Getting my first mac today OSX Questions

smithy

smithy

designer.
Hi well im new to this forum and osx....

im gettin my first mac today, an emac. After about nearly 10 years of pc's im over them now so ive switched. But i have a few questions about osx. Ive played around with it alot at the apple centre on the emacs, and really i find it pretty easy to use. But what really confuses me is like eg in windows when u close a program pressing the x the program is no longer running. But correct me if im wrong but in os x when u close eg ummm flash or something that is running the arrow is still underneath the icon in the dock.. So does this meen the program is still running and u have to force quit it by right clicking and force quit? Well once i get it i may run into more questions i may need to ask but yer... Anyways i better go and pick up my new mac!!

thanks alot
 
Congratulations! You'll love your new Mac. If you don't, just ship it to me -- I can always use another one. ;)

You are mostly correct -- when you click the red button to close a document, it does not quit the application, it merely closes the document. And yes, you can right-click the app in the dock to quit it, but that's not a force quit. The only time that would be a force quit would be if the app hangs and stops responding. Then right-clicking in the dock will bring up a menu with the choice "force quit." Normally the context menu will just say "quit."

The Mac's memory management is so good, though, that most of us just leave our apps open all the time. An open app that has no open documents will just hang around in the background, not taking up any of your precious RAM or cpu cycles. And when you just leave it running, it's ready to use at a moment's notice. During the course of a day, I generally end up with, oh, easily two dozen or more apps running, and I just leave them running. And I'm somewhat unusual, I think, in that I shut down my Mac every night and start with a clean slate every morning. Many Mac users pretty much never shut down and never quit anything. I know people who have had Photoshop, Word, Mail, Safari, iCal, and a zillion other programs running continuously for weeks at a time.

So really ... don't worry about quitting apps. Once you get used to the app still running even after you close its last document, you'll wonder how you ever managed any other way.
 
Add: There are a handful of apps that do quit when you close their window. These are generally applications where you can't have multiple documents open at once. If the application is its window, then generally the app will quit when you close its window. System Preferences is one, the Calculator is another. I thought iTunes also had that behavior, but I just tested it and it stayed running even after I closed its window.
 
It's my understanding that windows and Mac OS X operate in a similar fashion. When you close a window (click the "X", or click the red dot) the connected app may still be running. On Windows you have just closed out an instance, when there may be other instances still running (multiple instances of IE, for example) The app's main code may continue to run, depending on the app, even with all instances closed. There may be no visual indication of an app still continuing to run. This is partly why Windows opens apps again very quickly once they have been opened.
The Mac OS X app will continue to run until you choose quit (you can calmly right-click on the apps icon in the dock, and choose Quit. There's usually no need to force-quit, ever. Unless an app stops responding, or other software issues can happen. And, you can choose to let the app run, even with all its windows closed. The OS X will manage many dormant apps, and you will find that windows for such apps will open more quickly (similar to Windows)
Of course, this may be over-simplified, and it's difficult to compare oranges to Apples :) I am just pointing out some basic similarities between Windows and OS X.
If you prefer to completely quit any Mac app, then don't close the last window, just click on the app's name in the top menu, and choose quit (hint: you can also do a Cmd-Q, which will quit virtually any app that uses Apple's standard GUI. )
 
Hey thanks alot for such a quick reply!!! Well my emac is finishing the intsall oh it needs disc 2 just wacked it in thanks alot everyone !! cya
 
Just curious :) Have you already had a problem? Why did you need to reload your system software so quickly?
 
Hey - well im on my mac and its GREAT !!! actually i thought it would be way more faster since i have 1gb of ram and 1.25ghz G4 ... ah well.. Oh yer nah it just says to wack in the cd's when the system starts up for the first time. Anyways thanks alot for your help Delta mac!! greatly appreciated
 
Hi Smithy
Welcome to the Mac and the forum.

To close the program and the window at the same time, you can use cmd+Q (rather like alt+F4). Carefully though, OSX was made to multitask and keeping apps open, ready to use is one of the beauties of the beast.

I often have seven to ten programs running at the same time. The OS keeps them all sorted out.

But you'll want to have RAM, lots of RAM.
 
Hey Smithy, welcome to our little community. Just another couple of tips to get you flying along in Mac OS X.

- Cycle through the programs by pressing Cmd-Tab (cmd is the open-Apple key next to the space bar). Pressing Cmd-Tab once takes you to the last program you were in. Pressing it repeatedly cycles through the programs in the dock ... you'll see the highlight move along the icons of the active apps as you hold Cmd and press tab. Now for some real magic: while you're still holding Cmd and the dock icon is highlighted, press H to hide that app, or Q to quit it. I get into the habit of going Cmd-Tab then, still holding Cmd, pressing Q, Q, Q ... this lets you quit all your open apps, which might be handy if you need to free up some resources for a bout of UT2004. :)

- Now, to cycle amongst documents within *most* applications, press Cmd-` (` is the one to the left of the 1 key, and above the Tab key). This way, you can cycle through all the windows you have open for a particular application.

- Try out tabbed browsing in Safari. Cmd-Click a link and it'll open the link in a new tab.

- Ctrl-click is usually an equivalent to right-click.

Have fun!
 
Yer thanks everyone for helping out i worked out how to do all them now.. After using osx all day i think im gettin really used to it now. And its great !! Anyways thanks again bye !
 
oh i just rembered... i posted a new topic abot how thsese like icons appear on my desktop and when u click em it opens the application folder. I downloaded msn messenger 4 and the like white harddrive symbol is on the desktop and when u click it - it opens a new window with the msn messenger. And when i move the icon to another place it just puts a shortcut or alias to that icon on the desktop. Like its just sorta annoying is it spose to be there ? or have i done something weird... Anwyays thanks again and sorry for being a pain
 
MSN is a cpu hog in MacOS and, from what you post, seems it does other illegal things too. I removed it from my machine ages ago. May I politely recommend Adium, Fire or Proteus (find them all at macupdate or versiontracker - Adium and Fire are free, Proteus is you-really-ought-to-pay-me-for-this-ware). These are multi-protocol clients that let you handle your yahoo, msn, aim, icq and even other accounts in one go. Very nice, even if you're only going to use msn. (I have settled into using just Adium, for no particular reason.)

Symphonix - you show the depth of your commitment. ;) Open Apple? Like, has it been called that since the Apple ][? :):):)

Also, the position of the tilde key (to cycle through documents) depends on the keyboard. My eMac and my iBook both have it next to the left shift key. It makes cycling an easy keystroke.
 
The white disk icon is a virtual drive - the mounted "dmg" file. You shouldn't need it all the time. And you don't want to copy that to anyplace (I guess it is why you get the alias/shortcut). Just open it and (usually) drag the app that's on it to your application folder. (If it's a pkg file, just double click on the pkg.) Then you can eject the white disk (drag it to the trash). You can either archive the "dmg" file or just toss it out too.
 
Just to explain this a little more (and hopefully not in too difficult a way...):

The Mac desktop by default shows you the volumes ('disks') that are actually mounted. You don't see a 'DVD drive' anywhere, if there isn't a disk inside of it. That's a basic difference between the Mac and Windows.

As pds has said, the white disks you're seeing are mounted 'disk image files'. Those files end on .dmg and contain a 'virtual disk'. They mount if you doubleclick the .dmg files or - if your webbrowser is set to do it - automatically on downloading them.

Often, they just contain one important icon - the application you've downloaded. You drag this (the application's icon) to the 'Applications' folder to copy it there. After that, you can unmount the 'virtual disk' by either dragging it to the trash, hitting Cmd-E (Apple key and 'e' key) or clicking on the little eject button next to the volume in a Finder window's sidebar.
 
Thanks alot Everyone for helping me... So this Adium and Fire programs do they connnect seamlessly to msn messenger. Cause i noticed when i was using msn messenger fireworks and flash mx 04 were running rather slow. So i would beleive that and ecespceially since microsoft made it of course it would hog the cpu like windows xp does. Thanks alot for replying again but i would like to know more about those chat programs lilke with ur opioion yanno thanks alot again !! cya
 
DeltaMac,

Incidentally, Windows programs usually run in one master window with sub windows. So, generally, if you close the window, the program quits.

This is something that confuses Windows owners to no end about the Mac.

In OS X, it's really not an issue unless you have a poorly programmed app that is a processor hog. And that's rare.

Doug
 
Proteus seems to use less RAM than Fire .. and that uses as well msn, YIM, AIM, ICQ .. Fire was pretty slow (at least 2.x of them) with not so much RAM.
Fire and Proteus are both quite compaitble with msn - logs in, works .. try maybe all of them to find out the one you like the most. ;)
 
File Quit, or command Q to quit a APP. i hate PEECEE users when they use macs and just close the window leaving the app still open and they think it's closed, stupid windoze
 
hehe, I perfectly remember when I was also under the impression the application was closed once you press the red X in the corner like my WinXP in those days.. I was always surprised how fast the app opened once I needed it again. ;)
 
jimbo61, give him a break! It's his first Mac, and he came here for help on how best to use it and what differences there were. No need to call him names or anything -- he just doesn't know all the ins and outs of Mac OS X yet. Help him, don't bash him!

symphonix: I can tell you're an old-school Mac user, like I am... I still refer to the Command key as the "Open-Apple" key... I'll bet half the users here don't remember, once upon a time, there were TWO Apple keys on old Apple/Macintosh computer keyboards: "open apple" and "closed apple" that did different things... hehe... those were the days!
 
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