- Get to Know Your Desktop and Finder
- Get to Know Your Finder Windows
- Get to Know Your Home and its Folders
- Take Advantage of the Sidebar
- Change the View of the Finder Window
- Use the Buttons in the Finder Window
- Select Multiple Items in the Finder
- Use the Dock
- Use the Trash
- Understand the Various Disk Icons
- Understand the Various Library Folders
- Use Mac OS X Together with Mac OS 9
- Look for Contextual Menus
- Work with Keyboard Shortcuts
- Burn a CD or DVD
- Learn Simple Troubleshooting Techniques
- Learn More About Mac OS X
- What You've Learned
Understand the Various Disk Icons
In the top portion of the Sidebar, you probably see something similar to the example shown below—you might see more icons and you might see fewer. These icons represent hard disks, networks, a CD, a DVD, an iPod, or any other type of removable media.
Display the contents of each item the same way you do any of the items in the lower portion of the Sidebar: single-click the icon.
The iDisk is your personal storage space on Apple's computers, which is something you get when you sign up for a .Mac account (see Lesson 11). A single click on the iDisk icon connects you to that storage space, as shown above.
The Network icon is useful when you have multiple computers linked together, either with cables or wirelessly. Use this icon as one way to connect to the other computers. See Lesson 10.
The Macintosh HD is your main hard disk, the one that holds the operating system. See the details on the opposite page. You can rename your hard disk at any time, so yours might not be called “Macintosh HD” anymore.
When you see the eject symbol to the right of an icon (the triangle with a bar under it), that means it is a removable disk of some sort. It might be a CD, a DVD, an iPod, or even another computer that you are connected to over the network. Click on the symbol to eject or disconnect the item.
View your Home folder from the hard disk
Above you see another way of looking at your Home folder. You can tell by the highlight that I clicked on the hard drive icon “Macintosh HD” in the top portion of the Sidebar. This displayed the folders stored on that hard drive; you can see them in the column to the right.
Then I clicked on “Users,” which displayed my Home folder in the next column. If you make any other users, as explained in Lesson 9, you will see all of those users here.
Then I clicked on “robin,” which displayed my Home folders in the next column. Notice the folders in this column have the same names as the folders in the Sidebar; that's because they're the same folders. In this view you can see where they are stored on your Mac. Do you see the Applications folder?
Experiment with these different ways of accessing your Home folders until you feel comfortable about where things are stored on your Mac.