A Month with a Mac - Part II: The Mobile Experience

More fun with OS X

One interesting feature of OS X's Finder is something that's referred to as spring-loaded folders. Say you have a folder and a file in your desktop. You want to put the file in a folder within the folder on your desktop. Normally, you'd have to open the folder on your desktop, then either drag the file on top of the folder within or open that folder and then drag the file in there. Here's where spring-loaded folders come into play: simply drag the file over the first folder and hold it there. That folder will open, and you can drop the file on the destination folder within. You can repeat the process as many times as you'd like, just keep on holding the file over folders and they will keep on opening just like that.

A video example of spring-loaded folders in action. Right click and save the movie to download. The movie is reduced in dimensions to provide for a smaller download size. Also note that the delay before the activation of a spring-loaded folder is completely customizable. The movie simply depicts the default "medium" speed, but it can be made faster or slower.

One thing that's always annoying about saving files or opening files in any program on any OS is the following situation:

You're in a program, such as Photoshop. You are trying to save a file in a particular location, say in a folder deep within your file system. But when you open the save dialog box, the default location is somewhere far away from your desired save location. Normally, you just use the save dialog box to navigate to that location and deal with it. And some of the time, you have a window open with that location sitting on your screen, mocking you as you try to use a separate dialog box to navigate to that same location.

OS X provides an interesting feature - simply drag any file into the save dialog box and the dialog box will go automatically to the location of that file. I find it especially useful in Photoshop when doing image work for AnandTech articles.

A video example of the benefits of Exposé as well as the drag feature described above - right click and save the movie to download. First, I use Exposé essentially to find a needle in a haystack of pictures, then I drag a folder into the save dialog box to jump to my desired save location. Note that the video isn't the smoothest depiction of Exposé because it's captured at 30 fps. In actuality, the Exposé function is much smoother. Also ignore any compression artifacts that were introduced as a result of the encoding/scaling of the movie file - this is purely a functional demonstration.

Although I didn't comment on it much in the first article, being the keyboard junkie that I am and having developed most of my fascination for computers during the VAX and DOS days, I've come to also appreciate OS X's Terminal application. Terminal serves as your conduit to the BSD base of OS X; it's your own BSD command prompt surrounded by a much better GUI. Even in the Windows world, I found myself using the command prompt as much as possible (I'd even ftp using it). Unlike the Windows command prompt, Terminal actually interfaces quite well with the rest of OS X. For example, if you have a file, drag it into an open Terminal window and the entire path to that file will be copied into the window for you. It actually makes interacting with the file system from the command prompt quite easy.

A video example of dragging a folder into a Terminal window to fill in the absolute location of that folder automatically within the file system - right click and save the movie to download.

Terminal is also a very powerful tool for things outside of managing the file system. User permissions, burning a CD, creating and extracting archives, and just about anything that you can do in a BSD OS, you can do from the Terminal. I've never been a huge BSD user, so I get limited use out of the more application/admin centric features of Terminal, but there are others who will appreciate it more than me.

Another feature that I didn't touch on was the freely downloadable X11 for OS X client. Using X11 for OS X, you can run X11 applications within the OS X interface. It's useful for college and university students in engineering programs where a lot of the applications that they use are X11 apps or are on machines they have to access remotely using ssh. I know it's something that came in handy for me during my last semester of Computer Engineering, especially while doing a lot of my Verilog design work, which could only be done on Sun/Unix machines.