if it’s not open). This spring loaded action is only present in Leopard, should you be running Tiger. With Snow Leopard, you will be able to “Exposé” all of the Windows of an app by doing that actino.
• Drag files onto the dock, and press Cmd+Option to force open it with any application. For instance, you have a text file that you know will open with TextEdit. However, it’s not one of the default recognised files, so TextEdit might not automatically accept that format. Force opening will make sure that the app will try to open anything you feed it.
• To copy an app right from the Dock to any location, you simply start by Cmd+Dragging it out, and then you can create an alias or copy it over to another location by switching to the Option key.

Traversing Safari

• Select a bunch of text, and drag it onto your desktop (or spring load into another folder). Make sure you click and hold the text for a second before moving your mouse or it will create a new selection. You can also drag it to a TextEdit or Mail icon to perform logical functions. Same goes for images.
• If you see a ‘select file’ button, as seen on many image and document uploading sites, simply drag the file from your desktop, stack, or Finder window onto that button to load the file. This doesn’t work on flash based ‘select file’ buttons like the WordPress upload tool.
• Safari by itself is completely drag and drop enabled. Drag links to the bookmarks bar to create new bookmarks. Drag them to the tab bar to create new tabs.
• To download a file instead of opening it in Safari, you can drag a link (from a web page or address bar) into the downloads window. This is really useful if you’ve only got the plain text link to a music or PDF document that you would prefer to download instead of opening it in the browser.
• While we’re on Safari, and this is not exactly a drag-and-drop trick, you can Cmd+Click the title bar of Safari to navigate the path of the site you’re on.

Dragging an image into the “Select file” button on an image uploading site

Random Acts of Dragginess

• Drag the ‘picture’ from a QuickTime movie window to create a snippet of that frame. Unfortunately this is not a PNG or Jpeg, so you will have to do post processing later on. However, it’s a great way to quickly grab screens from a video to sort through later.
• Cmd+Drag default items from menubar. You can also rearrange the icons there. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for third party app icons.
• Cmd+Drag items off a toolbar. You can also move them around. To hide items on toolbar click the grey pill.
• Say you’re working on a report in TextEdit and you want to move that PDF document open in Preview slightly to the left. To do so just Cmd+Drag the background window to move it independently without bring the app to the foreground.
• To set the desktop background, you can open up system preferences, Wallpapers, and then drag in any wallpaper into the thumbnail preview area.
• From the Printer Preferences in your System Preferences, create a new ‘desktop printer shortcut’. Now you can drag any file or text into that icon and it will immediately start printing using default settings. If it’s not a native Mac file, it will open up the application (like Word or Photoshop) and invoke the print dialog.

Changing wallpapers without any hassles

If you don’t understand any of this, or would like to watch a video based tutorial anyway, hit play on the embedded stream below.

About the Screencast

We’ve rendered the video in a higher resolution this time [download], so it weighs in at 40MB. There’s a smaller version at 20MB as well [download], if you so choose. Both videos are not rendered to play on an iPhone. You can of course just subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes, and have these videos trickle down into your library. And lastly, you can also view the screen in less than optimal quality in the YouTube video embedded below.

Direct link to video. Subscribe to SA YouTube Channel

Ever noticed the Library folder inside your Home folder and wonder what it was all about? Time and again, for certain tricks you have to go to specific locations in the library, and you do so without understanding the why and how of it. No not you. I know you are experienced enough to understand what the library folder, which is why I’d suggest you pass up this guide to your newbie Mac friends.

Back to the Library folder, there’s in fact three of them. There’s two systemwide Library folders, one placed inside the Mac HD, and the second one is in the Mac HD » System folder. The third one’s for each user account on the system placed inside the Home folder. I’m going to focus more on the one in the user home folder, as tampering with the one at System level might create havoc in your system.

While Mac applications are single units of functionality, when you first launch an app it creates certain files across your system. The two main places where you will find these files are:

Preferences
Almost every application you launch will create a preference ‘.plist’ file in the Preferences folder, sometimes more than one. This is an XML file which stores your preferences you’ve changed in each application. If for instance you want to make an application behave like it was just launched on your Mac, just delete the respective .plist file and it’ll all go back to square one.

Application Support
If an application needs to store data, not the kind you can carry around, it will create a folder in the Application Support folder. For instance, Things will store its database here, Clipboard managers will store past clips, and FTP clients will store favourites and bookmarks. If you ever need to transfer an application to another Mac and move all that data, these are the folders you need to copy. This folder is also important for troubleshooting apps. For instance, Google Reader in my Eventbox app wasn’t updating. So I just deleted the Google Reader folder from the App Support » Eventbox folder, and everything refreshed just fine.

PreferencePanes
Preference panes are installed on a per user basis, or systemwide. While you can uninstall Preference panes just by right-clicking them in System Preferences and selecting delete, if you want to move them to another system, this is the folder they’re placed in.

Widgets
Similar to Preference Panes, you can also access the widgets that are installed in your system. You can move them from the Home folder to the systemwide preferences to make widgets accessible to every user in the system. You can even use them to backup or share a widget collection, as sometimes the developers stop serving an old widget.

Safari
Whenever you right click on an image in Safari and set it as a desktop background, the original is immediately saved in the Safari folder inside your Library. Sure you can grab it as a screenshot: Cmd+Shift+4 » Spacebar and clicking on the desktop. But this is not the full resolution file that you downloaded as it only grabs till the dimensions of your screen. There’s more goodies in this folder including Bookmarks and History plist files which you otherwise cannot export with Safari’s default feature set.

Mail

Come Snow Leopard, Mail is said to be much improved. I don’t know how much of that is true, so I’ll mention this anyway. Mail app stores its data inside the Mail folder in your library. If it crashes and refuses to start up again, you can just delete this folder. You can even drill down into a specific account and delete only the Inbox folder. It will then retrieve all your Mail again from the server. If you have a Time Machine backup, all you need to do is replace this Mail folder with the one from few days ago and Mail will catch up. Saved me a bunch of times.

There’s of course a whole lot of junk in there you don’t want to know about. Hopefully this little guide will better help you understand how exactly each of these folders affects your Mac. If you have any other tips or suggestions with regard to them folders, do share.

This is probably the least used feature of Mac OS X, and yet it’s present in almost every application you might use. I’m talking about the Services menu of course, tucked in under the application name in your menubar. I must admit, for the longest time, I never really paid much attention to it. At the surface, it seems like something useless (most of the options are greyed out anyway), so why bother? Well, it turns out that the Services menu is so awesome, that you would be a fool not to use it.

Square One

You see that application name right there in the menubar? Finder, Safari, etc? Under that menu is a “Services” flyout menu. Inside you will find a variety of commands that ‘sort of’ make sense. However most of these are greyed out because all services are activated only in context. In TextEdit or any other application with a text input field, select a little text and go to Services » Speech » Start Speaking. Getting the hang of it?

A Multitude of Usage Scenarios

• Compose emails with files attached by selecting a bunch of files in Finder, and then going to Services » Mail » Sent File
• Need to go through a long article quickly? Select the text in Safari, and then go to Services » Summarize to bring down the content.
• Select a word or phrase, and go to Services » Spotlight to create a spotlight search window.
• My favourite: Services » TextEdit » New Window Containing Selection.

Customizing Shortcuts

Why go through all that trouble you must be thinking? Much better to just drag and drop your way around right? Well since the Services menu is a menubar item, you can customise keyboard shortcuts for any command. You can perform any of the service actions by adding keyboard shortcuts using the Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane.

Extending Services

The beauty of the services menu is that it’s highly extensible by third party plugins. Many third party apps like Coda, Things, The Hit List, will automatically add their own menus for executing tasks related to their apps. For instance one can quickly create new tasks in Things by selecting text in Safari and then hitting a shortcut.

There are also some special ‘plugins’ for adding functionality to the menubar.

WordService
Created by Devon Technologies, WordService is a boon for writers and publishers. The plugin adds things like converting to lowercase, changing straight quotes to smart quotes, as well as more advanced commands like ‘Trim Line Endings’, ‘Windows to Mac encoding”. My personal favourite? Remove multiple spaces for all those spacebar happy articles that I come across.

LargeType
This adds a service for displaying any selected text in large type, much like the phone numbers are displayed in the Address Book. Very useful if you want to leave a message like “Don’t Touch Anything!” for the next user.

KavaServices
Costing $25 for a license, KavaServices adds a bunch of (potentially) useful commands like text translation, currency conversion, search engine integration, calculating mathematical expressions, and a whole lot more.

Print Selection
Copy any text from any application, and hit the Print Selection to bring up a dialog box with your text loaded.

Service Scrubber
Not a plugin as much as a full blown applications to reorganise your services. You can disable third party services, customise keyboard shortcuts, and basically give it a much cleaner look.

Adeu

Okay I admit it. Services are less important these days in this Exposé drag and drop world, where everything is controlled by the mouse and being prepped for touch. However there are some interesting uses for them, because at the end of the day, nothing saves time like a bunch of keyboard shortcuts!