macOS Sierra For Dummies. Bob LeVitus
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Название: macOS Sierra For Dummies

Автор: Bob LeVitus

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Зарубежная образовательная литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781119280675

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СКАЧАТЬ like the ones in Figure 2-2 or work as described in the following list, don’t worry. These are System Preferences you can configure to your heart’s desire, which you can discover in Chapter 5.

      Here are some ways you can scroll in a window:

      ❯❯ Click a scroll bar and drag. The content of the window scrolls proportionally to how far you drag the scroll bar.

      ❯❯ Click in the scroll bar area but don’t click the scroll bar itself. The window scrolls either one page up (if you click above the scroll bar) or down (if you click below the scroll bar). You can change a setting in your General System Preference pane to cause the window to scroll proportionally to where you click.

      

For what it’s worth, the Page Up and Page Down keys on your keyboard function the same way as clicking the white scroll area (the vertical scroll bar only) in the Finder and many applications. These keys don’t work in every program, though, so don’t become too dependent on them. Also, if you purchased a mouse, trackball, or other pointing device that has a scroll wheel, you can scroll vertically in the active (front) window with the scroll wheel or press and hold down the Shift key to scroll horizontally. Alas, this horizontal scrolling-with-the-Shift-key works in Finder windows but not in all applications. For example, it works in the Apple TextEdit application, but not in Microsoft Word.

      ❯❯ Use the keyboard. In the Finder, first click an icon in the window and then use the arrow keys to move up, down, left, or right. Using an arrow key selects the next icon in the direction it indicates – and automatically scrolls the window, if necessary. In other programs, you might or might not be able to use the keyboard to scroll. The best advice I can give you is to try it – either it will work or it won’t.

      ❯❯ Use a two-finger swipe (on a trackpad). If you have a notebook with a trackpad or use a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, just move the arrow cursor over the window and then swipe the trackpad with two fingers to scroll.

(Hyper)active windows

      To work within a window, the window must be active. The active window is always the frontmost window, and inactive windows always appear behind the active window. Only one window can be active at a time. To make a window active, click it anywhere – in the middle, on the title bar, or on a scroll bar. It doesn’t matter where; just click anywhere to activate it.

      

The exceptions are the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons on inactive windows, which always do what they do, regardless of whether a window is active or inactive.

Look at Figure 2-3 for an example of an active window in front of an inactive window (the Applications window and the Utilities window, respectively).

       FIGURE 2-3: An active window in front of an inactive window.

      The following is a list of the major visual cues that distinguish active from inactive windows:

      ❯❯ The active window’s title bar: By default, the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons are bright red, yellow, and green, respectively. If you chose the Graphite Appearance in the General System Preferences pane, they’ll be dark gray; the inactive windows’ buttons are light gray regardless of Appearance settings.

      ❯❯

This is a nice visual cue. Colored items are active, and gray ones are inactive. Better still, if you move your mouse over an inactive window’s gumdrop buttons, they light up in their usual colors so you can close, minimize, or zoom an inactive window without first clicking it to making it active. Neat!

      ❯❯ The active window’s toolbar: Toolbar buttons are darker and more distinctive; the inactive window’s toolbar buttons are light gray and more subdued.

      ❯❯ The active window’s drop shadow: Notice how the active window has a more prominent shadow? This tricks your eye into thinking the active window is in front of the inactive one.

      One last thing: If you’re wondering how to resize a window, just hover the cursor over a window’s edge or corner or over the dividing line between two panes in the same window (such as the Sidebar and the main area of Finder windows). A helpful little arrow appears as a visual cue that you can now drag the edge, corner, or dividing line to resize the window or pane.

      Dialog Dealie-Boppers

      Dialogs are special windows that pop up over the active window. You generally see them when you select a menu item that ends in an ellipsis (…).

Dialogs can contain a number of standard Mac features (I call them dealie-boppers), such as radio buttons, pop-up menus, tabs, text entry fields, and check boxes. You see these features again and again in dialogs. Take a moment to look at each of these dealie-boppers in Figure 2-4.

      ❯❯ Radio buttons: Radio buttons are so named because, like the buttons on your car radio (if you have a very old car), only one at a time can be active. (When they’re active, they appear to be pushed in, just like the old radio buttons.) Radio buttons always appear in a group of two or more; when you select one, all the others are automatically deselected.

      

Here’s a nifty and undocumented shortcut: You can usually select check boxes and radio buttons by clicking their names (instead of the buttons or boxes).

      ❯❯ Tabs: When a dialog contains more information than can fit in a single window, the info may be divided among panes denoted by tabs. In Figure 2-4, the New Document tab is selected on the left, and the Open and Save tab is selected on the right.

      ❯❯ Pop-up menus: These menus are appropriately named because that’s what they do: They pop up when you click them. In Figure 2-4, the Styling menu has been clicked and is popped up; the other pop-up menus – Opening Files, Saving Files, Document Type, and Encoding (mostly obscured by the popped-up Styling menu) – are unclicked and unpopped.

      You can always recognize a pop-up menu because it appears in a slightly rounded rectangle and has a double-ended arrow symbol (or a pair of triangles, if you like) on the right.

      Have you figured out yet what radio buttons, tabs, and pop-up menus have in common? Hint: All three enable you to make a single selection from a group of options. (Well, okay, that was more of an answer than a hint.)

      ❯❯ Text-entry fields: In text entry fields, you type text (including numbers) from the keyboard. In Figure 2-4, the Width, Height, Author, Organization, and Copyright options are text-entry fields.

      ❯❯ Check boxes: The last dealie-bopper that you see frequently is the check box. In a group of check boxes, you can select as many options as you like. Check boxes are selected when they contain a check mark, and they’re deselected when they’re empty, as shown in Figure 2-4.

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