Hardware on the Mac - Making the Move - Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition (2014)

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition (2014)

Part II. Making the Move

Chapter 9. Hardware on the Mac

Most of the discussion in this book so far has covered software—not only the OS X operating system that may be new to you, but also the programs and documents you’ll be using on it. But there’s more to life with a computer than software. This chapter covers the finer points of using Macintosh-compatible printers, cameras, disks, monitors, and keyboards.

Mac Meets Printer

Printing has always been one of the Mac’s strong suits—and you’re about to find out why.

Setting Up a Printer

Setting up a printer is incredibly easy. The first time you want to print something, follow this guide:

1. Connect the printer to the Mac, and then turn the printer on.

Inkjet printers connect to your USB jack. Laser printers hook up either to your USB jack or to your network (Ethernet or wireless).

2. Open the document you want to print. Choose FilePrint. In the Print dialog box, choose your printer’s name from the Printer pop-up menu (or one of its submenus, if any, like Nearby Printers). See Figure 9-1.

Cool! Wasn’t that easy? Very nice how the Mac autodiscovers, autoconfigures, and autolists almost any USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, or Bonjour printer.

Have a nice afternoon. The End.

Oh—unless your printer isn’t listed in the Printer pop-up menu. In that case, read on.

NOTE

“Nearby Printers” refers to printers that aren’t connected directly to your Mac but are accessible anyway: a printer connected to an Apple Time Capsule or an AirPort base station, certain network printers that speak Bonjour, or printers connected to other Macs you’ve shared, as described later in this chapter.

3. From the Printer pop-up menu (Figure 9-1, top), choose Add Printer.

A special setup window opens (Figure 9-1, bottom), which is even better at autodetecting printers available to your Mac. If you see the printer’s name here, then click it and then click Add.

Top: To introduce your Mac to a new printer, try to print something. If you have a USB printer or a “nearby” one, it’s probably listed here already. Off you go.If your printer isn’t listed, then choose Add Printer from this pop-up menu.Bottom: Your Mac should automatically “see” any printers that are hooked up and turned on. Click the one you want, and then click Add.

Figure 9-1. Top: To introduce your Mac to a new printer, try to print something. If you have a USB printer or a “nearby” one, it’s probably listed here already. Off you go. If your printer isn’t listed, then choose Add Printer from this pop-up menu. Bottom: Your Mac should automatically “see” any printers that are hooked up and turned on. Click the one you want, and then click Add.

You’re all set. Have a good time.

Unless, of course, your printer still isn’t showing up. Proceed to step 4.

4. Click the icon for the kind of printer you have: Default, IP, or Windows.

Default usually does the trick, especially if you have an inkjet printer. Choose IP if you have a network printer that’s not showing up in Default—especially if you have an old AppleTalk printer. And choose Windows if there’s a Windows-only printer out there on your office network.

After a moment, the names of any printers that are turned on and connected appear in the printer list. For most people, that means only one printer—but one is enough.

5. Click the name of the printer you want to use.

As an optional step, you can open the Print Using pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog box. Choose “Select a driver to use,” and then, in the list that appears, choose your particular printer’s model name, if you can find it. That’s how your Mac knows what printing features to offer you when the time comes: double-sided, legal size, second paper tray, and so on.

6. Click Add.

After a moment, you return to the main Printer Browser window (Figure 9-1, top), where your printer now appears. You’re ready to print.

NOTE

If you still don’t see your printer’s name show up, ask yourself: Is my Mac on a corporate network? Does the network have an LPR (Line Printer Remote) printer? If you and your company’s network nerd determine that the printer you want to use is, in fact, an LPR printer, then click IP Printing at the top of the Printer Browser dialog box. Fill in the appropriate IP address and other settings, as directed by your cheerful network administrator.

Printer Preferences

If you’re lucky enough to own several printers, then repeat the steps above for each one. Eventually, you’ll have introduced the Mac to all the printers available to it, so all their names show up in the printer list.

To see the printer list so far, open System Preferences→Print & Scan. You can have all kinds of fun here (Figure 9-2):

§ Choose a default printer. As indicated by the Default Printer pop-up menu, OS X intends, conveniently enough, to use whichever printer you used for the last printout for the next one. Most people, after all, don’t switch printers much.

Still, you can choose one particular printer from this pop-up menu to set it as the default printer—the one the Mac uses unless you intervene by choosing from the Printer pop-up menu in the Print dialog box (Figure 9-1).

§ Create desktop printer icons. This handy, little-known feature gives you drag-and-drop access to your printers.

From the Print & Scan pane of System Preferences, just drag a printer’s icon out of the window and onto the desktop (or wherever you like). Repeat for your other printers. From now on, you can print a document on a certain printer just by dragging the document’s icon onto the appropriate printer icon.

§ Check the ink level. Click a printer, and then click Options & Supplies, to see how your inkjet ink or laser-printer toner level is. That way, you won’t be caught short when you’re on a deadline and your printer is out of ink. You now get a bright yellow “low ink” warning in the dialog box that actually appears when you print.

You know that stuff you read about earlier? Setting up printers from the Print dialog box? You can do the same work here. Click the button below the left-side list.

Figure 9-2. You know that stuff you read about earlier? Setting up printers from the Print dialog box? You can do the same work here. Click the button below the left-side list.

Making the Printout

You can’t miss the Print dialog box. It appears, like it or not, whenever you choose File→Print in one of your programs.

The options you encounter depend on the printer you’re using. They also depend on whether or not you expand the dialog box by clicking the Show Details button. That reveals a lot of useful options, including a handy preview; see Figure 9-3.

If you expand the box, the choices you find vary by printer. But here are the common options:

§ Printer. If you have more than one printer connected to your Mac, then you can indicate which one you want to use for a particular printout by choosing its name from this pop-up menu.

§ Presets. Here’s a way to preserve your favorite print settings: Once you’ve proceeded through this dialog box, specifying the number of copies, which printer trays you want the paper taken from, and so on, you can choose Save As from the pop-up menu and then assign your settings set a name (like “Borderless, 2 copies”). Thereafter, you’ll be able to recreate that elaborate suite of settings simply by choosing its name from this pop-up menu.

Bottom: Most of the time, all you want is one darned copy of what’s on your screen. So the standard Print dialog box is spartan indeed: You get a preview that you can page through, page controls, and a Print button.Top: But when you expand the box by clicking Show Details, you get a new world of options. You can specify which orientation you want for the printout, how much you want it reduced or magnified, and so on. On the Layout pane, you can save paper by choosing a higher number from the Pages per Sheet pop-up menu.

Figure 9-3. Bottom: Most of the time, all you want is one darned copy of what’s on your screen. So the standard Print dialog box is spartan indeed: You get a preview that you can page through, page controls, and a Print button. Top: But when you expand the box by clicking Show Details, you get a new world of options. You can specify which orientation you want for the printout, how much you want it reduced or magnified, and so on. On the Layout pane, you can save paper by choosing a higher number from the Pages per Sheet pop-up menu.

§ Copies. Type the number of copies you want printed. The Collated checkbox controls the printing order for the various pages. For example, if you print two copies of a three-page document, the Mac generally prints the pages in this order: 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. If you turn off Collated, on the other hand, it prints in this order: 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3.

§ Pages. You don’t have to print an entire document—you can print, say, only pages 2 through 15.

TIP

You don’t have to type numbers into both the From and To boxes. If you leave the first box blank, then the Mac assumes you mean “from page 1.” If you leave the second box blank, then the Mac understands that you mean “to the end.” To print only the first three pages, in other words, leave the first box blank and type “3” into the second box. (These page numbers refer to the physical pages you’re printing, not to any fancy numbering you’ve set up in your word processor. As far as the Print dialog box is concerned, the first printed page is page 1, even if you’ve told your word processor to label it “page 455.”)

§ Paper Size, Orientation. Somebody at Apple finally realized how frustrating it was to have to open the Page Setup dialog box to change the paper-size and orientation settings and then open the Print dialog box for other settings. Now, in most programs, these controls are duplicated right in the Print dialog box for your convenience.

§ PDF. A PDF file, of course, is an Adobe Reader (Acrobat) document—a file that any Mac, Windows, Linux, or Unix user can view, read, and print using either Preview or the free Adobe Reader (included with every PC and Mac operating system).

You can easily save any document as a PDF file instead of printing it—a truly beautiful feature that saves paper, ink, and time. The document remains on your hard drive, and the text inside is even searchable using Spotlight.

And that’s just the beginning. Apple has added a long list of additional PDF options (like password-protected PDFs, emailed ones, and so on). But Apple faced a design quandary: How could it offer a new list of PDF-related options without junking up the Print dialog box?

Its solution was a strange little item called a pop-up button, shown in Figure 9-3, bottom. Use this PDF button like a pop-up menu. The command you’ll use most often is probably Save as PDF, which turns the printout into a PDF file instead of sending it to the printer. For details on the other PDF options here, see Opening PDF Files.

If you examine the unnamed pop-up menu just below the Presets pop-up menu, you’ll find dozens of additional options. They depend on your printer model and the program you’re using at the moment, but here are some typical choices:

§ Layout. As described in Figure 9-3, you can save paper and ink or toner cartridges by printing several miniature “pages” on a single sheet of paper.

§ Paper Handling. You can opt to print your pages in reverse order so they stack correctly, or you can print just odd or even pages so you can run them through again for double-sided printing.

§ Paper Feed. If you chose the correct printer model when setting up your printer, then this screen “knows about” your printer’s various paper trays. Here’s where you specify which pages you want to come from which paper tray. (By far the most popular use for this feature is printing the first page of a letter on company letterhead and the following pages on blank paper from a second tray.)

§ Cover Page. Yes, that throwaway info page has made its way from the fax world into the hard-copy world.

§ Scheduler. This option lets you specify when you want your document to print. If you’re a freelancer, sitting at home with an inkjet on your desk, you might not immediately grasp why anyone wouldn’t want the printouts right now. But try printing a 400-page catalog in a big office where other people on the network might conceivably resent you for tying up the laser printer all afternoon, and you’ll get the idea.

§ ColorSync. Most color printers offer this panel, where you can adjust the color settings—to add a little more red, perhaps. This is also where you indicate whose color-matching system you want to use: Apple’s ColorSync, your printer manufacturer’s, or none at all.

Then, below the light-gray line in this pop-up menu, you’ll find a few options that are unique to the chosen printer or program. Some HP printers, for example, offer Cover Page, Finishing, and other choices. Other likely guest commands:

§ Quality & Media (inkjet printers only). Here’s where you specify the print quality you want, the kind of paper you’re printing on, and so on. (The name of this panel varies by manufacturer.)

§ [Program Name]. Whichever program you’re using—Mail, Word, Pages, or anything else—may offer its own special printing options on this screen.

§ Summary. This command summons a text summary of all your settings so far.

TIP

Here’s one for the technically inclined. Open your Web browser and enter this address: http://127.0.0.1:631. You find yourself at a secret “front end” for CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), the underlying printing technology for OS X. This trick lets your Mac communicate with a huge array of older printers that don’t yet have OS X drivers. Using this administration screen, you can print a test page, stop your printer in its tracks, manage your networked printers and print jobs, and more—a very slick trick.

Printing

When all your settings look good, click Print (or press Return) to send your document to the printer.

Managing Printouts

After you’ve used the Print command, you can either sit there until the paper emerges from the printer, or you can manage the printouts-in-waiting. That option is attractive primarily to people who do a lot of printing, have connections to a lot of printers, or share printers with many other people.

Start by opening the printer’s window. If you’re already in the process of printing, just click the printer’s Dock icon. If not, open →System Preferences→Print & Scan, click the printer’s name, and then click Open Print Queue.

At this point, you see something like Figure 9-4: The printouts that will soon be sliding out of your printer appear in a tidy list.

Waiting printouts appear in this window. You can sort the list by clicking the column headings (Name or Status), make the columns wider or narrower by dragging the column-heading dividers horizontally, or reverse the sorting order by clicking the column name a second time. The Supply Levels button opens a graph that shows how much ink each cartridge has remaining (certain printer models only).

Figure 9-4. Waiting printouts appear in this window. You can sort the list by clicking the column headings (Name or Status), make the columns wider or narrower by dragging the column-heading dividers horizontally, or reverse the sorting order by clicking the column name a second time. The Supply Levels button opens a graph that shows how much ink each cartridge has remaining (certain printer models only).

Here are some of the ways in which you can control these waiting printouts, which Apple collectively calls the print queue:

§ Delete them. By clicking an icon, or ⌘-clicking several, and then clicking the Delete toolbar button, you remove items from the list of waiting printouts. Now they won’t print.

§ Pause them. By highlighting a printout and then clicking the Hold button, you pause that printout. It doesn’t print out until you highlight it again and then click the Resume button. (Other documents continue to print.) This pausing business could be useful when, for example, you need time to check or refill the printer, or when you’re just about to print your letter of resignation as your boss drops by. (Maybe to offer you a promotion.)

§ Halt them all. You can stop all printouts from a printer by clicking Pause Printer. (They resume when you click the button again, which now says Resume Printer.)

You can’t rearrange printouts by dragging them in the queue list. But remember that you can resequence the printing order by choosing the Scheduler option; you can also drag waiting printouts between these lists, shifting them from one printer to another.

TIP

As you now know, the icon for a printer’s queue window appears automatically in the Dock when you print. But it also stays in the Dock for the rest of the day; it doesn’t disappear when the printing is complete.

If you wish it would, right-click the printer’s Dock icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Auto Quit.

Printer Sharing

Printer sharing is for people (or offices) with more than one Mac, connected to a network, who’d rather not buy a separate printer for each machine. Instead, you connect the printer to one Mac, flip a couple of software switches, and then boom: The other Macs on the network can send theirprintouts to the printer without actually being attached to it—even wirelessly, if they’re on a WiFi network.

NOTE

Of course, this feature is most useful when you’re sharing printers that can hook up to only one Mac at a time, like USB inkjet photo printers. Office laser printers are often designed to be networked from Day One.

Setting up printer sharing is easy; see Figure 9-5, top. Then, to make a printout from across the network, see the instructions in Figure 9-5, bottom.

Top: On the Mac with the printer, open the Sharing panel of System Preferences. Turn on Printer Sharing, and then turn on the checkboxes for the printers you want to share. Switch to the Print & Scan pane, and turn on “Share this printer on the network” for the printer(s) you want to share.Bottom: To use a shared printer elsewhere on the network, open the document you want to print, and then choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, the shared printer is clearly identified under the Nearby Printers heading.

Figure 9-5. Top: On the Mac with the printer, open the Sharing panel of System Preferences. Turn on Printer Sharing, and then turn on the checkboxes for the printers you want to share. Switch to the Print & Scan pane, and turn on “Share this printer on the network” for the printer(s) you want to share. Bottom: To use a shared printer elsewhere on the network, open the document you want to print, and then choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, the shared printer is clearly identified under the Nearby Printers heading.

TIP

You can control which account holders on your network are allowed to use the printer you’ve shared. You know that idiot in Accounting who’s always using up your cartridges by printing 200-page documents? Cut that sucker off! Just add the lucky guests’ names to the Users column in System Preferences→Sharing→Printer Sharing, as shown in Figure 9-5.

If your PC-wielding friends install Bonjour for Windows (a free download from this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com), they can even print to your Mac’s shared printer, too.

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Of course, your Mac (the one attached to the printer) must be turned on in order for the other computers to print. In part, that’s because the documents-in-waiting from other people pile up on your hard drive.

Faxing

Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away. And Apple hath taken away faxing.

Apple has never been afraid to abandon technologies that strike it as obsolete, and faxing is one of them. Heck, OS X can’t even fax if you have one of Apple’s own USB fax modems.

If you still need to fax, you have a couple of options. First, you can sign up for a service like eFax or Faxaway, which let you send and receive faxes online. Second, you’re welcome to buy a non-Apple fax modem, some of which work fine. Whatever you buy comes with its own software and instructions.

PDF Files

Sooner or later, almost everyone with a personal computer encounters PDF (portable document format) files. Many a software manual, Read Me file, and downloadable “white paper” comes in this format. Until recently, you needed the free program called Adobe Reader if you hoped to open or print these files. Windows devotees still do.

PDF files, however, are one of OS X’s common forms of currency. In fact, you can turn any document (in any program with a Print command) into a PDF file—a trick that once required the $250 program called Adobe Acrobat Distiller. (Maybe Apple should advertise: “Buy Acrobat for $250, get OS X free—and $120 cash back!”)

NOTE

All right, that joke about Acrobat is an exaggeration. OS X alone creates screen-optimized PDF files: compact, easy-to-email files that look good onscreen but don’t have high enough resolution for professional printing. For high-end purposes and more optimization for specific uses (Web, fancy press machines, and so on), you still need a program like Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, or InDesign.

But why would you want to create PDFs? What’s the big deal about them? Consider these advantages:

§ Other people see your layout. When you distribute PDF files, the recipients see the same fonts, colors, page design, and other elements you put in your original document. They get to see all of this even if they don’t have the fonts or the software you used to create the document. (Contrast with the alternative: Say you’re sending somebody a Microsoft Word document. If your correspondent doesn’t have precisely the same fonts you have, he’ll see a screwy layout. And if he doesn’t have Word or a program that can open Word files, he’ll see nothing at all.)

§ It’s universal. PDF files are very common in the Macintosh, Windows, Unix/Linux, and even smartphone worlds. When you create a PDF file, you can distribute it (by email, for example) without worrying about what kinds of computers your correspondents are using.

§ It has very high resolution. PDF files print at the maximum quality of any printer. A PDF file prints great both on cheapo inkjets and on high-quality image-setting gear at professional print shops.

§ You can search it. A PDF file may look like a captured graphic, but behind the scenes, its text is still text; Spotlight can find a word in a PDF haystack in a matter of seconds. That’s an especially handy feature when you work with electronic software manuals in PDF format.

Opening PDF Files

There’s nothing to opening a PDF file: Just double-click it. Preview opens the PDF file on your screen. (Or highlight its icon in the Finder and tap the space bar for a Quick Look at it.)

Creating PDF Files

Opening, schmopening—what’s really exciting in OS X is the ability to create your own PDF files. The easiest way is to click the PDF pop-up button in the standard Print dialog box (Figure 9-6). When you click it, you’re offered a world of interesting PDF-creation possibilities:

§ Open PDF in Preview lets you convert whatever document you’re on the verge of printing into a frozen PDF file that opens into Preview for your inspection. The point here is that you can have a look at it before you print it.

The PDF button is crawling with neat ways to process a document while it’s still open—and you can add to this pop-up button’s list, too. For example, if you’re code-inclined, you can create even more elaborate pathways for documents you want to print or convert to PDF using an Automator workflow.

Figure 9-6. The PDF button is crawling with neat ways to process a document while it’s still open—and you can add to this pop-up button’s list, too. For example, if you’re code-inclined, you can create even more elaborate pathways for documents you want to print or convert to PDF using an Automator workflow.

§ Save as PDF saves your document to the disk as a PDF document instead of printing it.

§ Save as PostScript gives you a PostScript file instead of a PDF. (PostScript is a format preferred by some designers and print shops. It consists of highly precise “what to draw” instructions for PostScript laser printers.)

§ Fax PDF faxes a document instead of printing it, in the unlikely event that you have a Mavericks-compatible fax modem.

§ Add PDF to iTunes converts the document into a PDF file and stores it in, of all places, iTunes. (Yes, iTunes can manage PDF documents.)

§ Mail PDF generates a PDF file and then attaches it to an outgoing message in Mail. Great for exchanging layout-intensive documents with collaborators who don’t have the same fonts, layout software, or taste as you.

§ Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder is one of the simplest and sweetest features in all of OS X.

You use it when you’ve just ordered something on a Web site, and the “Print this receipt” screen is staring you in the face. Don’t waste paper and ink (and, later, time trying to find it!). Instead, use this command. You get a perfectly usable PDF version, stored in your Home→Documents→Web Receipts folder, where you can use Spotlight to find it later, when you need to consult or print it because your gray-market goods never arrived.

NOTE

You may see other commands here, too, as you install other companies’ software programs.

Fonts—and Font Book

OS X type is all smooth, all the time. Fonts in OS X’s formats—called TrueType, PostScript Type 1, and OpenType—always look smooth onscreen and in printouts, no matter what the point size.

OS X also comes with a program that’s just for installing, removing, inspecting, and organizing fonts. It’s called Font Book (Figure 9-7), and it’s in your Applications folder.

Where Fonts Live

Brace yourself. In OS X, there are three Fonts folders. The fonts you actually see listed in the Font menus and Font panels of your programs are combinations of these Fonts folders’ contents.

Here’s a rundown:

§ Your private fonts (your Home folderLibraryFonts). This Fonts folder sits right inside your own Home folder. You’re free to add your own custom fonts to this folder. Go wild—it’s your font collection and yours alone. Nobody else who uses the Mac can use these fonts; they’ll never even know you have them.

NOTE

Your Home→Library folder is ordinarily hidden. The quickest way to see it is to press Option as you choose Go→Library in the Finder.

§ Main font collection (LibraryFonts). Any fonts in this folder are available to everyone to use in every program. (As with most features that affect everybody who shares your Mac, however, only people with Administrator accounts can change the contents of this folder.)

Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families among the various Fonts folders represented here—from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making them available to all account holders.

Figure 9-7. Each account holder can have a separate set of fonts; your set is represented by the User icon. You can drag fonts and font families among the various Fonts folders represented here—from your User account folder to the Computer icon, for example, making them available to all account holders.

§ Essential system fonts (SystemLibraryFonts). This folder contains the 35 fonts that the Mac itself needs: the typefaces you see in your menus, dialog boxes, icons, and so on. You can open this folder to see these font suitcases, but you can’t do anything with them, such as opening, moving, or adding to them. Remember that, for stability reasons, the System folder is sealed under glass forever. Only the Unix entity known as the superuser can touch these files—and even that person would be foolish to do so.

With the exception of the essential system fonts, you’ll find an icon representing each of these locations in your Font Book program, described next.

NOTE

And just to make life even more exciting, Adobe’s software installers may donate even more fonts to your cause, in yet another folder: your Home→Application Support folder.

Font Book: Installing and Managing Fonts

One of the biggest perks of OS X is its preinstalled collection of over 50 great-looking fonts—“over $1,000 worth,” according to Apple, which licensed many of them from type companies.

But when you do buy or download new fonts, you’re in luck. There’s no limit to the number of fonts you can install.

Looking over your fonts

Right off the bat, Font Book is great for looking at samples of each typeface. For example, click Computer, click the first font name, and then press the key. As you walk down the list, the rightmost panel shows you a sample of each font (Figure 9-7).

You can also click any font family’s flippy triangle (or highlight its name and then press ) to see the font variations it includes: Italic, Bold, and so on.

TIP

When you first open Font Book, the actual text of the typeface preview (in the right panel) is pretty generic. Don’t miss the Preview menu, though. It lets you substitute a full display of every character (choose Repertoire)—or, if you choose Custom, it lets you type your own text.

Printing a reference sheet

You can print a handy, whole-font sampler of any font. Click its name and then choose File→Print. In the Print dialog box, click the Show Details button to expand the dialog box, if necessary.

As shown in Figure 9-8, you can use the Report Type pop-up menu to choose from three reference-sheet styles:

§ Catalog prints the alphabet twice (uppercase and lowercase) and the numbers in each selected font; use the Sample Size slider to control the size. This style is the most compact, because more than one print sample fits on each sheet of paper.

§ Repertoire prints a grid that contains every single character in the font. This report may take more than one page per font.

§ Waterfall prints the alphabet over and over again, with increasing type sizes, until the page is full. You can control which sizes appear using the Sample Sizes list.

When everything looks good, click Print.

Eliminating duplicates

Since your Mac accesses up to three folders containing fonts, you might wonder what happens in the case of conflicts. For example, suppose you have two slightly different fonts, both called Optima, which came from different type companies and are housed in different Fonts folders on your system. Which font do you actually get when you use it in your documents?

The scheme is actually fairly simple: OS X proceeds down the list of Fonts folders in the order shown on Fonts—and Font Book, beginning with your own home Fonts folder. It acknowledges the existence of only the first duplicated font it finds.

If you’d rather have more control, open Font Book. A bullet (•) next to a font’s name is Font Book’s charming way of trying to tell you that you’ve got copies of the same font in more than one of your Fonts folders. You might have one version of Comic Sans in your own Home→Library→Fonts folder, for example, and another in your Mac’s main Fonts folder.

From the Report Type pop-up menu, choose the style you want. The preview screen shows you each one before you commit it to paper. Type-size controls always appear in the lower right.

Figure 9-8. From the Report Type pop-up menu, choose the style you want. The preview screen shows you each one before you commit it to paper. Type-size controls always appear in the lower right.

Click the one you want to keep, and then choose Edit→Resolve Duplicates. Font Book turns off all other copies, and the bullet disappears.

Adding, removing, and hiding fonts

Here’s what you can do with Font Book:

§ Install a font. When you double-click a font file’s icon in the Finder, Font Book opens and presents the typeface for your inspection. If you like it, click Install Font. You’ve just installed it into your account’s Fonts folder so that it appears in the Font menus of all your programs. (If you’d rather install it so that it appears in all account holders’ Font menus, see Figure 9-7.)

§ Remove a font. Removing a font from your machine is easy: Highlight it in the Font Book list, and then press the Delete key. (You’re asked to confirm the decision.) Before taking such a drastic and permanent step, however, keep in mind that you can simply disable (hide) the font instead. Read on.

§ Disable a font. When you disable a font, you’re simply hiding it from your programs. You might want to turn off a font so that you can use a different version of it (bearing the same name but from a different type company, for example), or to make your Font menus shorter, or to make programs like Microsoft Word start up faster. You can always turn a disabled font back on if you ever need it again.

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How’s this for a sweet feature? OS X can activate fonts automatically as you need them. When you open a document that relies on a font it doesn’t have, OS X activates that font and keeps it available until that particular program quits.

Actually, it does better than that. If it doesn’t see that font installed, it searches your hard drive on a quest to find the font—and then it asks you if you want it installed, so the document will look right.

To disable a font, just click it or its family name, and then click the checkbox button beneath the list (or press Shift-⌘-D). Confirm your decision by clicking Disable in the confirmation box. (Turn on “Do not ask me again” if you’re the confident sort.)

The font’s name now appears gray, and the word “Off” appears next to it, making it absolutely clear what you’ve just done. (To turn the font on again, highlight its name, and then click the now-empty checkbox button, or press Shift-⌘-D again.)

NOTE

When you install, remove, disable, or enable a font using Font Book, you see the changes in the Font menus and panels of some programs immediately. You won’t see the changes in others, however, until you quit and reopen them.

Font collections

A collection, like any of the ones listed in the first Font Book column, is a subset of your installed fonts. Apple starts you off with collections called things like PDF (a set of standard fonts used in PDF files) and Web (fonts you’re safe using on Web pages—that is, fonts that are very likely to be installed on the Macs or Windows PCs of your Web visitors).

But you can create collections called, for example, Headline or Sans Serif, organized by font type. Or you can create collections like Brochure or Movie Poster, organized by project. Later, you can switch these groups of fonts on or off at will, or jump right to them in programs that use the standard Fonts panel, which saves you time wading through hundreds of fonts.

To create a new collection, click the leftmost button to create a new entry in the Collection column, whose name you can edit. Then click one of the font storage locations—User or Computer—and drag fonts or font families onto your newly created collection icon. (Recognize this process from playlists in iTunes, or albums in iPhoto?) Each font can be in as many different collections as you want.

To remove a font from the collection, click its name, and then press Delete. You’re not actually removing the font from your Mac, of course—only from the collection.

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Each time you create a new font collection, OS X records its name and contents in a little file in your Home folder→Library→FontCollections folder.

By copying these files into the Users→Shared folder on your hard drive, you can make them available to anyone who uses the Mac. If your sister, for example, copies a file from the Shared folder into her own Home folder→Library→FontCollections folder, she’ll see the name of your collection in her own Fonts panel. This way, she can reap the benefits of the effort and care you put into its creation.

Smart Collections

Font Book can create a collection for you, too. If you choose File→New Smart Collection, a dialog box lets you specify criteria for this always-updated collection. For example, you might use the buttons to specify “Kind name is TrueType” and “Design style is Sans-serif.” The effect is exactly like smart folders in the Finder (Smart Folders) or smart playlists in iTunes (Playlists): Once you set up the smartness, the set stays up to date as your font collection changes.

Font libraries

Don’t get confused; a font library is not the same as a font collection.

A font library is a set of fonts outside Font Book that you can install or uninstall on the fly. They don’t have to be in any of your Fonts folders; Font Book can install them from wherever they happen to be sitting on your hard drive (or even on the network). Font Book never copies or moves these font files as you install or remove them from libraries; it simply adds them to your Font menus by referencing them right where they sit.

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That can be a handy arrangement if you periodically work on different projects for different clients. Why burden your day-to-day Font menu with the 37 fonts used by Beekeeper Quarterly magazine, when you need to work with those fonts only four times a year?

Once you’ve added some fonts to a library, you can even set up collections within that library.

To create a library, choose File→New Library; the library appears in the Collection list at the left side of Font Book. Now you can drag fonts into it right from the Finder, or set up collections inside it by highlighting the library’s icon and choosing File→New Collection.

Exporting fonts

Next time you submit a design project to a print shop or a graphics bureau, you won’t have to worry that they won’t have the right fonts. It’s easy to collect all the fonts you used in a document and export them to a folder, ready to submit along with your file.

Use the Services→Font Book→Create Collection From Text command. Font Book opens and shows you the new collection it’s created, containing all the fonts used in your document. Click the collection, and then choose File→Export Collection. The software prompts you to name and choose a location for the exported fonts folder.

NOTE

The Create Collection From Text command doesn’t work in all programs, but you can always build and export a collection manually.

The Fonts Panel

In long-established programs like Microsoft Word, choosing fonts works exactly as you’re probably used to: You choose a typeface name from the Font menu or from a formatting palette or toolbar.

Things get much more interesting when you use more recently written programs, like TextEdit, iMovie, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, iPhoto, and Mail. They offer a standard OS X feature called the Fonts panel. If you’re seated in front of your OS X machine now, fire up TextEdit or Pages and follow along.

Choosing fonts from the Fonts panel

Suppose you’ve just highlighted a headline in TextEdit, and now you want to choose an appropriate typeface for it.

In TextEdit, you open the Fonts panel (Figure 9-9) by choosing Format→Font→Show Fonts (⌘-T). Just as in Font Book, the first column lists your Collections. The second column, Family, shows the names of the actual fonts in your system. The third, Typeface, shows the various style variations—Bold, Italic, Condensed, and so on—available in that type family. (Oblique and Italic are roughly the same thing; Bold, Black, and Ultra are varying degrees of boldface.)

The Fonts panel, generally available only in Cocoa programs, offers elaborate controls over text color, shadow, and underline styles.See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose Show Preview from the pop-up menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your cursor just below the title bar (where it says Fonts) and drag downward.

Figure 9-9. The Fonts panel, generally available only in Cocoa programs, offers elaborate controls over text color, shadow, and underline styles. See the handy font sample shown here above the font lists? To get it, choose Show Preview from the pop-up menu. Or use the mousy way: Place your cursor just below the title bar (where it says Fonts) and drag downward.

The last column lists a sampling of point sizes. You can use the Size slider, choose from the point-size pop-up menu, or type any number into the box at the top of the Size list.

Designing collections and favorites

At the bottom of the Fonts panel, the menu offers a few useful customization tools:

§ Add to Favorites. To designate a font as one of your favorites, specify a font, style, and size by clicking in the appropriate columns of the Fonts panel. Then use this command.

From now on, whenever you click Favorites in the Collections column, you’ll see a list of the typefaces you’ve specified.

§ Show Preview. The Fonts panel is great and all that, but you may have noticed that, until you choose this option, it doesn’t actually show you the fonts you’re working with—something of an oversight in a window designed to help you find your fonts. See Figure 9-9 for details. (Choose this command again—now called Hide Preview—to get rid of the preview.)

The Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type effects, which vary by font. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Small Capitals option created the “Do Not Drink” style; and so on.

Figure 9-10. The Typography palette is a collapsible menagerie of fancy type effects, which vary by font. In this example, turning on Common Ligatures creates fused letter pairs like fl and fi; the Small Capitals option created the “Do Not Drink” style; and so on.

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Once you’ve opened the Preview pane, feel free to click the different sizes, typeface names, and family names to see the various effects.

§ Hide Effects. The “toolbar” of the Fonts panel lets you create special text effects—colors, shadows, and so on—as shown in Figure 9-9. This command hides that row of pop-up buttons.

§ Color. Opens the Color Picker, so you can specify a color for the highlighted text in your document.

§ Characters. Opens the Character Viewer, so you can choose a symbol without having to remember the crazy keyboard combo that types it.

§ Typography. Opens the Typography palette (see Figure 9-10).

§ Edit Sizes. The point sizes listed in the Fonts panel are just suggestions. You can actually type in any point size you want. By choosing this command, in fact, you can edit this list so that the sizes you use most often are only a click away.

§ Manage Fonts. Opens Font Book, described earlier in this chapter.

Digital Cameras

Like Windows, OS X is extremely camera-friendly. The simple act of connecting a digital camera to its USB cable stirs OS X into action—namely, it opens iPhoto, Apple’s digital-photo shoebox program.

If it’s a digital video camera you plugged in, OS X opens iMovie instead.

(If iPhoto and iMovie intrigue or baffle you, entire Missing Manuals await you on those topics. Just sayin’.)

Disks

Floppy drives disappeared from Macs beginning in 1997—and these days, they’re absent from most Windows PCs, too.

In the meantime, there are all kinds of other disks you can connect to a Mac these days: CDs and DVDs, hard drives, iPods, USB flash drives, and so on.

When you insert a disk, its icon may show up in any of three places (depending on your Finder preferences): on the right side of the desktop, in the Computer window, and in the Sidebar. To see what’s on a disk you’ve inserted, double-click its icon.

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You can make the Mac work like Windows, if you choose. For example, to open a single window containing icons of all currently inserted disks, choose Go→Computer (which produces the rough equivalent of the My Computer window).

To save you that step, though, you can tell OS X to put disk icons on the desktop, too. Just choose Finder→Preferences, click General, and turn on the top checkboxes—“Hard disks,” “External disks,” and “CDs, DVDs, and iPods.”

To remove a disk from your Mac, use one of these methods:

§ Hold down the key on your keyboard, if it has one. It’s usually in the upper-right corner. Hold it down for a moment to make a CD or DVD pop out. (If you don’t have an key, hold down F12 instead.)

§ Drag its icon onto the Trash icon. For years, this technique has confused and frightened first-time Mac users. Their typical reaction: Doesn’t the Trash mean “delete”? Yes, but only when you drag file or folder icons there—not disk icons. Dragging a disk icon into the Trash (at the end of the Dock) makes the Mac spit the disk out. (If you drag a disk image icon or the icon of a networked disk, this maneuver unmounts them—that is, gets them off your screen.)

The instant you begin dragging a disk icon, the Trash icon on the Dock changes form, as though to reassure the novice that dragging a disk icon there will only eject the disk. As you drag, the wastebasket icon morphs into a giant-sized logo.

§ Highlight the disk icon, and then choose File→Eject (or press ⌘-E). The disk pops out.

§ Right-click the disk icon. Choose Eject from the shortcut menu.

§ Click the button next to a disk’s name in the Sidebar.

Any of these techniques also work to get network disks and disk images off your screen.

NOTE

If you try to eject a disc and the Mac tells you, “This disk is in use,” the message tells you exactly which program is still holding on to the disk. Switch to that program, close whatever document is causing the problem, and then eject the disk.

Startup Disks

When you turn the Mac on, it hunts for a startup disk—that is, a disk containing a System folder. If you’ve ever seen the dispiriting blinking folder icon on a Mac’s screen, you know what happens when the Mac can’t find a startup disk. It blinks like that forever, or until you find and insert a disk with a viable System folder on it.

Usually, a startup disk is a hard drive or a DVD. (Not all external USB disks are capable of starting up the Mac, but any internal hard drive can, and any external FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive can.) You can even put a stripped-down, emergency copy of OS X onto a flash drive and start up your Mac that way; see System Preferences.

Selecting a Startup Disk

It’s perfectly possible to have more than one startup disk simultaneously attached to your Mac. Some veteran Mac fans deliberately create other startup disks—using external hard drives, for example—so that they can easily start the Mac up from a backup disk or from a different version of the OS.

Only one System folder can be operational at a time. So how does the Mac know which to use as its startup disk? You make your selection in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences (Figure 9-11).

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If you’re in a hurry to start the machine up from a different disk, then just click the disk icon and then click Restart in the System Preferences window. You don’t have to close the System Preferences window first.

In the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, the currently selected disk—the one that will be “in force” the next time the machine starts up—is always highlighted. You also see the System folder’s version, the name of the drive it’s on, and its actual name.

Figure 9-11. In the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, the currently selected disk—the one that will be “in force” the next time the machine starts up—is always highlighted. You also see the System folder’s version, the name of the drive it’s on, and its actual name.

Erasing a Disk

OS X doesn’t have an Erase Disk command at the desktop. When you want to erase a disk (such as a DVD-RW disc), you’re supposed to use Disk Utility, which sits in your Applications→Utilities folder. This is the same program you use to erase, repair, or subdivide (partition) a hard drive.

Once you’ve opened Disk Utility, click the name of the disk (in the left-side list), click the Erase tab, and then click the Erase button.

You won’t be able to do so, though, if:

§ The disk is a standard CD-ROM, DVD, a previously recorded CD-R, or a disk elsewhere on the network.

§ You’re trying to erase the startup disk. You can’t wipe out the disk that contains the currently running System folder any more than you can paint the floor directly beneath your feet. (To erase your built-in hard drive, for example, you must start up from the OS X DVD.)

Burning CDs and DVDs

Not many Mac models come with a DVD burner anymore. But if yours has one (maybe an external USB drive), a CD or DVD is great for backing up stuff, transferring stuff to another computer (even a Windows PC), mailing to somebody, or offloading (archiving) older files to free up hard drive space. You can buy blank CDs and DVDs incredibly cheaply in bulk—$20 for 100 CDs, for example—via the Web.

You can burn a disc in either of two ways: with the blank disc inserted or without.

Burn Folders: Without the Disc

The burn folder is a special folder that you fill up by dragging file and folder icons to it. Then, when you’re ready to burn, you just insert the blank disc and go.

The burn-folder concept has a lot going for it:

§ No wasted hard drive space. When you use a burn folder, you’re not using up any additional disk space as you load up a disc with files and folders. Instead, the Mac just sets aside aliases of the files and folders you want to burn. Aliases take up negligible hard drive space. When you finally burn the disc, the designated material is copied directly onto the CD or DVD.

§ Easy reuse. You can keep a burn folder on your desktop, prestocked with the folders you like to back up. Each time you burn a disc, you get the latest version of those folders’ contents, and you’re saved the effort of having to gather them each time.

§ Prepare ahead of time. You can get a CD or DVD ready to burn without having a blank disc on hand.

Here’s how you use burn folders:

1. Create a burn folder.

To make a burn folder appear on your desktop, choose File→New Burn Folder. To create one in any other window, right-click a blank spot inside that window and, from the shortcut menu, choose New Burn Folder.

Either way, a new folder appears, bearing the universal Mac “burn” symbol ().

2. Rename it.

Its name is highlighted, so you can just start typing to rename it. Press Return when you’re finished.

3. Load up the folder by dragging files and folders onto it.

If you double-click the burn folder to open its window (Figure 9-12), you’ll notice that you’re not actually copying huge files. You’re simply making a list of aliases.

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At the bottom of the burn folder’s window, the “minimum disc size” display keeps track of how much stuff you’ve loaded up so far, so you can gauge if it will fit on one disc.

Top: A burn folder looks like any ordinary folder—except that it has that radioactive logo on it. You can drag files and folders right into its window; OS X displays only aliases for now, but when you burn the disc, the actual files and folders will be there.If you open the burn folder, you find an unusual strip across the top. Its most important feature is the Burn button at the right.Bottom: Ready to proceed, Captain.

Figure 9-12. Top: A burn folder looks like any ordinary folder—except that it has that radioactive logo on it. You can drag files and folders right into its window; OS X displays only aliases for now, but when you burn the disc, the actual files and folders will be there. If you open the burn folder, you find an unusual strip across the top. Its most important feature is the Burn button at the right. Bottom: Ready to proceed, Captain.

4. Decorate the window, if you like.

You can choose list view or icon view; you can drag the icons into an arrangement you like; you can change the background color of the window; and so on. One nice feature of the Mac (which is not available on The Other OS) is that the look of a window is preserved when you burn it to CD.

5. Click the Burn button in the upper-right corner of the window, or choose FileBurn Disc.

The message shown at bottom in Figure 9-12 appears.

6. Insert a blank disc.

If you have a slot-loading Mac, then slip the disc into the slot. If your Mac has a sliding CD/DVD tray instead, open it first by pressing the button on the tray or by pressing your key for about a second.

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Once you’ve inserted a CD or DVD into your tray, you can close it either by pushing gently on the tray or by pressing the key again.

One last confirmation box appears, where you can name the disc and choose a burning speed for it.

7. Click Burn (or press Return).

The Mac’s laser proceeds to record the CD or DVD, which can take some time. Feel free to switch into another program and continue using your Mac. When it’s all over, you have a freshly minted CD or DVD, whose files and folders you can open on any Mac or Windows PC.

When You Have a Blank Disc on Hand

If you have a blank disc ready to go, burning is even simpler.

Start by inserting the disc. After a moment, the Mac displays a dialog box asking, in effect, what you want to do with this blank disc (unless you’ve fiddled with your preference settings). See Figure 9-13 for instructions.

If you choose Open Finder, then the disc’s icon appears on the desktop after a moment; its icon also appears in the Sidebar, complete with the burn symbol ().

At this point, you can begin dragging files and folders onto the disc’s icon, or (if you double-click the icon) into its window. You can add, remove, reorganize, and rename the files on it just as you would in any standard Finder window. All you’re really doing is dragging aliases around; the real files are left untouched on your hard drive. You can also rename the CD or DVD itself just as you would a file or folder.

Choose Open Finder if you plan to copy regular Mac files onto the CD or DVD, or Open iTunes if you plan to burn a music CD using iTunes. (Click “Make this action the default” if you figure you’ll always answer this question the same way.) Click OK.To burn the disk, drag its icon onto the Burn icon in the Dock, or choose File→Burn Disc.

Figure 9-13. Choose Open Finder if you plan to copy regular Mac files onto the CD or DVD, or Open iTunes if you plan to burn a music CD using iTunes. (Click “Make this action the default” if you figure you’ll always answer this question the same way.) Click OK. To burn the disk, drag its icon onto the Burn icon in the Dock, or choose File→Burn Disc.

When the disc’s icon contains the files and folders you want to immortalize, do one of these things:

§ Choose FileBurn [the disc’s name].

§ Click the button next to the disc’s name in the Sidebar.

§ Click the Burn button in the upper-right corner of the disc’s window.

§ Drag the disc’s icon toward the Trash icon in the Dock. As soon as you begin to drag, the Trash icon turns into the yellow logo. Drop the disc’s icon onto it.

§ Right-click the disc’s icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Burn [the disc’s name].

In any case, a dialog box now appears. Click Burn. When the recording process is over, you’ll have yourself a DVD or CD that works in any Mac or PC.

Here are a few final notes on burning CDs and DVDs at the desktop:

§ Not sure what kinds of discs your Mac can burn? Choose →About This Mac, and click More Info. In the resulting dialog box, click the Storage tab. There it is, plain as day: a list of the formats your machine can read and write (that is, burn). For example, you might see: “CD-Write: -R, -RW. DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW.”

§ If you do a lot of disc burning, a full-fledged CD-burning program like Toast (www.roxio.com) adds myriad additional formatting options that let you make startup CDs, video CDs, and so on.

§ When you insert a CD-RW or DVD-RW disc that you’ve previously recorded, the box shown in Figure 9-13 doesn’t appear. Instead, the disc’s icon simply appears on the desktop as though it’s an ordinary CD. Before you can copy new files onto it, you must erase it using Disk Utility, as described in the previous section.

§ The discs that your Mac burns work equally well on Macs and Windows (or Linux) PCs. If you plan to insert a CD or DVD into a PC, however, remember that Windows doesn’t permit certain symbols in a Windows filename (\ / : * ? “ < > |). You’ll run into trouble if any of your file names contain these symbols. In fact, you won’t be able to open any folders on your disc that contain illegally named files.

iTunes: The Digital Jukebox

iTunes, in your Applications folder, is the ultimate software jukebox (Figure 9-14). It can play music CDs; tune in to Internet radio stations; load up your iPod, iPhone, or iPad; and play digital sound files (including the Internet’s favorite format, MP3 files) and other popular audio formats. It can also turn selected tracks from your music CDs into MP3 files, so that you can store favorite songs on your hard drive to play back anytime—without having to dig up the originals.

iTunes also lets you record your own custom audio CDs that contain only the good songs. Finally, of course, iTunes is the shop window for the online iTunes Store, which sells music, TV shows, movies, and iPhone/iPad apps.

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The following pages present a mini-manual on iTunes. For the full scoop, plus coverage of the iPod and the iTunes Store, consult iPod: The Missing Manual.

The first thing to understand is that iTunes is three apps in one. It’s designed to be the viewer for all the music, videos, apps, and ebooks in three places: (1) on your computer, (2) on your phone or tablet, and (3) in Apple’s online store.

The Music button is a pop-up menu. From it, you can jump to the lists of Movies, Music, TV Shows, and other categories on your Mac. You can also view the lists of stuff you’ve bought.The playback and volume controls are at the top-left corner. At upper-right: a search box that lets you pluck one track out of a haystack.

Figure 9-14. The Music button is a pop-up menu. From it, you can jump to the lists of Movies, Music, TV Shows, and other categories on your Mac. You can also view the lists of stuff you’ve bought. The playback and volume controls are at the top-left corner. At upper-right: a search box that lets you pluck one track out of a haystack.

The button at top right lets you choose either Library (what’s on your computer) or iTunes Store. When your iPhone (or other i-gadget) is connected, it has a button of its own right next door.

The following pages take you through the three worlds—computer, store, iPhone—one by one.

Library

The library is all the music, videos, apps, and ebooks that you’ve downloaded to your Mac or PC. To see it, click Library at the upper-right corner of iTunes. (If that button says iTunes Store instead, then you’re already seeing your library.)

At this point, you’re supposed to drill down to the material you want to manage or play:

1. Use the pop-up button at the top-left side of iTunes to specify what kind of file you want to look at: Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, or Apps.

2. Use the buttons across the top to further isolate or sort what you’re after. For example, if you chose Music in step 1, then your options are Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres, Playlists, Radio, Internet, and Match. If you choose Movies, then the options are Unwatched, Movies, Genres, Home Videos, and List. You get the idea.

When you click one of these headings, the contents appear in the center part of the iTunes window. You may see wildly different things here, depending on what you clicked. For example, if you click Songs, you see a huge alphabetical list; if you click Albums, you see a square grid of album covers.

Three Ways to Fill Your Library

Once you have iTunes, the next step is to start filling it with music and video so you can get all that goodness onto your iPhone. iTunes gives you at least three options right off the bat:

§ Let iTunes find your files. If you’ve had a computer for longer than a few days, you probably already have some songs in the popular MP3 format on your hard drive, perhaps from a file-sharing service or a free music Web site. If so, then the first time you open iTunes, it offers to search your PC or Mac for music and add it to its library. Click Yes; iTunes goes hunting around your hard drive.

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You may have songs in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. Unfortunately, iTunes can’t play WMA files. But when iTunes finds nonprotected WMA files, it offers to convert them automatically to a format that it does understand. That’s a convenient assurance that your old music files will play on your new toy. (iTunes can not, however, convert copy-protected WMA files like those sold by some music services.)

§ Visit the iTunes Store. Another way to feed your Mac is to shop at the iTunes Store, as described in the next section.

§ Import music from a CD. iTunes can also convert tracks from audio CDs into digital music files. Just start up iTunes and then stick a CD into your computer’s CD drive. The program asks if you want to convert the songs to audio files for iTunes. (If it doesn’t ask, then click Import CD at the bottom of the window.)

If you’re connected to the Internet, the program automatically downloads song titles and artist information from the CD and begins to add the songs to the iTunes library.

If you want time to think about which songs you want from each CD, then you can tell iTunes to download only the song titles and then give you a few minutes to ponder your selections. To do that, choose iTunes→Preferences→General. Use the “When you insert a CD” pop-up menu to choose Show CD.

From now on, if you don’t want the entire album, you can exclude the dud songs by turning off their checkmarks. Then click Import CD.

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If you always want all the songs on that stack of CDs next to your computer, then change the iTunes CD import preferences to Import CD and Eject to save yourself some clicking. When you insert a CD, iTunes imports it and spits it out, ready for the next one.

In that same Preferences box, you can also click Import Settings to choose the format (file type) and bit rate (amount of audio data compressed into that format) for your imported tracks. The factory setting is the AAC format at 128 kilobits per second.

Most people think these settings make for fine-sounding music files, but you can change your settings to, for example, MP3, which is another format that lets you cram big music into a small space. Upping the bit rate from 128 to 256 Kbps makes for richer-sounding music files—which also happen to take up more room because the files are bigger. The choice is yours.

Once the importing is finished, each imported song bears a green checkmark, and you have some brand-new files in your iTunes library.

Playlists

A playlist is a list of songs you’ve decided should go together. It can be any group of songs arranged in any order, all according to your whims. For example, if you’re having a party, you can make a playlist from the current Top 40 and dance music in your library. Some people may question your taste if you, say, alternate tracks from La Bohème with Queen’s A Night at the Opera, but hey—it’s your playlist.

To create a playlist in iTunes, press ⌘-N, or choose File→New→Playlist.

A freshly minted playlist starts out with the impersonal name “Playlist.” Just type a better name: “Cardio Workout,” “Shoe-Shopping Tunes,” “Hits of the Highland Lute,” or whatever you want to call it. But don’t click Done yet.

Now you can add your songs or videos. The quickest way is to drag their names directly onto the playlist’s icon. Use any of the buttons across the top—Songs, Albums, Artists, whatever—to find the songs; then drag their names into the empty Playlist column at the right side.

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Instead of making an empty playlist and then dragging songs into it, you can work the other way. You can scroll through a big list of songs, selecting tracks as you go by ⌘-clicking—and then, when you’re finished, choose File→New→Playlist From Selection. All the songs you selected immediately appear on a brand-new playlist.

When you drag a song title onto a playlist, you’re not making a copy of the song. In essence, you’re creating an alias of the original, which means you can have the same song on several different playlists.

iTunes even starts you out with some playlists of its own devising, like “Top 25 Most Played” and “Purchased” (a convenient place to find all your iTunes Store goodies listed in one place). To see all your playlists, make sure you’re viewing your library and your music; click Playlists at the top.

Smart playlists

Smart playlists constantly rebuild themselves according to criteria you specify. You might tell one smart playlist to assemble 45 minutes’ worth of songs you’ve rated higher than four stars but rarely listen to, and another to list your most-often-played songs from the ’80s.

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To rate a song, make the window wide enough that you can see the Rating column. (If you don’t see this column, then right-click any column heading and choose Rating from the list of options.) Then just click the Rating column for a selected song. The appropriate number of stars appears—one, two, three, four, or five—depending on the position of your click. You can change a song’s rating as many times as you like—a good thing, considering the short shelf life of a pop hit these days.

To make a smart playlist, choose File→New Smart Playlist (Option-⌘-N). The dialog box shown in Figure 9-15 appears. The controls here are designed to set up a search of your music database. Figure 9-15, for example, illustrates how you’d find up to 74 minutes of Beatles tunes released between 1965 and 1968—that you’ve rated three stars or higher and that you’ve listened to no more than twice.

A smart playlist is a powerful search command for your iTunes database. You can set up certain criteria, like the hunt for particular Beatles tunes illustrated here. The “Live updating” checkbox makes iTunes keep this playlist updated as your collection changes, as you change your ratings, as your play count changes, and so on.

Figure 9-15. A smart playlist is a powerful search command for your iTunes database. You can set up certain criteria, like the hunt for particular Beatles tunes illustrated here. The “Live updating” checkbox makes iTunes keep this playlist updated as your collection changes, as you change your ratings, as your play count changes, and so on.

Editing and deleting playlists

A playlist is easy to change. Here’s what you can do with just a little light mousework. Start by making sure you’re viewing your library and your music, and click Playlists at the top:

§ Change the order of songs in the playlist. Drag song titles up or down within the playlist window to reorder them.

§ Add new songs to the playlist. Click Add To (upper right), and then tiptoe through your iTunes library and drag more songs into a playlist.

§ Delete songs from the playlist. If your playlist needs pruning, or that banjo tune just doesn’t fit in with the brass-band tracks, you can ditch it quickly: Click the song in the playlist window and then hit Delete or Backspace to get rid of it. When iTunes asks you to confirm your decision, click Remove.

Deleting a song from a playlist doesn’t delete it from your music library—it just removes the title from your playlist.

§ Delete the whole playlist. To delete an entire playlist, click its name in the list of playlists (far left) and then press Delete. Again, this zaps only the playlist itself, not all the songs you had in it. (Those are still in your computer’s iTunes folder.)

iTunes Store

The iTunes software’s second purpose is to be the face of Apple’s online iTunes Store. (From your library, click iTunes Store at upper right).

Once you land on the store’s main page and set up your iTunes account, you can buy and download songs, audiobooks, ebooks, apps, and videos. This material goes straight into your iTunes library.

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iTunes doesn’t have a monopoly on music sales. Amazon, Google, Rhapsody, and other services sell songs in MP3 format, meaning no copy protection. eMusic.com has great MP3 prices, but the music comes from lesser-known bands. And Amazon’s MP3 Downloader software can whip your purchases right into iTunes.

To navigate the iTunes Store, click the buttons across the top strip: Music, Movies, TV Shows, App Store, Books, Podcasts, and iTunes U.

There are all kinds of ways to slice, dice, and search this catalog. For example, in the Music store, you can use the Music button at the top of the screen as a pop-up menu; choose a category or genre, like Free on iTunes (free songs!), Recent Releases, Blues, Metal, and so on. You can use the search box (top right) to find a song by name, album name, band, composer, and so on.

Or just scroll down. The various buttons on the front page of the Music Store represent music Apple thinks you might like: new releases, big hits, Genius recommendations (songs Apple thinks you’ll like based on an analysis of what’s already in your library), and so on. Down the right side of the window, you see lists of the top-selling songs and albums. A handy way to see what the rest of your fellow music lovers are buying, if you don’t mind being a sheep.

The same tools are available for finding TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, and so on.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: AUTOPLAYING MUSIC CDS

How do I make music CDs automatically play when they’re inserted into the Mac?

First, make sure iTunes is slated to open automatically when you insert a music CD. You do that on the CDs & DVDs panel of System Preferences (use the “When you insert a music CD” pop-up menu).

Then all you have to do is make sure that iTunes knows to begin playing automatically once it launches. Choose iTunes→Preferences, click the General icon if necessary; from the “When you insert a CD” pop-up menu, choose Begin Playing. Click OK.

From now on, whenever you insert a music CD, iTunes will open automatically and begin playing.

TV, movies, and movie rentals

The iTunes store also offers an increasingly vast selection of downloadable TV episodes ($2 apiece, no ads) and movies (some you can buy for $10 to $20, others you buy or rent for $3 to $6).

Once you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching—and once you start, you have 24 hours to finish before it turns into a pumpkin (actually, it deletes itself from your computer and any phones or tablets you’ve synced it to).

Authorizing Computers

All iTunes movies and TV shows are copy-protected.

When you create an account in iTunes, you automatically authorize that computer to play copy-protected songs from the iTunes Store. Authorization is Apple’s way of making sure you don’t go playing those music tracks on more than five computers, which would greatly displease the movie studios.

You can copy those songs and videos onto a maximum of four other computers. To authorize each one to play music from your account, choose Store→Authorize Computer. (Don’t worry; you have to do this just once per machine.)

When you’ve maxed out your limit and can’t authorize any more computers, you may need to deauthorize one. On the computer you wish to demote, choose Store→Deauthorize Computer.

iTunes Radio

In Mavericks, Apple has given you an amazing gift: your own radio station. Your own empire of radio stations, in fact.

The new iTunes Radio service (Figure 9-16) lets you listen to exactly the kind of music you want to hear. It doesn’t just distinguish among genres like jazz or rock; your choices are far more specific, like “upbeat male vocals with driving brass section” versus “slow lovesick ballads with lots of strings.”

You don’t get to choose the exact songs or singers you want to hear. Instead, you specify a “seed” song, singer, or musical genre, and iTunes Radio does the rest. For example, if you choose Billy Joel as your “seed,” then you’ll hear a lot of Billy Joel, but also a lot of other music that sounds more or less like his.

Here’s something you can’t do when you listen to real radio: Skip past a song you don’t like. When you tap the button, iTunes Radio instantly skips to the next song it would have played. In fact, you can even tell it Play More Like This or Never Play This Song to shape your radio station’s future.

NOTE

You’re allowed to skip up to six songs per hour per station. When you’ve reached your skip limit, the Skip button is dimmed for an hour.

In exchange for all this magic, you have to listen to the occasional ad between songs—unless you subscribe to iTunes Match (Keyboards), in which case you never hear any ads.

The idea of a “seed song”–based radio service isn’t new, of course. It’s the same idea as Pandora, a Web site and app that has offered precisely the same features for years. But iTunes Radio is built in, it syncs with the Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad, and it’s so nice to use.

Playing iTunes Radio

When you open iTunes and look at your library, choose Music from the top-left pop-up menu; then click Radio on the top bar.

This composite illustration shows the most useful parts of iTunes Radio.Top: You can’t fast-forward or rewind within a Radio song. The progress bar is just a graph that shows you where you are in the song. The numbers on either side show you how far you are into the song and how much is left to play.What you can do, though, is click the > button to open this secret menu. Play More Like This and Never Play This Song let you fine-tune your “radio station,” tailoring it precisely to your tastes.Bottom: Here’s how you create a new station. Click a genre tile or type in a “seed” performer.

Figure 9-16. This composite illustration shows the most useful parts of iTunes Radio. Top: You can’t fast-forward or rewind within a Radio song. The progress bar is just a graph that shows you where you are in the song. The numbers on either side show you how far you are into the song and how much is left to play. What you can do, though, is click the > button to open this secret menu. Play More Like This and Never Play This Song let you fine-tune your “radio station,” tailoring it precisely to your tastes. Bottom: Here’s how you create a new station. Click a genre tile or type in a “seed” performer.

Across the top, you get a horizontally scrolling set of “album covers” (Figure 9-16). They represent ready-made “radio stations” that Apple has supplied for you. Click the one called “iTunes Top 100: Pop,” for example, and your Mac instantly begins playing the biggest current pop hits.

Below these, you see bigger “album covers” for radio stations you’ve created yourself, as described below. Don’t forget to scroll down to see them all.

As a station plays, the control panel at the top center shows the song’s name, band, and album name. And, of course, the price; Apple would be thrilled if you came across a song you liked so much that you wanted to buy it. That’s why the price button ($1.29, for example) is so prominent. When you tap it, the price changes to say Buy Song; tap again to download the song directly. Now you can listen to it again, on demand, without being subject to the randomness of iTunes Radio.

Make your own station

You can set up a new “radio station” of your own in either of two ways: by choosing one of Apple’s canned, ready-to-use stations or by typing in a song or performer you like.

§ Prefab stations. Tap the button. Boom: There’s a huge, scrolling list of music genres—Blues, Christian, Classical, Indie Rock, and so on (Figure 9-16, bottom). Tap one to see a list of prefab radio stations, ready to hear.

If you tap Jazz, for example, the options include Bop, Early Jazz, Jazz Rock, Latin Jazz, and The Big Band Era. Tap the to listen a little bit. If you like what you hear, tap Add, just to its right. You’ve just added a new “radio station” to the iTunes Radio main screen.

§ Type in a “seed.” Tap , and then tap the tiny search box at the top. Type in the name of a singer, band, song, or kind of music (“show tunes” or “a cappella,” for example).

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: IPOD INDEPENDENCE

Out of the box, the iPod (or iPad, or iPhone) and iTunes come set for automatic synchronization. That is, as soon as you hook them together, iTunes sends your complete music library (the contents of your Library “folder” in iTunes) to the iPod. The iPod’s songs and playlists always match the Mac’s.

Apple’s idea here was to ensure that you don’t use the iPod as a convenient piracy machine. Your iPod gets its music from your Mac, but it can’t put its songs onto a Mac.

At least that’s the theory. But what if your hard drive self-destructs, vaporizing the 945 MP3 files that you’ve made from your paid-for CD collection? You legally own those copies. Shouldn’t you have the right to retrieve them from your own iPod?

If you believe the answer is yes, then a quick search at www.download.com for the word “iPod” will bring up a list of programs like Senuti (iTunes spelled backward, get it?), which let you copy music from the iPod to the Mac.

These programs know that the name of the super-secret music folder on the iPod, called iPod_Control, is invisible, which is why you can’t see it on your desktop without the help of these utilities.

In the results, tap the entry that looks most promising (“A Cappella Radio,” for example). You’ve just created a new station, and it begins playing instantly. Its details page opens, too, so you can fine-tune it.

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If a song comes on that you especially like, the New Station from Artist and New Station from Song buttons (Figure 9-16) instantly create a new station that will play more music that sounds like this performer or this song. In effect, you get to branch your original station into one that’s more finely tuned to a particular taste.

Deleting or editing a station

On the main Radio screen, in the My Stations row, tap the icon of the station you want to mangle or obliterate.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: INTERNET RADIO AND PODCASTS

iTunes Radio may be all the rage. But the Internet radio feature that’s been in iTunes for years is still around, too. It lets you tune in to hundreds of Internet-based radio stations, which may turn out to be the most convenient music source of all. They’re free, they play 24 hours a day, and their music collections make yours look like a drop in a bucket.

You can also download and listen to podcasts, which are like Web-distributed personal radio shows—some commercial (like NPR) and some homemade (sometimes very homemade).

For radio, choose Music from the top-left corner pop-up menu. Click Internet at the top of the screen. (If you don’t see Radio there, then choose iTunes→Preferences→General and turn on Internet Radio.)

In the main list, if you’re connected to the Internet, you’ll see categories like Blues, Classic Rock, Classical, and so on, as shown here. Click the flippy triangle to see a list of Internet radio stations in that category.

When you see one that looks interesting, double-click it. (The higher the number in the Bit Rate column, the better the sound quality.) Wait a moment for your Mac to connect to the appropriate Internet site, and then let the music begin!

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Without add-on shareware (like Audio Hijack Pro), there’s no easy way to capture Internet broadcasts or to save them onto your hard drive. You can, however, drag a radio station’s name into a playlist to make it easier to access later on. If you discover other Internet radio stations that sound interesting, choose File→Open Stream, type in the station’s Web address (URL), and press Return.

To grab a podcast, click iTunes Store at top right. At the top of the screen, click Podcasts. Now you can browse a vast list of available podcasts. When you click one that looks promising, you can either listen to it on the spot, or—and here’s the real fun—click Subscribe.

Once you do that, choose Podcasts from the top-left pop-up menu in your Library view to find the latest episodes of the podcasts you’ve subscribed to. Sync those babies to your iPod or iPhone, and you’ve got interesting material—or, at least fresh material—to listen to every day of the week.

Now you can rename your station (click its existing name) or share it. Using the Play More Like This and Never Play This sections, you can add performers, songs, or genres that you want more of or don’t want to be part of this station anymore.

Finally, Delete a station by right-clicking (or two-finger clicking) its icon.

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Click (top of the screen) to view a list of every song you’ve heard on each of your stations. It’s an amazing way to find out the name of some great song whose name you didn’t catch while it was playing. This list also, of course, includes a Buy button for each of those songs.

Syncing with iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches

The third and final function of iTunes is to load up, and back up, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. (The following discussion uses “iPhone” as an example, but it works the same way with other i-gadgets.) You can connect your iPhone to your computer either wirelessly, over WiFi, or with the white USB cable that came with it.

Once the device is connected, click the iPhone button at the top-right corner of the iTunes screen. (That button doesn’t appear when you’re in the store. In that case, click Library first.) Now you can look over the device’s contents or sync it (read on).

Connecting with a cable

Pretty simple: Plug one end of the white cable (supplied with your iPhone) to your computer’s USB jack. Connect the other end to the device. If it’s turned on and awake, then it’s officially connected.

Connecting over WiFi

The familiar white USB cable is all well and good—but since you’re using a wireless device, why not sync it to your computer wirelessly, for Pete’s sake?

The iPhone can be charging in its dock, happily and automatically syncing with your laptop somewhere else in the house. It transfers all the same stuff to and from your computer—apps, music, books, contacts, calendars, movies, photos, ringtones—but through the air instead of via your USB cable.

Your computer has to be turned on and running iTunes. The iPhone and the computer have to be on the same WiFi network.

To set up wireless sync, connect the device using the white USB cable, one last time. Ironic, but true.

Now open iTunes and click the iPhone button at top right. On the Summary tab, scroll down; turn on “Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi.” Click Apply. You can now detach the device.

From now on, whenever the iPhone is on the WiFi network, it’s automatically connected to your computer, wirelessly. You don’t even have to think about it. (Well, OK—you have to think about leaving the computer turned on with iTunes open, which is something of a buzzkill.)

Just connecting it doesn’t necessarily mean syncing it, though; that’s a more data-intensive, battery-drainy process. Syncing happens in either of two ways:

§ Automatically. If the phone is plugged into power (like a speaker dock, an alarm-clock dock, or a wall outlet), and it’s on the same WiFi network, then it syncs with the computer all by itself.

§ Manually. You can also trigger a sync manually—and this time, the phone doesn’t have to be plugged into power. To do that, open Settings→General→iTunes→Wi-Fi Sync and tap Sync Now. (You can also trigger a WiFi sync from within iTunes—just click the Sync button. It says “Sync” only if, in fact, anything has changed since your last sync.)

Once your iPhone is connected to the computer and you’ve clicked its name in the upper-right corner of iTunes, the top of the iTunes window reveals a horizontal row of word buttons: Summary, Info, Apps, Tones, Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Books, Photos, and On This iPhone. For the most part, these represent the categories of stuff you can sync to your device. They let you specify exactly what you want copied to it—which songs, which TV shows, which apps, and so on.

Once you’ve made your selections, click the Summary tab and then click Apply. (The Apply button says Sync instead if you haven’t actually changed any settings.)

Playing with Playback

To play a song or video in iTunes, double-click it. Or click iTunes’ Play button () or press the space bar. The Mac immediately begins to play the songs whose names have checkmarks in the main list, or from the CD currently in your Mac.

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The central display at the top of the window shows not only the name of the song and album, but also where you are in the song, as represented by the horizontal strip. Drag the handle, or click elsewhere in the strip, to jump around in the song.

As music plays, you can control and manipulate the sound and the visuals of your Mac in all kinds of interesting ways. Some people don’t move from their Macs for months at a time.

Turning on visuals

Visuals are onscreen light shows that pulse, beat, and dance in sync to the music. (For real party fun, invite some people who grew up in the ‘60s to your house to watch.)

To summon this psychedelic display, choose View→Show Visuals, or just press ⌘-T. The show begins immediately—although it’s much more fun if you choose View→Enter Full Screen (Control-⌘-F) so the show takes over your whole monitor. True, you won’t get a lot of work done, but when it comes to stress relief, visuals are a lot cheaper than a hot tub.

Keyboard control

You can control iTunes’ music playback using its menus, of course, but the keyboard can be far more efficient. Here are a few of the control keystrokes worth noting:

Function

Keystroke

Play, Pause

space bar

Next song/previous song

, or ,

Louder, quieter

⌘- , ⌘-

Rewind, fast-forward

Option-⌘- , Option-⌘-

Eject the CD

⌘-E

Turn Visuals on

⌘-T

Turn Visuals off

⌘-T or mouse click

Full-screen mode

Control-⌘-F

Exit full-screen visuals

⌘-T, ⌘-F, Esc, or mouse click

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You can also control CD playback from the Dock. Right-click (or two-finger click) the iTunes icon to produce a pop-up menu offering playback commands like Pause, Next Song, and Previous Song, along with a display that identifies the song currently being played.

Sound Check: Preventing ear-blast syndrome

Here’s a clever touch: In iTunes→Preferences→Playback, you see a checkbox called Sound Check. Its function is to keep the playback volume of all songs within the same basic level so you don’t have to adjust the volume to compensate for different recorded levels. (This setting, too, gets transferred to your iPod, iPad, or iPhone.)

Come to think of it, you could while away quite a few happy afternoons just poking through the Preferences dialog box. It grows richer with every successive version of iTunes.

Playing with the graphic equalizer

If you choose Window→Equalizer, you get a handsome control console that lets you adjust the strength of each musical frequency independently (Figure 9-17).

Drag the sliders (bass on the left, treble on the right) to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of your speakers or headphones (and listening tastes). Or save yourself the trouble—use the pop-up menu above the sliders to choose a canned set of slider positions for Classical, Dance, Jazz, Latin, and so on. These settings even transfer to your i-gadgets.

Figure 9-17. Drag the sliders (bass on the left, treble on the right) to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of your speakers or headphones (and listening tastes). Or save yourself the trouble—use the pop-up menu above the sliders to choose a canned set of slider positions for Classical, Dance, Jazz, Latin, and so on. These settings even transfer to your i-gadgets.

DVD Movies

If your Mac has a DVD drive, watching movies on your screen couldn’t be simpler: Just insert a movie DVD. Unless you’ve fiddled with your preference settings, the DVD Player program opens and begins playing the movie in full-screen mode. (Even the menu bar disappears. To make it reappear, move your cursor to near the top of the screen.)

NOTE

If DVD Player doesn’t open automatically when you insert a DVD movie, you can open it yourself. It’s sitting there in your Applications folder. (Then fix the problem, using System Preferences CDs & DVDs.)

Top: Even in full-screen mode, you can control the playback and navigate the disc using the translucent, pop-up control bar.One especially cool feature is the Player Settings button. It opens the Zoom controls window shown here, which gives you manual control over the width and height of the picture on your screen.Don’t miss the scrubber bar at the very bottom, either. It lets you scroll directly to any spot in the DVD.Bottom: When you’re not in full-screen mode, you get a separate, floating “remote control.” It has most of the same controls, but they’re arranged with a more 1999 sort of design aesthetic.

Figure 9-18. Top: Even in full-screen mode, you can control the playback and navigate the disc using the translucent, pop-up control bar. One especially cool feature is the Player Settings button. It opens the Zoom controls window shown here, which gives you manual control over the width and height of the picture on your screen. Don’t miss the scrubber bar at the very bottom, either. It lets you scroll directly to any spot in the DVD. Bottom: When you’re not in full-screen mode, you get a separate, floating “remote control.” It has most of the same controls, but they’re arranged with a more 1999 sort of design aesthetic.

Playing a Movie

Once DVD Player starts playing your movie, you can move your mouse to the bottom of the screen, at any time, to bring up the control bar (Figure 9-18).

Or just use the keyboard controls, which appear here in this clip ’n’ save cheat sheet:

Function

Keystroke

Play, Pause

space bar

Fast-forward, rewind

Shift-⌘-, Shift-⌘- (press repeatedly to cycle to 3, 8, 16, and 32 times normal speed)

Skip forward/back 5 seconds

Option-⌘-, Option-⌘-

Louder, quieter

⌘-, ⌘-

Mute/Unmute

Option-⌘-

Next/previous “chapter”

,

Full-screen mode on/off

⌘-F

Half, normal, maximum size

⌘-1, ⌘-2, ⌘-3

Eject

⌘-E

Add a bookmark

⌘-= (equal sign)

Language Fun

Most Hollywood DVDs have been programmed with onscreen subtitles to help those with hearing impairments and people sitting in noisy bars. The Subtitle button offers a pop-up menu of alternative languages and subtitle options.

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For real fun, turn on English subtitles but switch the soundtrack to a foreign language. No matter how trashy the movie you’re watching, you’ll gain much more respect from your friends and family when you tell them you’re watching a foreign film.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: PARENTAL CONTROLS

The DVD parental controls in OS X aren’t much. You can’t say, for example, “Don’t play anything rated PG-13 or above”; you have to rate each DVD yourself, one at a time.

But that’s better than nothing.

Insert the DVD you’re worried about. Choose File→Get Disk Info. Click the Parental Controls tab.

Click the button and enter your administrator’s password. (Unless, of course, your 8-year-old is the administrator of this Mac instead of you, in which case this DVD is the least of your problems.)

Now you can select either “Always ask for authorization” or “Always allow to be played,” depending on your feelings about the movie. Click OK.

All you’ve done so far, however, is to specify what happens when you turn on parental controls—and you haven’t done that yet. Choosing Features→Enable Parental Control does the trick.

When parental control is turned on, nobody can watch the “Always ask for authorization” DVDs without correctly inputting your administrator’s password.

Which nobody knows except you. (Right?)

Chapter Thumbnails

A standard Hollywood DVD comes programmed with chapters—invisible markers that let you jump from the beginning of one important scene to the next. To see them in DVD Player, just move your mouse to the top of the screen. A row of chapter thumbnail images appears, which you can click to jump around in.

You can create your own scene thumbnails, too. That might not be an especially tempting feature when you’re playing Hollywood DVDs. But on homemade DVDs, made either by you or by somebody else, these custom scene markers can be handy signposts.

First choose Window→Chapters (⌘-B) to open the chapter thumbnail palette. Here you’ll find the existing scene breaks, which may or may not already have “poster frame” images.

All the action takes place in the Action menu () at the bottom of the panel. For example, it contains the Generate Missing Thumbnails command, for use on DVDs that have chapter breaks but no little poster frames to represent them.

Whether there’s a poster frame for a particular chapter or not, you can substitute an image of your own. Find the exact frame of the movie that you think looks better than what’s already in the Chapters palette; click the chapter in the palette, and, from the pop-up menu, choose Use Current Frame for Thumbnail. Presto: You’ve replaced the unhelpful (or nonexistent) chapter image with one that works better.

The Big Picture

Now, watching a movie while sitting in front of your Mac is not exactly the great American movie-watching dream. Fortunately, every recent Mac has a video-output jack; with the proper cables, you can connect the Mac to your TV for a much more comfortable movie-watching experience.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: REGION CHANGING

The first time I tried to play a DVD, I got this weird message about initializing the region code. What’s up with that?

Hollywood generally releases a movie in different parts of the world at different times. A movie may come out on video in the U.S. when it’s just hitting theater screens in Europe. We certainly can’t have people watching a DVD before the movie studio says it’s OK! That’s why many discs are region-locked, so that they play back only on players in certain geographic regions.

As a DVD player in disguise, your Mac is just doing its duty. You can change its region (you’ll be offered the chance to do so when you insert a region-locked DVD from another region), but only five times—and then it’s frozen forever in the fifth version.

The dialog box shows you which region your DVD is designed for: 1 for the U.S. and Canada; 2 for Japan, Europe, South Africa, and the Middle East; 3 for Southeast and East Asia; 4 for Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean; 5 for Eastern Europe, Africa, and North Korea; 6 for China; and 8 for airplanes, cruise ships, and so on. Any DVD that you burn yourself is assigned region 0, meaning that it will play anywhere.

(There’s no region 7. Maybe it’s reserved for the empty spot in movie executives’ hearts.)

Of course, if you have an Apple TV, then you can pull off the same stunt without any wires at all, using AirPlay. Read on.

AirPlay

If you’d shown this feature to the masses in 2005 or so, they’d have fallen down and worshiped it as a god.

Today, we’re used to wireless everything. But this is pretty cool: With one click, you can send whatever is on your Mac’s screen to your TV’s screen, in hi-def. No wires.

That stunt premiered on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4s. But on the Mac, AirPlay becomes far more useful. Now you can present photo slideshows on the TV from your laptop. Or play movies you’ve found online. Or give presentations from PowerPoint or Keynote. Or present software lessons to a class.

There is a catch, of course: This trick requires both a recent Mac model (mid-2011 or later) and an Apple TV. That’s a tiny, $100 black box that connects to a hi-def TV and lets you watch videos from services like YouTube, Netflix, MLB.TV, NBA, NHL, and Vimeo. It can also play videos, music, and photos from Macs or PCs on the network.

But with AirPlay, the Apple TV (and therefore your TV) can now play anything you can see on your Mac, including services like Hulu that aren’t available on the Apple TV alone. You can play your iTunes music while watching those cool screen-savery visualizers on your HDTV. And you can carry your $100 Apple TV around with you to corporate boardrooms to project your pitches, rather than a $1,500 projector.

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The Mac and the Apple TV have to be on the same wireless network—but that doesn’t mean they need a WiFi hotspot. You may remember that your laptop can create its own WiFi network (see The Get Info method). This ad hoc network isn’t connected to the Internet, of course, but other gadgets can connect to it. So if you’re someplace without a WiFi hotspot, you can still use AirPlay. Just create an ad hoc network on your laptop, and then choose that as your Apple TV’s network!

Using AirPlay is so simple, it would confuse only an AirHead. See Figure 9-19 for instructions.

“Match Desktop Size”

Once you turn on AirPlay, the AirPlay menulet lets you make an additional choice. A menu section called “Match Desktop Size To:” lets you choose either This Mac or Apple TV (or whatever you named your Apple TV).

Your Mac and your TV probably don’t have the same proportions and resolution. So the menu is asking: Which screen “wins”?

The factory setting is Apple TV. Your TV screen will be completely filled, although you might see black letterbox bars on your Mac’s screen. But if you’re watching TV shows or movies, for example, you won’t care.

Make sure the Apple TV is on the same WiFi network as your Mac. At that point, the AirPlay menulet appears automatically.Top: From it, choose the name of your Apple TV, and presto: Whatever is playing on your Mac simultaneously plays on your big screen, both stereo audio and 720p hi-def video.To stop sending your Mac’s A/V to your TV, choose “AirPlay Mirroring: Off” from the same menulet.Bottom: Specify which screen you want to impose its shape and resolution: the Mac or the TV.

Figure 9-19. Make sure the Apple TV is on the same WiFi network as your Mac. At that point, the AirPlay menulet appears automatically. Top: From it, choose the name of your Apple TV, and presto: Whatever is playing on your Mac simultaneously plays on your big screen, both stereo audio and 720p hi-def video. To stop sending your Mac’s A/V to your TV, choose “AirPlay Mirroring: Off” from the same menulet. Bottom: Specify which screen you want to impose its shape and resolution: the Mac or the TV.

If you choose This Mac instead, the picture will look normal on your Mac, but you might see black letterbox bars on the TV. That might be better for a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, for example, where you want the TV to show exactly what the Mac shows.

Your choice here may affect the magnification of the image on your TV, too, since its resolution and your Mac’s probably don’t match.

System Preferences

In System Preferences→Displays, you’ll find an AirPlay Mirroring pop-up menu that duplicates the AirPlay menulet described above. You’ll also find a checkbox called “Show mirroring options in the menu bar when available.” That’s the on/off switch for the AirPlay menulet. When this option is turned on, and the Mac uses The Force to detect the presence of a nearby Apple TV, the AirPlay menulet appears automatically.

AirPlay Sound

Not all Macs have the hardware horsepower to send video to an Apple TV; those made before mid-2011, for example, probably don’t. But even those Macs can still send audio to your Apple TV (or your AirPort Express base station), and from there to what’s presumably a better sound system than your Mac’s puny built-in speakers.

The official way to do that: Open System Preferences→Sound→Output. Click the name of the Apple TV or AirPort Express in the list of speakers.

But there are two faster ways:

§ Press Option as you open the menulet. The items in this menu magically sprout previously invisible choices—like Apple TV and your other AirPlay gear.

§ If you just want to play music that’s in iTunes, you can choose your Apple TV’s name (or AirPort Express’s name) from the pop-up button in the lower-right corner of the window.

Keyboards

As you know by now, switching to the Mac entails switching your brain, especially when it comes to the old keyboard shortcuts. All of those Ctrl-key sequences become, on the Mac, ⌘-key sequences. (Check your Macintosh keyboard: The ⌘ key is right next to the space bar, usually on both sides.)

But plenty of other Mac keys may seem unfamiliar. For your reassurance, Chapter 1 offers a rundown of what they do.

Text-Navigation Keystrokes

In Windows, you may have grown accustomed to certain common keystrokes for navigating text—key combinations that make the insertion point jump to the beginning or end of a word, line, or document, for example.

OS X programs offer similar navigation keystrokes, as you can see here:

Function

Windows keys

Mac keys

Move to previous/next word

Ctrl+ , Ctrl+

Option- , Option-

Move to beginning/end of line

Home/End

Home/End*

Move to previous/next paragraph

Ctrl+, Ctrl+*

Option-, Option-*

Move to top/bottom of window

Home/End

Home/End (but see below)

Select all text

Ctrl+A

⌘-A

Select text, one letter at a time

Shift+, Shift+

Shift-, Shift-

Select text, one word at a time

Ctrl+Shift+arrow keys

Option-Shift-arrow keys

Undo

Ctrl+Z

⌘-Z

Cut, Copy, Paste

Ctrl+X, C, V

⌘-X, C, V

Close window

Alt+F4

⌘-W

Switch open programs

Alt+Tab

⌘-Tab

Hide all windows

+D

F11

* in some programs

Incidentally, the keystroke for jumping to the top or bottom of a window varies, depending on the program. You need ⌘-Home/End in Microsoft Word, ⌘-up/down arrow in TextEdit and Stickies, and Home/End in iPhoto and Finder list windows.

Mouse

Most USB mice work as soon as you plug them into your Mac—even two-button, scroll-wheel mice. Using System Preferences, you can program your spare mouse buttons to invoke cool features like Exposé and the Dashboard.

That’s not to say, however, that you shouldn’t install your mouse’s driver software. If your mouse came with such software (or if you find it on the manufacturer’s Web site), you may well find that your mouse learns a few new tricks—making its “back” and “forward” buttons work properly in Safari, for example. Otherwise, a shareware program like USB Overdrive ($20, from www.usboverdrive.com) can unlock those features. (For more on Mac mice, see Logging Out, Shutting Down.)

Monitors

Your Mac can use standard monitors of the type found in the Windows world. Every Macintosh can drive multiple screens at the same time, too, meaning that you can generally use your old PC screen either as your Mac’s main monitor or as a second, external screen.

If one of those arrangements appeals to you, the only complication might be the connector. Most PC screens, of course, have a standard VGA connector (or a more modern DVI connector) at the tip of their tails. Over the years, however, Apple has “standardized” on enough different screen-plug types to fill a catalog. There’s been DVI, Mini-DVI, Micro-DVI, Mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt—you get the idea.

For the proper fee, Apple will be happy to sell you whatever adapter cable you need to accommodate the monitor you’ve got.

TIP

It’s even possible to connect both your Mac and your PC to the same monitor, and to switch from one to the other at will. If this arrangement appeals to you, you’ll need a so-called KVM switch (which also lets you switch your keyboard and mouse between the two computers). You can find KVM switches for sale at electronics stores and online from manufacturers like Belkin (www.belkin.com).

In any case, the center of operations for all your monitor settings is the System Preferences→Displays panel. Here you set your monitor’s resolution, calibrate color balance and brightness, and turn AirPlay on and off—a cool feature that duplicates whatever is on your Mac screen on a TV set. Wirelessly.

TIP

You can open up this panel with a quick keystroke from any program on the Mac. Just press Option as you tap one of the screen-brightness keys on the top row of your keyboard.

The specific controls depend on the kind of monitor you’re using, but here are the ones you’ll most likely see.

Display Tab

This tab is the main headquarters for your screen controls. It governs these settings:

§ Resolution. All Mac screens today can make the screen picture larger or smaller, thus accommodating different kinds of work. You perform this magnification or reduction by switching among different resolutions (measurements of the number of dots that compose the screen).

When you use a low-resolution setting, such as 800 x 600, the dots of your screen image get larger, thus enlarging (zooming in on) the picture—but showing a smaller slice of the page. Use this setting when playing a small Web movie, for example, so that it fills more of the screen. (Lower resolutions usually look blurry on flat-panel screens, though.) At higher resolutions, such as 1280 x 800, the screen dots get smaller, making your windows and icons smaller, but showing more overall area. You could use this kind of setting when working on two-page spreads in your page-layout program, for example.

If you select “Best for built-in display,” the Mac uses the highest resolution possible for your Mac’s screen—the one that makes it look sharpest. The list of other resolution settings your monitor can accommodate—800 x 600, 1024 x 768, and so on—doesn’t appear unless you turn on Scaled.

TIP

New and weird in Mavericks: Option-click the Scaled button to see some additional, less common display resolutions.

§ Brightness. This slider lets you make the screen look good in the prevailing lighting conditions. Of course, most Apple keyboards have brightness-adjustment keys, so this software control is included just for the sake of completeness.

§ Automatically adjust brightness. Your laptop’s light sensor dims the screen automatically in dark rooms—if this checkbox is turned on.

Arrangement Tab (Multiple Monitors)

From the dawn of the color-monitor era, Macs have had a terrific feature: the ability to exploit multiple monitors all plugged into the computer at the same time. Sometimes you want the Mac to project the same thing on both screens (mirror mode); that’s useful in a classroom when the “external monitor” is a projector. Other times, you want to make one monitor act as an extension of the next. For example, you might have your Photoshop image window on your big monitor but keep all the Photoshop controls and tool palettes on a smaller screen. Your cursor passes from one screen to the other as it crosses the boundary.

To connect a second monitor or a projector, you have a couple of options:

§ The wired way. Connect the appropriate cable or adapter to your Mac’s video-output jack. This jack may be any of three types these days. Mac laptops and iMacs use a weird, tiny connector called a Mini DisplayPort; you need an adapter cord to connect it to the VGA, DVI, or HDMI input that most monitors or projectors expect.

All Macs these days also have something called Thunderbolt jacks. You can connect them to a few Thunderbolt-equipped external monitors, notably Apple’s.

Finally, there’s the black, cylindrical Mac Pro. It also has an HDMI jack, which is the easiest of all to connect to screens and projectors.

To set this up, hook up the monitor or projector. Your Mac should discover (and start projecting to) the external screen automatically; if it doesn’t, close and then reopen the lid (if you’re using a laptop), or choose Detect Displays from the Displays menulet.

Top: Use the menulet to control whether the TV displays a mirror image of your Mac or an extension of it. To stop sending your Mac’s A/V to your TV, choose Disconnect AirPlay Display from the same menulet.Bottom: Whenever two monitors are going, the Arrangement tab lets you specify which one gets the menu bar, and where the monitors think they are relative to each other.

Figure 9-20. Top: Use the menulet to control whether the TV displays a mirror image of your Mac or an extension of it. To stop sending your Mac’s A/V to your TV, choose Disconnect AirPlay Display from the same menulet. Bottom: Whenever two monitors are going, the Arrangement tab lets you specify which one gets the menu bar, and where the monitors think they are relative to each other.

§ The wireless way. You can also connect your Mac to a TV wirelessly—if you have an Apple TV. This feature is called AirPlay, and it’s described on AirPlay.

Once you’ve connected a second screen, with a cable or without, a different System Preferences→Displays window appears on each screen. The idea is that you can change the color and resolution settings independently for each. Your Displays menulet shows two sets of resolutions, too—one for each screen.

The Arrangement tab (Figure 9-20, bottom) shows a miniature version of each monitor. By dragging these thumbnails around within the window, you can specify how you want the second monitor’s image “attached” to the first. Most people position the second monitor’s image to the right of the first, but you’re also free to position it on the left, above, below, or even directly on top of the first monitor’s icon (the last of which produces a video-mirroring setup). For the least likelihood of going insane, consider placing the real-world monitor in the same position.

For committed multiple-monitor fanatics, the fun doesn’t stop there. See the microscopic menu bar on the first-monitor icon? You can drag that tiny strip onto a different monitor icon, if you like, to tell Displays where you’d like your menu bar to appear. (And check out how most screen savers correctly show different stuff on each monitor!)

TIP

If you close your laptop while it’s connected to an external monitor, the machine doesn’t go to sleep. Instead, it keeps the external monitor on. The laptop remains on, so you can keep right on working, as though the laptop were the brains for a big-screen Mac.

When you’re not mirroring, here’s what you can expect:

§ The menu bar appears on every monitor. It’s bright and alive on only one screen at a time, though; on the other screens, it’s dimmed and unavailable until you click it.

§ The Dock appears on only one screen at a time. As you start working on a different screen, move your cursor to the bottom edge to make the Dock jump there. (That’s if you’ve positioned the Dock at the bottom. If you’ve placed it on the left or right, vertically, it stays on the leftmost or rightmost monitor all the time.)

§ Mission Control appears independently on every screen. That is, when you do the three-finger swipe upward, whatever programs are on each screen shrink down. You can even create separate sets of Spaces on each screen; it’s exactly as though you’re using multiple Macs and not just multiple screens.

Color Tab

This pane offers a list of color profiles for your monitor (or, if you turn off “Show profiles for this display only,” for all monitors). Each profile represents colors slightly differently—a big deal for design and photography types.

When you click Calibrate, the Display Calibrator Assistant opens to walk you through a series of six screens, presenting various brightness and color-balance settings in each screen. You pick the settings that look best to you; at the end of the process, you save your monitor tweaks as a ColorSync profile, which your Mac uses to adjust the screen for improved color accuracy.

Scanners

OS X gives you two programs that can operate any standard scanner: Image Capture and Preview. The controls are identical in both programs.

To scan in Image Capture, turn on your scanner and click its name in the left-side list. Put your photos or documents into the scanner.

Now you have a couple of decisions to make:

§ Separate and straighten? If you turn on “Detect separate items” in the Scan Size menu, OS X will perform a nifty little stunt indeed: It will check to see if you’ve put multiple items onto the scanner glass, like several small photos. (It looks for rectangular images surrounded by empty space, so if the photos are overlapping, this feature won’t work.)

If it finds multiple items, Image Capture automatically straightens them, compensating for haphazard placement on the glass, and then saves them as individual files.

§ Where to file. Use the “Scan to” pop-up menu to specify where you want the newly scanned image files to land—in the Pictures folder, for example. You have some other cool options beyond sticking the scans in a folder; for example, you can send the resulting image to iPhoto, Preview, or Mail.

Once you’ve put a document onto it or into it, click Scan. The scanner heaves to life. After a moment, you see on the screen what’s on the glass. It’s simultaneously been sent to the folder (or post-processing task) you requested using the “Scan to” pop-up menu.

More Power To You

As you can see, Apple has tried to make basic scanning as simple as possible: one click. That idiotproof method gives you very few options, however.

If you click Show Details before you scan, though, you get a special panel on the right side of the window that’s filled with useful scanning controls (Figure 9-21).

Here are some of the most useful options:

§ Resolution. This is the number of tiny scanned dots per inch. 300 is about right for something you plan to print out; 75 is standard for graphics that will be viewed on the screen, like images on a Web page.

§ Name. Here, specify how you want each image file named when it lands on your hard drive. If it says Scan, then the files will be called Scan 1, Scan 2, and so on.

§ Format. Usually, the file format for scanned graphics is TIFF. That’s a very high-res format that’s ideal if you’re scanning precious photos for posterity. But if these images are bound for the Web, you might want to choose JPEG instead; that’s the standard Web format.

§ Image Correction. If you choose Manual from this pop-up menu, then, incredibly, you’ll be treated to a whole expando-panel of color correction tools: brightness, tint, saturation, a histogram, and so on.

When you use the Show Details button, you get a new panel on the right, where you can specify all the tweaky details for the scan you’re about to make: resolution, size, and so on. See how the photos have individual dotted lines around them? That’s because Detect Separate Items is turned on. These will be scanned into two separate files.

Figure 9-21. When you use the Show Details button, you get a new panel on the right, where you can specify all the tweaky details for the scan you’re about to make: resolution, size, and so on. See how the photos have individual dotted lines around them? That’s because Detect Separate Items is turned on. These will be scanned into two separate files.

Opening the Details panel has another handy benefit, too: It lets you scan only a portion of what’s on the scanner glass.

Once you’ve put the document or photo into the scanner, click Overview. Image Capture does a quick pass and displays on the screen whatever is on the glass. You’ll see a dotted-line rectangle around the entire scanned image—unless you’ve turned on “Detect separate images,” in which case you see a dotted-line rectangle around each item on the glass.

You can adjust these dotted-line rectangles until you’ve enclosed precisely the portion of the image you want scanned. For example, drag the rectangles’ corner handles to resize them; drag inside the rectangles to move them; drag the right end of the line inside the rectangle to rotate it; preview the rotation by pressing Control and Option.

Finally, when you think you’ve got the selection rectangle(s) correctly positioned, click Scan to trigger the actual scan.