Chapter 6
| About the Macintosh Chapter 6 |
The System is what makes your Mac a Mac. It's the software that handles files, folders, drives, menus, displays, dialogs and everything else that happens on your machine. And all the nuts and bolts are located in the System Folder on your hard disk. It's very dangerous for beginners to tamper with the System Folder (which is why System 7.5 lets you protect it via the General Controls control panel) but more experienced Mac users will find themselves working with it a lot.
And one of the easiest ways of grasping how the System works is to take a tour through some of the items in the System Folder...
If you want an item to appear in-your Apple menu, simply drag it (or an alias) into this folder. If you want to find out more about the Apple menu, turn back to chapter four.
Whenever you copy anything while you're working (a picture, or a piece of text, for example) it's saved to this temporary Clipboard file. When you 'paste' what you've copied into a new document or new location, it's the contents of the Clipboard you paste. The Clipboard stores the last thing you copied indefinitely - until you copy something new.
Quick tip: you can see what's currently stored in the Clipboard file by choosing the Show Clipboard option from the Edit menu when you're in the Finder (i.e. back at the Desktop and not within an application).
This is the folder where the control panels are stored (see chapter five for more on control panels). Control panels are part of the operating system and they let you modify the way your Mac does things. As your Macintosh starts up, it loads control panels and System Extensions (which we'll look at shortly) as part of the operating system before even the Desktop appears. Some applications install control panels of their own in addition to those that come as part of the Mac's operating system. That's because these programs offer features that need to interact with the operating system at a very basic level.
Quick tip: it's a big feature of System 7.5 that you can drag control panels, System Extensions and Fonts (see the next two items) onto your System Folder icon, and the System will put them in the right place.
Extensions are very similar to control panels, in that they load up alongside the System software when you start up your Macintosh. That's why they're called 'Extensions' - they extend the capabilities of the System software. Many Extensions are supplied with your Macintosh, and many more are installed when you install new applications. The real difference between Extensions and control panels is that Extensions don't have any settings for you to adjust.
Note that both control panels and Extensions can cause 'conflicts'. It all depends on whether they have been programmed according to the 'rules' laid down by Apple's engineers and how many extra Extensions and control panels have been added to your System Folder. A conflict occurs when two Extensions/control panels 'fight' for the same bit of memory, or other Macintosh resource. If this happens you need either the patience of a saint and a great deal of trial and error or a special piece of 'conflict catching' software to track down the problem. Problems usually occur while your Mac is trying to start up, but can occur during normal use.
Quick tip: if you hold down the Shift key as you start your Macintosh up, the System will load without any Extensions or control panels (a message will appear on the screen to confirm this). If your Mac now starts successfully, it's a sure-fire certainty that you've got an Extensions/control panels problem.
Extensions and control panels also eat up valuable memory, and you often don't need them all running at once. System 7.5 has a control panel (how ironic) called Extensions Manager which lets you choose sets of Extensions and control panels to load up. You could have one set for word processing, one for games, one for accounts and so on.
The Finder is the application that runs all the time in the background, handling the Desktop display and sorting out your files and folders. Do not rename this file, delete it or move it out of the System Folder. It's a crucial part of the System and your Mac can't work without it. You may see other files with the same icon in your System Folder called System Enabler or System Update. Don't touch these either. As their name suggests, they are updates and modifications to your basic Finder application and work alongside it.
Fonts are the different typefaces you see on your screen, and which you can choose from in word processing documents and other Macintosh applications. The font used for the menu bar is called Chicago and the font you see in windows is Geneva. Fonts are stored as files in the System Folder, and your Mac is supplied with half a dozen or more. You can get hold of fonts from a variety of places, and installing them is easy with System 7.5 - you just drag the font files on to the System Folder icon and your Mac sorts out the rest.
A font can be set to any size you like, and can be made italic or bold, underlined or turned into an outline and more. This was one of the factors in the early success of the Macintosh - the way it could display and print fonts.
Fonts are slightly tricky in that there are different types. These have come about because your Mac has to be able to both display fonts on the screen and to print them smoothly. The traditional solution has been to provide fonts as a 'pair' of files - a 'screen' font to look after the screen display, and a 'printer font' to provide the much smoother output you need on paper.
Because the Mac's display is made up of dots, screen fonts too are made up of dots. In the past, you had to have a screen font file for every size you wanted to display on the screen. Happily, that's now been sorted out by both Adobe Type Manager and, even more neatly, by the TrueType font format.
By contrast, printer fonts are made up of geometric shapes. This means that your Mac can instruct the printer to print them at any size and they will still come out with smooth outlines.
Having to keep pairs of font files has always been a nuisance. Adobe, the American company that practically invented Desktop publishing technology, provide an excellent tool in the form of Adobe Type Manager (see the control panels chapter). This software uses the printer font to draw the screen image. You still need a screen font file, but you don't need one for each type size and the screen representation of fonts is much smoother and more faithful.
Indeed, this is the system now used by the publishing industry (which is almost exclusively Macintosh-based in this day and age). Adobe's PostScript printing system, universally used for producing professional publications electronically, uses 'PostScript fonts'. This means having a single screen font, and single printer font and Adobe Type Manager (supplied with System 7.5 but available from a variety of sources - often with commercial applications - for owners of earlier Systems).
In System 7.5, both screen fonts and printer fonts are stored in the Fonts folder. In earlier Systems, printer fonts were stored in the Extensions folder and screen fonts formed part of the System file.
Having to cope with two font files is still a bit of a nuisance, though, and it can cause problems if they get separated, or one gets lost, or one is replaced and the pair doesn't match any more.
This is one of the reasons why Apple invented the competing TrueType font format. TrueType fonts are single font files that handle both the screen display and printed output. They use a little more memory, but they are much more convenient, and the fonts supplied with newer Macintoshes are in TrueType format.
However, the publishing industry still revolves around PostScript fonts, so Apple is in the strange position of having to support both TrueType fonts (by including them with the machine) and PostScript fonts (by now supplying Adobe Type Manager as part of the System software).
Just to make things even more complicated, Apple have released a competitor to PostScript called QuickDraw GX. It aims to integrate the same kind of printing features and quality of PostScript with the Macintosh operating system and the applications that run on it.
To find out more about QuickDraw GX, see the chapter on Apple Extras. For now, though, don't give it too much thought. For the time being, QuickDraw GX has made little headway, and it's still at the stage of being a curiosity. It also gobbles up lots of precious memory if you install it as part of your System.
The Note Pad, like the Scrapbook, is a standard Mac utility. It lets you jot down notes while you work, and this is the file where your notes are stored. Again, you can double-click on it if you want to see the Note Pad (which is on the Apple menu anyway).
Most Macintosh applications need to store information how they've been configured or how individual users have customised them. They do this by creating small 'preferences' files. In previous versions of the System they would turn up all over the place - usually, loose in the System Folder. In System 7.5 they are grouped together in this Preferences folder.
It's a good idea to periodically sift through your Macintosh's hard disk, weeding out old and unwanted files. Outdated preferences files for applications you've long-since discarded are prime candidates for the wastebasket.
If your Mac is printing something, you don't have to sit quietly and wait until it's finished before you start working again. When you set up your printer you have the option of switching 'background printing' on. When background printing is on, you can carry on working on your Macintosh while it's feeding data to the printer. The only drawback is a jerky mouse and sluggish response. There seems no way round this, and it afflicts even the fastest Macintosh models. Still, it's better to be able to work jerkily than not at all.
The Scrapbook is one of the Mac's handy little utilities - it lets you store any number of pictures in a kind of scrolling tile gallery window (see the chapter on Mac gadgets for more). This is the file that contains all the images. Double-click on it if you want to see the Scrapbook.
If there are applications you use constantly, you can save yourself time and effort by putting them, or a file you use all the time, or an alias of either, into the Startup Items folder. For example, if you have a Mac with a CD-ROM drive and like a little music while you work, you can put an alias of the System 7.5's audio CD player into this folder. Then, when your Mac has started up, you can put a CD in straight away. More importantly if you use personal organiser software, you can put your diary file in the Startup Items folder and leave the application running all day in the background, ready for when you need to refer to it.
This works in exactly the same way as the Startup Items folder except that it waits until you shut down your Mac before it activates the contents. It could be useful if you need to remind yourself to update tomorrow's to-do list before you finish work - just put your to-do list file in here and it will be opened automatically when you attempt to shut down your Mac.
In older versions of the System, this file contained the bulk of the Mac's operating system. With later versions of the System, the relevant files are split up into different folders within the System Folder. The System file still contains the basic Mac sounds, though, plus the various keyboard layouts for different countries (as described in the control panels chapter).
The System file is actually a special kind of document called a 'suitcase'. You can recognise suitcases by their distinctive icon. In the old days suitcases were used much more, but now, the only other time you'll see suitcases is in the Fonts folder, where they're used to store screen fonts and TrueType fonts.
Suitcases are a lot like folders, in that you can double-click on them to open them up, and you can drag items from one suitcase to another (only certain sorts of file can go into suitcases, though).
Expert tips
The Finder and the System are usually updated in pairs. However, you may need to check the version numbers of both if you have a compatibility problem.
Let's face it, that 'Welcome to Macintosh' box you see during startup does get faintly tedious when you've already seen it fifty billion times before. But you can create your own startup screen if you have an application that can save in StartupScreen format (the excellent shareware GraphicConverter, for example): just create a file called 'StartupScreen' and drag it into your System Folder. (In Photoshop, save it out as a PICT Resource.)
Unless you're working on documents for publication, stick to TrueType fonts. Not only does it make your System folder less cluttered, it saves you RAM too. Oh yes it does! Although TrueType fonts use more memory than PostScript versions, you can switch ATM off, and that's the biggest memory hog of all.
System 7.5's Note Pad is much better than the previous version. You still only get eight pages, but they expand to full screen size and they have scroll bars so that you can write a lot more. Why not maintain a to-do list using Note Pad, and put an alias of Note Pad in both your Startup Items and Shutdown Items folders? Every morning you'll be reminded of what needs doing, and every night you'll be reminded to plan tomorrow's work. It works for me! (In as much as anything does...)
G.Mills@compserv.gla.ac.uk
