Mac OS X Leopard Course

Welcome to Mac OS X Leopard, version 10.5 with the operating system. It's now almost a decade since Mac OS X was first released and it was several years before that, that we first got our hands on the developer preview of Mac OS X. In those years it's changed enormously as has the world and as have computers. We have much, much more powerful computers than we had then. We have much more connectivity. We have much more wireless and we have new ways of dealing with computers and the things that we do with them. And Leopard provides a way to do all of the things that we've always wanted to do as well as new things. I will be pointing out some of the differences between Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, but I am also going to be showing you Leopard as if you had never seen it before because some of you have never seen Mac OS X before or have never used it. So what we're going to try and do is look at Leopard and I will highlight things that are new and different. The first thing that's new and different is the desktop image that you see by default. It's an aurora. There are a lot of space images through out Leopard. We seem to be in the era of space in the operating system and it actually is not just a casual choice. By talking about space and bringing a great deal of translucency and three dimensionality to the operating system, Apple has been able to provide a way of organizing information that goes far beyond what we ever were able to do before and I'll show you a few of those things right now. First of all, at the bottom of the window we have the dock. We always had a dock which is by default at the bottom of the window, which has icons for the applications that you've placed in the dock as well as an indicator under each one that it's running. This little dot here means that the finder is running. If I were to launch another application it would show up in the dock with a dot underneath it. Over here at the right are files and folders that I can place in the dock. When I place a folder in the dock now, something new happens. If I have a documents folder here in the dock and I click on it once it opens up. This is a stack of the documents within it and if there are a small number of documents inside that folder or stack they will be displayed like this, in a sort of arc fashion. If there are more than will be displayed easily here, then you get a grid view of them. I can go into the finder and show this stack, this folder in the finder; just by clicking here and there I have the window. And I'm going to click on the downloads stack because I want to show you a couple of things here that are easier to demonstrate against this white background. Notice here that I've got some shading here. We have more shadows then ever before and this translucency that we've always had in Mac OS X is much more pervasive in the operating system for a good reason, because it helps to organize data. I have the same basic folder view that I can see in the finder. I can see individual files and folders in it. I can look at it in icon view, and let me go back to my desktop and to my account, there we are, and here are the folders, the default folders created for this account. What I've done now is to create a new account within Mac OS X Leopard and I've put a few files and folders into it but basically this is what you get when you first create an account in Leopard. Now there are several ways in which you can get started in Leopard. One is by buying a new Mac and it will be installed but you'll be walked through the process of setting up your own account on Leopard. You are also prompted to see if you want to transfer data from an existing computer onto your new computer. If you have a computer and you upgrade to Leopard, then you have the choice of maintaining your account settings, files and folders and so forth and they will be brought forward. What we're looking at here is the environment that you get when you create a brand new account and as the tutorial goes on I will be adding files and folders to it. It will become bigger and bigger with more and more data in it. But I thought we'd start from something fairly simple. If you used Mac OS X before, you can notice that the icons in the basic account are a little different and they're different for a reason, which is that we have some new ways of looking at them. We can look at them in icon view. We can look at them in a list view where I can open each one and see other information about it. We can go into column view where I can see information about the documents in columns. And this is a new icon up here. This is for cover flow. Cover flow opens that folder that I was in and I see images of them and I'm moving my hand along a track pad. It would work also with a mouse. I can look through the documents or the images and here I have a pdf file. You notice I have the image of the pdf file and when I hover over it I have arrows and I can actually page through the pdf file and there are many, many formats that cover view can look at. And if you're looking through images, it's very, very quick to find one this way. Up here I have another icon here for quick look. And what quick look lets me do is to select either here or down here a document and to look inside it, inside this dark framed window. Notice here I'm moving it, you can see the image behind it. This is what the translucency is all about, putting more data than will fit in one particular area of the screen by letting you see behind it. Normally if you put a piece of paper on top of another one on your desk you can't see what's behind it. Here by choosing the right amount of translucency what Apple lets us do is to be able to very clearly see the top, but to see through it where it's appropriate to see through it. So these are some of the new features that you'll see as you start to explore the finder. But there's more and now I'm going to show you something, another very exciting feature of Leopard that you haven't seen before in the operating system.