Web Extras: Help | Catalog | Feedback | Print | Check for Updates Take Control The Mac OS X Lexicon by Sharon Zardetto and Andy Baird Table of Contents (1.5) Read Me First........................................ 2 Introduction.......................................... 6 | Punctuation | Numbers | |A|B|C |D|E|F| |G|H|I|J|K |L| |M|N|O|P|Q|R| |S|T|U|V|W|X| |Y|Z| About This Book .................................205 15 $ This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! READ ME FIRST Welcome to Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon, version 1.5 This book explains a little bit of everything; in fact, it’s The Mac OS X (and then some) Lexicon because it’s never just you and your Mac. It’s you and your Mac and the Web, and your email, and that article you just read that threw 17 new acronyms at you or assumed that you knew all sorts of networking terms. Or it’s you and your Mac and Finder features you’ve never touched, such as burn folders, smart folders, or proxy icons, and that mysterious Services submenu. This book was written by Andy Baird and Sharon Zardetto, edited by Tonya Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2007, Andy Baird and Sharon Zardetto. All rights reserved. The price of this ebook is $15. If you want to share it with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book: “lend” it for a quick perusal or review, but someone who wants to keep it around to read the whole thing should get his or her own copy. Click here to give your friend a discount coupon. Discounted classroom and library copies are also available. What’s New in This Version Most of the changes in this version were made to keep pace with Leopard: we’ve added about 30 new entries, and changed about 40 existing entries because Leopard’s little cat feet (apologies to Carl Sandburg) left paw prints in areas big and small. Leopard-inspired changes are marked with a Leopard spot in the margin. When the entry title is marked, it’s a Leopard-specific entry; when the text is marked, as with this entry, there’s Leopard-related info in it. Because we added so much new material about Leopard, along with updating the ebook to cover other changes since it was released in July 2007—changes like Apple adding Numbers to iWork and “brick” picking up a whole new meaning—we didn’t change the version number from 1.0 to just 1.1; we upped it to version 1.5. 2 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Basics This book uses the standard Take Control approaches for referring to file locations, menu commands, and System Preferences: • Path syntax: The route to a folder or file on your hard disk is the file’s path, or pathname. The syntax for paths conforms to Unix standards, because that’s what underlies Mac  OS  X. The path starts with the top level of your disk and lists all the intervening folders, separated by slashes:/Users/Vanessa/Documents/AnnoyABC. • Menus: We refer to menu commands like this: File > Close All. Commands in submenus have longer references: TextEdit > Services > Translator > Into Pig Latin. • System Preferences: When we refer to a “preference pane,” such as the Appearance preference pane, we’re talking about panes in System Preferences, which you access by choosing  > System Preferences and then clicking on an icon in the System Preferences window to get to the specific pane. Links and Navigation Controls All Take Control ebooks provide blue-colored internal links so you can easily jump to someplace else in the book—that’s one of the advantages of ebooks. But this Lexicon has more options than the other books, and a few are less obvious than they may seem at first: • If you are reading this book on paper, obviously the links won’t work. However, you can request a free copy of the ebook by sending a message to [email protected]. • There’s a roundup at the beginning of each section of all the terms in that section. You can use it to browse the section, and to jump to any term by clicking on it. • To jump to a section for a specific letter, use the bookmarks we’ve provided. • Many entries have references to other entries, but we haven’t marked all the possible cross-references, or we’d have sentences that look like this: “In Mac OS X, programs often store plists in a preference folder inside a Library folder; try trashing them when the application crashes.” We marked just the ones we think you might want to look up in context of the current entry. 3 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! • Some cross-reference links aren’t to entry titles, but to something in the text of another entry. If you run across “daughterboard” and click on it, for instance, you’ll be taken to the entry for “logic board,” because that’s where daughterboard is explained. • You’ll probably be jumping around a lot as you use this ebook, what with all the links. Don’t forget about the Back button in your PDF reader—you can click your way back through one or more links, the same way you retrace your steps in your Web browser. Margin Icons We’ve provided four special types of links to the outside world—the world outside of this book, that is—by way of special margin icons: • The blue “weblink” icon takes you someplace on the Web that provides further information on the topic at hand. This might be indepth information from the Unicode consortium, an Apple support page, or a Wikipedia entry; in some cases, it’s just an interesting side trip on the current or a tangential topic. • The green “weblink” icon brings you to a Web site for a product or company mentioned in an entry. • The “booklink” icon sends you to the Web page for the Take Control book that covers the current entry. • The TidBITS icon links you to a TidBITS article related to the entry topic. • If you are reading this book on paper and don’t have the ebook version, you can request a free copy of the ebook by sending a message to [email protected]. There’s also a non-clickable margin icon—the Leopard spot— described in What’s New in this Version. 4 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Pronunciations We provide pronunciations for three types of entries: unusual words, words that are commonly mispronounced, and acronyms that are said as words rather than as separate letters. (So, if there’s no pronunciation for an acronym, such as LZW or GID, you know they’re said as letters.) Where we do show how to pronounce a word, we don’t use fancy pronunciation guides such as in the picture here (for the word “Jabber”); we use simple, (American) English-based syllables with capitals to show where the stress falls: EULA = YOO·la. Alphabetization Sure, you have the A–Z part down pat, but we want to note these nonletter alphabetization issues: • Items in the Punctuation and Symbols section are grouped logically, not by any specific sorting order. • Items in the Numbers section are sorted alphabetically: the leftmost characters are more important, so 400K comes before 64-bit. • Items that begin with a period (mostly extensions, such as .jpg and .bmp) are alphabetized as if they had no leading punctuation. He Said, She Said Sometimes we write in the plural, and sometimes in the singular. There’s no easy way around it: “The first time I ran across this feature…”. It’s unlikely that both of us had the same experience, and it hardly matters which one of us is speaking at the time. But as we read and edited each other’s work, many times our comments were along the lines of “Yes, I agree—that interface change was a great improvement (or not)—so say �we’ here.” Occasionally—very occasionally—we disagree, in which case we tell you who thinks what about the issue. 5 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! INTRODUCTION Are you tired of seeing references to Carbon and Cocoa and not knowing what they are or remembering which is which? What exactly is iLife? Is that Bonjour choice in iChat’s menu for when you’re typing en français? Do you have hot-swappable devices—and would you know if you did? Is a dual-layer DVD the same as a double-sided one, and is either one a Blu-ray? Do you want to know the basic definitions and concepts for things like: permissions, metadata, hypertext, base station, partition, phishing, public-key encryption, and that mysterious Services submenu? Do you need hip boots to wade through the alphabet soup of SDRAM, RSS, RTF, IMAP, EULA, OEM? We could go on… and we do! But wait! If you already feel familiar enough with all the terms you run across when you’re working (or playing) with your Mac, and you don’t feel the need to look up anything, it may come as a surprise when we say we wrote this book for you, too. Because this is not a book for just looking up things; in fact, that’s probably its secondary use. We wrote this book so you could enjoy reading it—and learn along the way. Discover interface features that you may have ignored until now, such as proxy icons, burn folders, and clippings. Learn about hard spaces and soft hyphens, and which “dash” you should use for a minus sign. Find out where the term spam came from, what relationship a flog has to a blog, and what an 8x CD speed is 8 times faster than. Add a few new words to your vocabulary: anacronym, netizen, Ogg Vorbis, favicon, pharming. The catalyst for this project was, in fact, the Carbon vs. Cocoa conundrum. Sharon ran across the phrase “Carbon application,” for the umpteenth time, in a respected Mac magazine, where there wasn’t even a quick parenthetical clue as to what that meant, and for the umpteenth time thought, “Carbon, Cocoa… why did they both have to start with C?!” A survey of the general Mac press and book offerings, and an inspection of Mac menus, dialogs, and the Help system showed an incredible amount of jargon and some surprising assumptions as to how many terms every user is presumed to know in all sorts of categories: Mac hardware and software; general computing and 6 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! basic networking; email and the Web; and items that interface with our Macs, such as the iPod and the Apple TV. So, Sharon tracked down her old friend Andy Baird—which might have been difficult since he’s a fulltime RVer who lives and travels in his motor home, but, in fact, was a cinch because he has a satellite Internet dish. She suggested he take a vacation from retirement to reinvent a project they worked on together a decade and a half ago, The Macintosh Dictionary. The lure of doing a just-click-a-link-andgo version of a lexicon was obviously strong, because here we are. We were quite amused, though hardly surprised, that in the interval since that last joint project (eons in computer years), not only has the technology advanced, but users’ views and interests have changed so much that many of the non-tech entries of that volume are not even on today’s radar screen: Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field, for instance, probably still exists but users don’t care as much as they used to about the personality quirks of their products’ CEOs. But we did bring one Dictionary entry forward to this Lexicon verbatim: check out Internet. 7 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! P unctuation and Symbols . / \ : -–— ~ “” … . Sure, it’s a period for the end of sentences, but it’s also a divider in URLs such as http://www.tidbits.com/ and in email addresses such as [email protected], where it’s pronounced dot. A dot also appears in IP addresses such as 123.231.5.0 where it’s also pronounced dot except when the cognoscenti use just a brief pause (the way you don’t say the separators in (973) 555-1234, but speak in the rhythm of a phone number). The period used in software version numbers is pronounced point: Mac OS  X 10.5 is “ten point five” and 10.5.1 is “ten point five point one.” But this period can also be silent: “ten-five” and “ten-five-one.” The period also has a special use in filenames in Unix, the Mac’s underlying framework: when it’s the first character in the name, the file becomes invisible. / A forward slash; on the U.S. keyboard, it’s on the same key as the question mark. It’s also a plain ol’ slash, so “http://” is said “http colon slash slash.” Please see backslash, immediately below— because a forward slash is not a backslash! The slash is also used to separate folders in a pathname such as /System/Library/Fonts. A slash at the beginning of a path, as in that example, refers to the root level of your boot disk. \ A backslash; on the U.S. keyboard, it’s on the same key as the vertical line (sometimes called a pipe). When someone says “slash,” this is not the character they’re referring to—or, at least, it shouldn’t be, and you can tell them so! 8 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! N umbers 10Base-T, 100Base-T, 1000Base-T • 2-up, 4-up… • 2x, 4x, 8x… • 400K • 404 • 501, 502… • 64-bit processing • 720p, 1080i • 802.11a/b/g/n 10Base-T, 100Base-T, 1000Base-T ⇢ Ethernet 2-up, 4-up… Multiple images on a page, although the exact meaning depends on what you’re doing. When it comes to labels, 3-up is simply 3 columns of labels; they could all have the same thing printed on them (“SALE!!”) or each have something different. If you’re a graphics professional and you’re setting something 4-up for a printer, you’re putting four copies of the same item on a single page because the paper is going to be cut in production. Or, you could be printing two different 5x7 photos on one sheet of letter or A4 paper, or two side-by-side pages on a single sheet because you’re going to fold it into a booklet. This form of 2-up (or 4-up, or more) printing is easy to set up, in any of several different layout designs, in the Print dialog: choose Standard from the Presets pop-up menu, and Layout from the pop-up menu beneath it. Luckily, the Print dialog includes visual feedback as you choose your options; the one here is for 4 pages per sheet, with left-right/top-down layout direction, single hairline border, and long-edged binding. 2x, 4x, 8x… The first CD-ROM and CD-RW drives read and wrote data at the same speed as the audio CDs from which the CD-ROM standard was derived: 150 kilobits per second (kbps). Later drives sped things up in order to get at the data faster, so 2x models worked at 300 kbps, 4x models at 600 kbps, and so on. Likewise, early DVD drives worked at 1.32 megabits per second (Mbps)—the same data rate as a digital video disc—but soon were replaced by 2x and faster versions. Most optical drives can read faster than they can write, and the speed at which a drive can reliably write data is limited by the quality of the recordable media used; so, a drive rated at 16x may be able to record 10 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! A AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) • AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) • account • Action menu • Activity Monitor • ADC (Apple Display Connector) • administrator, administrative account • ADSL (asymmetric DSL) • .ai • AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) • AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) • AirPort • alert • algorithm • alias • aliasing, anti-aliasing • alphanumeric • anacronym • analog • anonymous FTP • AOL (America Online) • .app • Apple key • Apple menu • Apple partition map • Apple TV • AppleCare • AppleScript • applet • AppleWorks • application • application binding • Aqua • archive • Archive & Install • ascender • ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) • ASP (Apple System Profiler) • ATA, SATA (Serial | Advanced Technology Attachment) • Atom • ATS (Apple Type Services) • authenticate • automagically • automatic font activation • Automator • avatar • AVC (Advanced Video Coding) • AVI (Audio Video Interleave) AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) An audio compression method that’s part of the MPEG standard. AAC is said to yield better quality at low bit rates than does MP3. All the audio files offered by the iTunes Store are in AAC format, but it is not, as some people assume, a format proprietary to Apple. AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) The technology, developed from the now obsolete QuickDraw GX, that supports certain typographic capabilities, such as kerning and tracking and on-the-fly ligatures; it’s used in Mac TrueType fonts. Windows TrueType and Adobe OpenType fonts use OpenType technology for similar typographic feats; since AAT is not a cross-platform technology, it’s unlikely to last. account In the multi-user environment of Mac OS  X, each user has an account, with her own home folder, user settings, preferences—everything that makes a Mac a personal computer. The kind of account a user has also defines some of the things she’s allowed to do, such as install programs. If you’re the sole user, you still have an account. This is all managed in the Accounts preference pane. 13 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! B Back to My Mac • backdrops • background • backup, back up • .backupdb • bandwidth • base font • Base Station • baseline • bcc • benchmark • beta test • Bézier curve • billion • binary numbers • bit • bit rate • bitmapped font • bitmapped graphic • BitTorrent • blog, blogger, blogosphere • Bluetooth • Blu-ray • .bmp • Bonjour • bookmark • boolean • boot, reboot • bootable disk, boot disk, startup disk • Boot Camp • bot • bounce • breadcrumbs • brick • brick-and-mortar • broadband • buffer • bug • burn • burn folder • bus, bus speed • byte Back to My Mac, BtMM The way to, well... get back to your Mac when you’re away from it. With two Macs running Leopard, you can use its screen sharing feature to remotely control your Mac, doing whatever’s necessary—which will often involve transferring files you forgot about. This particular miracle is somewhat narrow in scope, since not only do you need a .Mac account, but both Macs involved must be configured to use the account—and, oh... did you leave that other Mac turned on? Still, if you’re the recipient of a narrowly focussed miracle, are you going to complain? backdrops ⇢ iChat background 1. A process running behind the scenes, invisible to the user. 2. Something “visible” going on while you’re working on something else: printing, downloading, and file copying are among the many activities that can happen “in the background.” 3. The picture that appears underneath your Desktop icons, managed from the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane. backup, back up A copy of files made for safekeeping in case of fire, theft, or (more likely) hard drive failure. Okay, also in case of stupidity or wanton carelessness, because we all have our days. Consider the adage, “There are only two kinds of computer users: those who have lost files and those who will.” Leopard’s Time Machine should make backups a normal way of life for Mac users, so perhaps the definition of “two kinds of 24 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! C C • cable modem • cache, cache file • calibration • Caps Lock • Carbon • CardBus • Cascading Style Sheets • cc, bcc (carbon copy, blind carbon copy) • CD (compact disc) • certificate • Character Palette • character set • chip • CID (character ID) • CJK, CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) • Classic • client • Clipboard • clipping • clock speed, clock rate • clone • CMAP (character map) • CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) • Cocoa • code • codec • collapse, expand • collection • Combo Drive • Combo updater, Delta updater • Command key • component video • composite video • Compress • compression • concatenation • contextual menu • Control key • cookie • Core Animation • Core Duo, Core 2 Duo • Cover Flow view • CPU (central processing unit) • crash • creator code • creeping featuritis • CRT (cathode ray tube) • CSS • CSV (comma separated values) • ctrl • curly quotes • cursor C So you thought your Mac used the latest breakthroughs in computer science? Not exactly. Most of the programs you use were written in some flavor of C, a computer language developed more than 30 years ago. C and its descendants (C++, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript and others) dominate today’s software scene. If you think 30 years sounds like old technology, think about this: the Mac’s operating system is based on UNIX, which was developed 40 years ago! cable modem A box that lets you connect your computer to a cable TV network, and thus obtain a high-speed link to the Internet. Of course, the network must be set up to offer this service, and you’ll have to pay for it. Since cable TV companies have broadband cable going into almost every community in America, piggybacking broadband Internet access on their networks was a natural way to add a needed, profitable service. Also see modem. cache, cache file cash · Storage of recently used information for speedy retrieval, on the assumption that if you just did or used something, you’re likely to do it or need it again soon. Cache usually refers to something in memory, 36 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! D daemon • daisy chain • Dashboard • data detector • data fork • database • daughterboard • dead key • debug • decompress • default • defrag, defragment • degauss • delimiter • Delta updater • deprecate • descender • Deselect All • Desk Accessory • Desktop • dfont, .dfont • DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) • dialog • dial-up • differential backup • digital, analog • digital certificate • digital divide • digital watermark • digitize • dingbat • directory • disabled • disclosure triangle • discretionary hyphen • discussion group, discussion board • disk image • Disk Utility • disk vs. disc • dismount • dither • DivX • DL (dual layer) • .dmg • DNS (domain name system) • .doc, .docx • Dock • documentation • dogcow • domain, domain name • dongle • .dot • double layer • dpi (dots per inch) • DRAM (dynamic random access memory) • drawer • driver • DRM (Digital Rights Management) • Drop Box • droplet • DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) • dual core • dual layer • dual processor • DVD (digital versatile disc) • DVI (digital visual interface) • Dvorak keyboard daemon DEE·mahn · In Unix systems, a program that runs in the background (such as a print server) rather than under direct control of a user; the word is an archaic spelling of “demon.” But note that the word itself is so archaic that its meaning is akin to “spirit,” with no evil connotation. daisy chain To connect together one after another; as for example, connecting a camera to a FireWire drive, to another FireWire drive, which is in turn connected to the Mac. Dashboard A “layer” in which small programs called widgets live; it opens when you press F12 if you haven’t changed any of the default keyboard shortcuts in the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, and stays on top of all your other open applications until you close it by pressing F12 again. To say neither of us loves Dashboard would be putting it mildly. Andy considers it an alternate universe where normal Mac user interface 51 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! E Easter egg • eject button • em dash • emoticon • en dash • enclosing folder • encryption • endless loop • episode • EPS (encapsulated PostScript) • ergonomic • Esc key • Ethernet • EULA (End User License Agreement) • exabyte • expand • ExpressCard • Exposé • extension, filename extension Easter egg A surprise built into software, usually found when you hold down certain keys while clicking something, or by performing certain procedures in a specific order. Easter eggs used to be endemic in the computer world, and in the Mac world in particular, but everyone seems so grown up and business-like these days. However, here’s a nifty Mac OS  X Easter egg. Turn on Speakable Items in the Speech Recognition screen of the Speech preference pane. With everything working (you can test it by asking your Mac, “What time is it?”), speak thusly: “Tell me a joke.” And then again. And again. Hope you like fifth-grade-level knock-knock jokes! But the drop in computer-software Easter eggs is somewhat made up for in the larger computer world, as in movies released on DVD, and even in Google maps, where, for a while at least, you could ask for driving directions from New York, NY to Paris, France, and get swimming instructions at step 23. Once word got around about this, there must’ve been way too much traffic (so to speak), because between the time we wrote this entry and laid it out, the egg disappeared. eject button ⇢ hot swappable em dash A dash as long as an em space. Wasn’t that helpful? An em, in typography, is a unit of measure the height and width of the point size being used. It’s called an em because in traditional typesetting the letter m was on a slug (a little lead block) the size of the font: in a 16point font, for instance, the m slug was 16 points wide. Now an em dash is just a long dash—like this—that’s not necessarily connected to the point size of the type—especially in height—look, two more! You can type an em dash with Option-Shift-hyphen. Also see en dash. 66 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! F face • FairPlay • fan • family • FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) • Fast User Switching • favicon • favorites • FFIL • field • file extension • file sharing • file type, filetype • FileVault • Finder • Firefox • firewall • FireWire • firmware • first-line indent • F-key • flame • Flash • flash drive • flash memory, flash RAM • flog • floppy disk • fn key • folder actions • font • Font Book • font collection • font metrics • Font panel • font smoothing • force quit • fork • format • forum • forward delete • .fp7 • fragmentation • freeware • freeze • Front Row • FTP (file transfer protocol) • function • function keys face ⇢ typeface FairPlay A digital rights management (DRM) technology applied to most files in Apple’s iTunes Store to ensure that purchases won’t be freely copied. FairPlay sets fairly liberal limits on what you can do with the items you buy: you may copy them to any number of iPods, burn them to as many CDs as you want, and play them on up to five computers, which must be authorized via the iTunes Store. As we wrote this entry, Apple introduced its new DRM-free option for some music files, wherein you pay a little more ($1.29 instead of .99) for non-protected files. For the extra 30 cents, you also get twice the data rate, or bit rate: AAC files encoded at 256 kbps instead of the 128 kbps standard for the rest of the iTunes library. You probably can’t hear the difference on your iPod—without much better headphones—but what with the bigger picture of electronic integration (AirPort Express connecting iTunes to your stereo setup), higher-quality digital downloads are becoming more important. family A set of typefaces that share a common base design; for instance, Gill Sans Bold, Gill Sans Italic, Gill Sans Condensed, and Gill Sans Narrow are all in the Gill Sans family. fan ⇢ stacks 71 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! G G5, G4, G3 • GarageBand • GB, Gb • GHz • GID (glyph ID) • GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) • gigabit Ethernet • gigabyte, gig • gigahertz • glyph • googol, googolplex • Grab • graphics card • graphics tablet • grid • Guest account • GUI (graphical user interface) • GUID G5, G4, G3 ⇢ PowerPC Macs GarageBand Apple’s program for musicians and would-be musicians (which is all of us, right?) makes it remarkably easy to put together a professional-sounding tune, and serves as a podcast studio. GarageBand can work with music loops, MIDI instruments, or live recordings, blending them together with a timeline-based user interface. GB, Gb An important distinction: GB is gigabyte, a common measure for hard disk capacity, and Gb is gigabit, a common unit in measuring network speed (Gb/sec or gbps, gigabits per second). GHz ⇢ You Always Hertz the One You Love GID (glyph ID) Identifying numbers assigned to characters in a font, especially necessary for characters outside the Unicode encoding scheme—as when a font supplies several alternate capital letters (Unicode has a single ID for, say, uppercase A). Also see glyph. GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) jif · A type of compressed bitmapped graphic often used in Web pages. GIFs can have a maximum of only 256 colors, so the format is unsuitable for photos, which are better saved as JPEGs. But the GIF format works well with line drawings, logos, and similar graphics (like this map), and can also be used for simple (generally annoying) animations. Lots of people pronounce GIF with a hard G—probably because it stands for 82 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! H H.264 • halftone • handles • hang • hard hyphen • hard link • hard space • HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) • HDTV (highdefinition TV) • help tag • hertz • hexadecimal numbers • HFS Plus (hierarchical file system) • home folder • home page • hot swappable • .html, .htm • HTML (hypertext markup language) • HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) • hub • hypertext • hyphen • Hz H.264 A video codec that’s becoming increasingly popular for downloadable video. H.264, also known as AVC or MPEG-4 Part 10, is the basis of Apple’s television and movie offerings in the iTunes Store, for example, as well as iChat AV’s high-quality videoconferencing. halftone A way of simulating grays on paper when you only have black ink. Similar to dithering, halftoning uses clusters of tiny black dots to give the illusion (at a normal viewing distance) of grays. When halftoning is used to simulate a full range of photographic colors with only four inks, the result is called process color. handles Small squares displayed at the corners of an onscreen object, used for resizing or otherwise manipulating it. hang ⇢ freeze hard hyphen ⇢ non-breaking hyphen hard link A special structure in Unix (and therefore in Mac OS X) that allows any reference to a file or folder appear to be that file for folder. Yes, that’s very Zen-like—and it’s not necessarily a satisfactory explanation to the more technically inclined. But we don’t have to worry about the underpinnings, when all you need to know is the result: Time Machine uses hard links in its storage scheme, so when it does an incremental backup and you’ve changed only a 500K file, the next hourly backup 86 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! I i.Link • I-beam • iCal • iChat • icon preview • iDisk • IEEE 1394 • iLife • IM (Instant Message) • IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) • iMovie • incremental backup • .indd • index sheet • index.html, index.htm • infinite loop • Info window • Input menu • insertion point • Inspector, inspector palette • installer • Intel Core Duo • interlaced, progressive • Internet • intranet • IP address (Internet protocol) • iPhoto • iPod • IRC (Internet Relay Chat) • iSight • ISO-8859-1, ISO Latin-1 • ISP (Internet Service Provider) • iSync • iTunes • iTunes Store • iWeb • iWork i.Link ⇢ FireWire I-beam The mouse cursor used for text editing, so named because… well, because that’s what it looks like. iCal Apple’s entry into the diet-drink market. Or, its calendar program that, while easy to use, lacks a businessworthy (or even busy-person-worthy) integration with Mail, could use a better approach to a To-Do list, and absolutely needs more options when it comes to font sizes on calendar appointments. After all, it’s the users who can no longer read 8-point type who are also the ones more likely to need to write down all their appointments. iChat Apple’s instant messaging (IM) software—or at least that’s what it pretends to be. In reality, it’s much more. In fact, I rarely use it for IMing, since most of my electronic conversations are necessarily asynchronous—my friends and I are rarely free to chat at the same time, so email works much better for us. But when a colleague or friend and I need to transfer a humongous file that oversteps the bounds of one or the other of our email attachment limits, we switch to iChat and drag the file in question into the iChat window. And did I mention you can chat—with your voice? (As long as you have a microphone on your Mac.) And if you have a compatible camera such as Apple’s iSight, you 92 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! J Jabber • jaggies • Java • JavaScript • Journaled • JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) • .jpg Jabber A protocol for instant messaging (IM), Jabber’s open standards lets anyone with the know-how (and a domain name, the hardware, the software, and the Internet connection) set up a Jabber server and contact Jabber users on other servers. You can be a jaberrer in iChat by choosing Window > Jabber, which opens a window just like your Buddy List or for Bonjour. jaggies ⇢ aliasing Java A C-derived language that was originally developed for intelligent toasters and the like, but became a fad in the ’90s, based on its slogan “Write once, run anywhere.” Java applets (small applications) can indeed run on many kinds of computers, although Microsoft muddied the waters by coming up with its own, incompatible, version. Java has almost no relationship to JavaScript, despite the similarity of names. JavaScript A scripting language with a C flavor, often used for simple programs embedded in Web pages. Despite the name, JavaScript has little in common with Java. In fact, the language was originally called “Mocha,” but Java was trendy back in the mid-90s, so some marketing genius at Netscape decided to cash in by renaming it JavaScript. Journaled Beginning in Jaguar (Mac OS  X 10.2), when you erase a Mac hard drive, the default volume format is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).” That means the operating system keeps a continuous record—a journal—of the changes made to the disk. If something goes wrong (such as a 101 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! K K, KB, Kb • kbps (kilobits per second) • kernel, kernel panic • kerning and tracking • .key • key repeat rate • keyboard layout • keyboard shortcut • Keyboard Viewer • Keychain • Keynote • kilobyte, kilobit • kiosk mode K, KB, Kb K and KB are abbreviations for kilobyte; Kb is the abbreviation for kilobit. kbps (kilobits per second) 1. A measure of network speed. For example, a typical dial-up connection to the Internet can move data at a maximum rate of 53 kbps. Since there are 8 bits in each byte, 53 kbps is only 6 kilobytes per second (kBps)—at that speed, it would take you almost 10 minutes just to download a song from the iTunes Store. 2. Speaking of songs, kbps is a measure of the amount of data in each second of audio in an audio file, and therefore describes its quality; see bit rate. kernel, kernel panic The kernel is the core of the Mac operating system, alternatively called the kernel environment. The panic sets in when the operating system doesn’t know what to do with an instruction it’s received: you get a black box on your screen with white text that usually says, “You need to restart your computer.” (No kidding!) One possible cause of a kernel panic is a damaged (or moved-out-of-the-right-place) system file or folder; another is an application or system utility utterly misbehaving. A simple restart almost always fixes the problem; if it doesn’t, you should consider reinstalling your system, using the Archive & Install option. 103 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! L LAN (local area network) • landscape • Latin-1 • launch • leading • Leopard • library • Library folders • ligature • line break • Linux • LISTSERV • local folder • log in, log out • logic board • login item • lossless, lossy • lpi (lines per inch) • LWFN • LZW LAN (local area network) A group of computers and peripherals (such as printers and scanners) connected by a common network—usually Ethernet and/or Wi-Fi. As the word “local” implies, this is usually in a small area, such as a single building, although some corporate LANs span continents. landscape A sideways (wider than it is tall) orientation for printing, as opposed to the standard, upright portrait view. Latin-1 ⇢ ISO Latin-1 launch To open, or run, an  application. Leopard’s Spotlight provides a special launching option: trigger Spotlight with with the default Command-Space, and type the name of the application—or as many letters as you need to identify it. Spotlight puts the application at the top of its “I found it!” list, already selected as the Top Hit, so all you have to do is hit Return to launch the program. leading Leopard ⇢ ⇢ baseline The Cat’s Meow library 1. In Font Book, a user-defined group of fonts the Mac can access no matter where they’re stored on your disk—they don’t have to be in a Fonts folder. 108 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! M Mac • MAC (Media Access Control) • .Mac • macro • MacRoman, Mac OS Roman • MagSafe • Mail • mailing list • malware • markup language • MB, Mb • Mbps (megabits per second) • media • megabyte, meg • megahertz • megapixel • memory • menu symbols • meta tag • metadata • MFS • MHz • Mighty Mouse • Migration Assistant • MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) • MIME (multipurpose Internet mail extensions) • mirror site • modem • modifier key • monofont, monospaced font • motherboard • .mov • MP3, .mp3 • MPEG-4 (Motion Picture Experts Group) • .mpkg • MTBF (mean time between failures) • MUG (Macintosh User Group) • multi-core processor • Multiple Master • multitasking Mac Macintosh · That’s right, it’s not an acronym, so if anybody writes “MAC” when describing your computer, you can look down your nose at them. And it’s not an apple (although it is an Apple), so folks who write about “McIntosh computers” are picking their fruit from the wrong tree. MAC (Media Access Control) This one is an acronym. It’s the unique hardware address built into every network adapter on your computer, and every networkable device—including Palm PDAs, VoIP over Wi-Fi phones, and printers with Ethernet. No two devices in the world have the same MAC address, allowing devices on a local network to easily differentiate themselves. MAC addresses are used only on local networks, not routed to wider networks or the Internet, so this is not the address the outside world sees—that’s your IP address. The MAC address for a Mac’s built-in Ethernet or AirPort adapter is sometimes accessed when you register or “activate” software so the software will be associated with that specific machine and not work if you copy it to another machine. You can find MAC numbers in the Network preference pane: choose the adapter from the Show menu, and then look for the AirPort ID or the Ethernet ID (for the Ethernet ID, click the Ethernet button, as shown here). 113 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! N nano • narrowband • NetBoot • netiquette • netizen • netroots • network • newbie • non-breaking hyphen • non-breaking space • NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) • NVRAM (non-volatile random access memory) nano A billionth part; a nanosecond (ns) is a billionth of a second. Here’s how short that is: light travels only twelve inches in a nanosecond. Also used colloquially to mean very, very small: “Nanotechnology will provide nanobots to scavenge through your bloodstream.” narrowband ⇢ bandwidth NetBoot As a verb, without any fancy caps, netboot means to start up your computer using an operating system that resides on a network server, rather than on a local disk drive. With the fancy spelling, NetBoot is Mac OS  X Server’s way of allowing a networked computer to start up from a special disk image that resides on the server. Aside from being a useful troubleshooting tool, using a NetBoot disk image as a startup disk is a way to ensure that every Mac in a specific environment—a classroom, say—presents exactly the same “experience” to every user at every startup. netiquette internet + etiquette · Generally accepted polite behavior in email, discussion forums, and other online activities. For example, typing in ALL CAPS is considered poor netiquette, unless you really mean to shout (which is, of course, still poor netiquette). netizen internet + citizen · Someone who is active and very involved in one or more online communities. 123 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! O OCR (optical character recognition) • OEM (original equipment manufacturer) • Ogg Vorbis, .ogg • old style numbers • open source • OpenType • operating system • optical drive • optimization • Option key • optional hyphen • OS (operating system) • OS X • otf • outline font • owner, Ownership & Permissions OCR (optical character recognition) A software feature that analyzes an image of a page of text (typically one that’s been created by a scanner), and, by recognizing the images of individual characters, produce a digital text file. OEM (original equipment manufacturer) Yep, that’s what it means: the company you buy something from isn’t necessarily the company that made the device—or, at least, the whole device. You can, for instance, buy an Apple computer with a hard drive made by one manufacturer, the memory by another, and the processor by yet another. That’s a pretty confusing example, of course, even though it’s accurate. You’ll more often run into the term for something more simple, such as a hard drive whose mechanism is made by an OEM and placed into a housing, packed with a power cord, and sold by another company. This might matter quite a bit when the company that sold it to you provides only a year’s guarantee but it turns out the that OEM provides a two-year guarantee on the mechanism that failed. Ogg Vorbis, .ogg A type of audio compression sometimes used as an alternative to MP3. iTunes and iPods can’t play .ogg files, but audio programs such as Amadeus can read them and convert them to MP3 format. The name, in case you’re wondering—and how could you not be?— comes from Exquisitor Vorbis, a character in Terry Pratchett’s science fiction novel Small Gods, plus the slang term “ogging,” meaning a kamikaze-style attack, that was used in the online game Netrek. What did any of this have to do with audio? Search us! 126 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! P P2P (peer to peer) • package • packet • .pages • Pages • PAL (phase alternating line) • palette • panic • Panther • Pantone • Parallels • parent folder • Parental Controls • partition • partition map scheme • pasteboard • path bar • path menu • pathname, path • PCMCIA • PDF (Portable Document Format), .pdf • peripheral • permissions • petabyte • phishing, pharming • Photo Booth • pica • PiFont • ping • pixel • .pkg, .mpkg • plist • plug-in, plugin • PMS (Pantone Matching System) • PMU, SMU (Power Management Unit, System Management Unit) • PNG (portable network graphics), .png • podcast • point • pointer • POP (post office protocol) or (point of presence) • port • portrait • PostScript language • PostScript Type 1 • power button • PowerPC Macs • ppi (pixels per inch) • .ppt • PRAM (Parameter RAM) • preference • preference pane • Preview • printer font • Printer Setup Utility • privileges • process color • processes • processor speed • program • proportional font • protocol • proxy icon • proxy server • .psd • Public folder • public-key encryption • Puma P2P (peer to peer) A type of network in which computers communicate with each other as equals, as opposed to a client-server network, where multiple computers (clients) obtain services from a central server. When you use the Create Network command in the AirPort menu, you’re creating a P2P network between two Macs; in contrast, when you use a browser to load a Web page, you’re in client-server mode. package A folder that looks like a file, in order to hide different data types within a single file icon. For example, a typical program needs code, help text, buttons, menus, windows, dialogs, and many other resources. The code could reside in the program’s file, and the other stuff in separate folders, but then it would be easy for the items to be accidentally separated. Putting it all in a package keeps everything together. Before Mac OS  X, the Mac used a file’s resource and data forks to keep disparate data in one place, but in Unix-based Mac OS  X that approach has been largely replaced by packages—also known as bundles—that hold the necessary pieces of a file, program, or installer. 130 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Q quad core • quarter • Quartz, Quartz Extreme • Quick Look • QuickTime • QuickTime Player, QuickTime Pro • quincunx • quits unexpectedly • QWERTY • .qxd quad core ⇢ multi-core processor quarter Joking jargon for two bits of information. In the 18th century, Spanish gold coins were sometimes cut into 8 pieces, referred to as bits (which is where the phrase “pieces of eight” comes from); since the Spanish coin was about equal in value to the American dollar, two bits equaled a quarter. Also see Shave and a Haircut, next page. Quartz, Quartz Extreme When you click a window’s Minimize button (that’s the yellow one) and watch the window shrink into the Dock like a genie returning to his bottle, you’re seeing Apple’s Quartz graphics software in action. Quartz puts everything, from scrolling text to eye-catching tricks like the genie effect, on the screen. In fact, “Quartz” is an umbrella term used to describe all the parts of the Mac OS  X display software, including Core Image, Core Graphics, and Core Video. Quartz Extreme is the latest version, faster and better than ever. Whether you use the Genie or Scale minimize effect (set it in the Dock preference pane), try this: hold Shift when you click the Minimize button for a slooow motion effect. Quick Look This is Sharon’s favorite new Leopard feature. With Quick Look, you look at nearly any file without opening its application—which means you don’t need its application. Quick Look can display many types of files: TextEdit, Word, Excel, PDF, and many graphics file types. You can even flip through multi-page Word, TextEdit, and PDF documents. Trigger Quick Look for a selected document with File > Quick Look (Command-Y) or with the Quick Look button on a Finder window’s toolbar; in the Quick Look window, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move to the previous and next files in the Finder window. 149 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! R RAM (random access memory) • .ram • raster graphic • rasterize • RCA connector • read-only • RealPlayer • reboot • receipt • Recent Items • refurbished • repair permissions • repertoire • resetting NVRAM • resetting PRAM • resolution • resource fork • restart • RGB (red, green, blue) • rich text • rip • ROM (read only memory) • Roman • root, root user • root level, root directory • Rosetta • router, wireless router • RSS (really simple syndication) • RTF (rich text format) • RTFD (rich text format directory), .rtfd • RTFM • RTL (right-to-left) RAM (random access memory) ram · Computer memory that needs electric power in order to retain its contents. RAM can be written to and read from much faster than to and from a hard disk, so it’s used for most of what your computer does. When you launch a program, much of it is loaded into RAM; when you work on a document, its contents are stored there until you save it to the disk. When you restart or turn off the computer, everything in RAM is forgotten. The first Mac had 128K of memory; the next, nicknamed the “Fat Mac,” had 512K. Most Macs come with 2 gigs of RAM as standard now: at 2,097,152K they must be morbidly obese. (Sharon’s first computer, a membrane-keyboard Timex-Sinclair, had 2K of memory, and she was thrilled when a 16K RAM pack became available. Andy’s first, a Poly-88, came with 16K of RAM, but he was able to upgrade it to 48K.) .ram · RealPlayer file extension raster graphic ⇢ bitmapped graphic rasterize To convert a graphic or text from vector to bitmapped (or raster) form. For example, if you have editable text in Photoshop and want to apply a filter to it, you must first rasterize it, because Photoshop filters work only on bitmaps. In fact, any text—even a business letter—is rasterized before printing, because all printers are raster devices: they put drops of ink, or dots of toner, on paper. That vector-to-raster conversion can take place in your computer, in the printer, or in a high-speed “rip” 151 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! S Sad Mac • safe boot • safe login • Safe Mode, safe boot • sans serif • SATA • .scpt, .scptd • screen saver • screen sharing • screenshot, screen capture • Script Editor • script, scripting • scriptable • scroller • SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) • SDRAM • .sea • search engine • Search For • SECAM (Système Electronique pour Couleur Avec Mémoire) • secondary click, secondary button • semiconductor • serif, sans serif • server • Services submenu • Sharing & Permissions • Shared folder • shareware • sheet • Sherlock • Shift key • short name • shortcut • sidebar • Simple Finder • .sit, .sitx • skin • Skype • SLA (Software License Agreement) • Slideshow command • slot-loading drive • Slow Keys • small caps • smart folder • smart quotes • smiley • SMS (short message service) • SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) • SMU • SnapBack • soft hyphen • soft return • Software Update • source code • Spaces • spam • spider • spot color • Spotlight • spring-loaded folders • SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) • stack • startup disk • startup item • static IP address • stationery • Sticky Keys • storage card • straight quotes • streaming • strikethrough • string, text string • StuffIt • style • subscribe, subscription • suitcase • SuperDrive • S-Video • symbols in menus • sync, syncing • system fonts • System Preferences • System Profiler Sad Mac The now-retired symbol of a Mac in trouble at startup, the Sad Mac used to show up on the screen, accompanied by a cryptic error code and the Chimes of Doom, when something Really Wrong occurred—such as a bad memory chip. His (her?) counterpart, the startup Happy Mac, has also been retired. We now have bad news accompanied by the international “no” symbol (the red, slashed circle), and a normal startup graced by a dull gray apple. The Sad Mac’s descendent—perhaps the child of Happy and Sad—lives on as Sad iPod, displayed on an iPod screen when it fails to start up. safe boot ⇢ Safe Mode safe login Logging in to an account in Safe Mode (next entry) when the computer is already on, by holding Shift immediately after clicking the Log In 160 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! T tab • .tab • tags, tagged text • Target Disk Mode • TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) • terabyte • Terminal • text box, text field • text encoding • text file, plain text file • text smoothing • TextEdit • theme • third-party • thumb drive • thumbnail • .tif • TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) • Tiger • Time Machine • To Do • tool palette • toolbar • Trash • Trojan horse • TrueType • TSV • .ttc • .ttf • .txt • Type 1 • typeface tab 1. What you shouldn’t use to indent the beginning of a paragraph (see first-line indent). 2. In preference panes and dialogs, tab refers to a screen of information available through a button (“use the General tab in Safari preferences”) because this interface feature used to look like tabs on stacked folders. 3. An ultra-convenient browser feature that lets you keep multiple Web pages in a single window: Command-clicking on a link creates a tab in the current window instead of opening a separate window. Prior to the 3.0 version of Safari that comes with Leopard (and was also released separately—it’s compatible with Mac OS X 10.4.9 and later, so it works with later versions of Tiger), this feature was easily overlooked, since you had to opt in by turning it on in Safari’s preferences; now it comes on by default. As befits such a handy feature, the new Safari provides even more in the way of tab options, such as “Turn all my tabs into separate windows,” “Turn all my windows into tabs in one window,” and the long-overdue confirmation warning if you close a window with multiple tabs in it. .tab · tab-separated text file extension ⇢ delimiter tags, tagged text 1. Tags are special “codes” used in text files to specify things such as character formatting and special instructions. HTML tags for Web pages—which are interpreted by browsers—look like this: <title>Chris’s Web Page</title>. 182 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! U U+ • UID (User ID) • UFS (Unix File System) • unexpectedly quits • Unicode • Unicode font • uninstall • Unix • unmount • unzip • update • URL (Uniform Resource Locator) • USB (Universal Serial Bus) • UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format, 8-bit) • UWB (ultrawideband) U+ The prefix for a Unicode ID number: U+0041 is uppercase A, for instance. It should also remind you that the number is in hex, not decimal. You’ll see these IDs in Character Palette’s pop-up help tags, and you can also type them (without the U+ prefix) in its Search field to find a specific Unicode character. Also see Hexadecimal: Sweet 16. UID (User ID) ⇢ 501 UFS (Unix File System) A data storage format used in some Unix systems, UFS is an option for some drives when you erase them under Mac OS  X with Disk Utility. You shouldn’t use this format unless you have good reason to—and if you don’t know what those reasons are, you shouldn’t be using it! (How’s that for beating around the bush?) unexpectedly quits Sometimes an application just ups and disappears—one second it’s there, and in the next instant it’s vanished, like a guest abruptly gone without so much as a by-your-leave. Then you get a “The application �Rude Company’ has unexpectedly quit” dialog—as if you hadn’t noticed! Use the Reopen button in the Unexpectedly Quit dialog the first time this happens for an application; if it happens again almost immediately, use the Try Again button instead, since this sets the application to open with many of its settings temporarily back to their defaults instead of your (possibly corrupted) user-defined ones. Unicode A text encoding standard that assigns a number (and name) to each character in every written language. As you might imagine, that’s quite 189 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! V vector graphic • VGA (video graphics array) • virtual Desktops • virtual memory • virus • vodcast • VoiceOver • VoIP (voice over IP) • volume vector graphic An image made of lines and shapes rather than from individual dots or pixels. Vector graphics have a big advantage over bitmapped graphics: they can be enlarged or reduced without ever suffering the jaggies. This format isn’t suitable for the tonal subtleties of a photograph, but when it comes to logotypes, charts, or other “drawn” art, like this truck, vector graphics excel. By far the most popular type of vector art is the PostScript format, as embodied in PDF, EPS, and Adobe Illustrator files. VGA (video graphics array) An early-’80s standard for analog video; it has a resolution of 640x480 pixels and uses a 15-pin D-subminiature connector. The term is often used as shorthand for 640x480 video of any kind. A proliferation of variants came later, including QVGA (320x240), SVGA (800x600), XVGA (1024x768), and extending all the way up to WQUXGA (3840x2400). There are dozens more, but rather than continue listing names, we’ve provided a weblink to a handy chart. virtual Desktops What you don’t get in Leopard with Spaces. Despite some overactive hype and misguided enthusiasm, it’s just not true: you have the same Desktop background, and the same Desktop icons are always there no matter which space you use. Spaces is so terrific it needs only accurate enthusiasm! virtual memory “Fake” memory, in that it’s treated as if it were RAM, but the nformation actually resides on a disk. This lets your Mac do more than it could if it had to stick to only the actual RAM installed, letting it run, say, 17 programs at once and handle very large documents in each. Virtual memory (also known as VM) is slower than genuine RAM, but 193 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! W WAN (wide area network) • watermark • WAV (waveform audio format), .wav • Web 2.0 • Web Clip • web crawler • webmail • WebDAV (Web-based distributed authoring and versioning) • Web-safe colors • widgets • Wi-Fi • wiki • WMV (Windows Media Video), .wmv • workflow • worm • write • write-only • WWW (World Wide Web) • WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) WAN (wide area network) A single network that covers a large geographical area; as opposed to a LAN, which typically exists only in a single building, or the Internet, which is a network of LANs and WANs. watermark ⇢ digital watermark WAV (waveform audio format), .wav Microsoft’s earliest file format for digital audio. Simple and not very efficient, it has been eclipsed by the compressed MP3 format, but there are still a lot of WAV files out there, and the best of them can equal audio CD quality. Fortunately, QuickTime can play .wav files. Web 2.0 No, it’s not the Next Big Thing, full of fascinating new technologies, super-fast networks, and beefed up security. It’s a Concept already here, and, like most concepts with a capital C, it’s nebulous because the definition keeps changing. (Also because it’s not an upgrade to the Web, or its technologies, so the name’s a little bogus.) Coined by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, it has all sorts of buzz phrases attached to it but might best be described (since that is, after all, why we’re here) by a comparison. Web 1.0: top-down, relatively static, fed-to-you information. Web 2.0: user-as-participant, wiki-based, blog-filled. This can go either way: there’s democracy, for instance, and then there’s American Idol. Web Clip A Dashboard widget you create from a piece of a Web page—a special Leopard Safari feature. When you see a part of a Web page you’d like to have as a widget—an hourly weather report, say—you click the Open 196 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! X Xeon • Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) • x-height • XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) • .xls • XML (extensible markup language) Xeon An Intel chip used in multiple-socket computers such as the Mac Pro. Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) An inspirational Mecca, the originator of ideas such as the mouse, the graphical user interface (GUI), WYSIWIG text editing, Ethernet, the laser printer, and a resolution-independent page-description language (InterPress) that was the precursor to PostScript. To name just a few you’d recognize right away. Because the mouse and the graphical user interface were conceived and incubated at Xerox PARC, and it was no secret that Steve Jobs and his posse had an official tour and demo of their computer developments (and that Apple hired some PARC researchers), it’s often claimed that the Mac, and its earlier GUI-based incarnation, the Apple Lisa, were merely rip-offs of the Xerox PARC creations. Not so! Read about it in the words of two people who were there, Bruce Horn and Jef Raskin; the three weblinks here are Bruce’s statement in regard to the Mac’s early development, Jef’s corrections on some details, and Bruce’s reply to those! And be thankful that the mouse developed beyond the first working model, shown here (and described in the patent application as an “X-Y position indicator for a display system”). x-height The height of the lowercase letters in a font, not counting those with ascenders like d and b. XHTML (extensible hypertext markup language) Most Web pages use HTML, a “markup language” that tells your Web browser how text and pictures should look on the screen. XHTML is the 201 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Y Y2K • YMMV, your mileage may vary • yottabyte • YouTube Y2K from Year 2000 · An expected disaster that didn’t happen. Early computer programs assumed the 20th century would last forever and stored years as 2-digit numbers. Why that would keep elevators from working, and how stocking up on canned goods would help, is beyond us, but the “crisis” came and went with only minor glitches. (There were adumbrations: one of Sharon’s credit cards was turned down in 1999 because its 2001 expiration date was interpreted as 1901, and was thus nearly a hundred years out of date.) YMMV, your mileage may vary A disclaimer in a reported benchmark or description that tells the reader she shouldn’t necessarily expect the same results: “I got rid of all the icons on my Desktop, and my overall Finder speed increased by almost ten percent. Your mileage may vary.” yottabyte Approximately one septillion bytes. Also see When Is a Thousand Not? YouTube From an idea about people uploading and sharing their vacation videos with family and friends to Time’s 2006 Invention of the Year, YouTube is, well… YouTube, MeTube, and EverybodyTube. It’s been interesting to watch (pun intended) how television has been hammering out its relationship with YouTube. When they first found their shows on YouTube, broadcasters threatened litigation based on copyright infringement; later they woke up to that fact it was free advertising. For an amusing look at copyright versus fair use issues, using material (in a fair use way) from one of my favorite companies, known for its resolute defense of its copyrights—no, not Apple—click the weblink. The video, of course, is on YouTube. 203 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Z zapping PRAM • zettabyte • zip, .zip • Zune zapping PRAM A general troubleshooting procedure that may solve several types of problems, such as when your computer turns on (you get the startup chime and hear the drive spinning) but the screen remains blank. To zap the PRAM: Start with the computer off; turn on the computer, immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R; keep all four keys pressed until you hear the startup chime twice, then release the keys. zettabyte Approximately one sextillion bytes. Also see When Is a Thousand Not? zip, .zip 1. To compress a file into a “zip” format, which then gets the .zip extension. In Mac OS  X, the File > Compress command (“Make Archive” previous to Leopard) zips a file. There’s no Unarchive command; double-clicking a zipped file unzips it. Take Control ebooks are in zip format so that when you download one from the Web site, it arrives as a file on your disk; otherwise, some Web browsers would just open the PDF file in the browser window. 2. The late, sometimes great—and sometimes not so much—storage solution, Zip drives and Zip disks, introduced in 1994, provided removable 100 MB disks for a $200 drive, a price and capacity extremely worthwhile at the time. The drop in price of CDs and the introduction of writeable DVDs and flash drives a few years later (and their continued price drops) eroded the Zip market. Zune Microsoft’s iPod-killer; apparently a very subtle assassin. 204 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! ABOUT THIS BOOK Thank you for purchasing this Take Control book. We hope you find it  both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments at [email protected]. About the Authors Sharon Zardetto: Sharon (formerly Zardetto Aker, but in real life sometimes Zardetto Wolfson... oh, never mind, that’s why she’s gone back to the original!) has been writing about the Mac ever since she had one, when it debuted in 1984. Her best-known efforts of more than 20 print books include the third edition of the Macintosh Bible as a sole effort (and involvement in many subsequent editions) and the Mac Almanac. She wrote for both Macworld and MacUser magazines from their earliest issues until the latter’s demise; documentation projects included the venerable, ground-breaking SuperPaint and the subtle hit—who could forget?—Machine Language Subroutines in Microsoft QuickBASIC. She’s also covered Mac OS X Tiger in Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X and Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X, also available in a combined print version from Peachpit press as Real World Mac OS X Fonts. More recently, she’s authored Take Control of Fonts in Leopard. Oh, she also has a life beyond the Mac, too, in northern New Jersey with her husband, two grown sons who keep coming back to the nest, and twice as many Macs in the house as people. Andy Baird: Andy has loved computers ever since he saw his first one (the Lincoln Labs TX-O, complete with graphic display and light pen) in 1957. A Macophile since 1984, he’s taught about Macs, written about them (including The Macintosh Dictionary), written software for them, and generally spent way too much of his adult life sitting in front of them. Andy lives and travels in his motorhome, “Skylark,” keeping in touch via satellite Internet. Most of his contributions to this book were written from various remote locations in the mountains of New Mexico. Like Sharon, Andy has exactly twice as many Macs as people in his home. Email us: Sharon | Andy | Sharon, cc Andy | Andy, cc Sharon (Aren’t hyperlinks fun?) 205 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Shameless Plug Sharon has more Mac information than she knows what to do with, and much of it doesn’t fit our Take Control line. Check out the beginnings of her own line of ebooks, 33 Things, at http://www.33thingsbooks.com/. Thank You to… We’d both like to thank Tonya and Adam for taking on this slightly0ff-the-beaten-Take-Control path project, and Tonya for her editing efforts. The Control Freaks and the Irregulars put a lot of time in reviewing the 1.0 manuscript, many going way beyond the call of whatever duty is incumbent upon such folks, and we’re grateful for their time and talents, even though we didn’t put in all the extrageeky Unix/Terminal stuff they suggested. Sharon would also like to thank Jerry Szubin (his picture is in Photo Booth) for help with setting the 1,456,432 links (or so it seemed) in the 1.0 version of this ebook, her son Nat for checking them after they were set, and Andy for foolishly agreeing to come out of retirement for this project. About the Publisher Publishers Adam and Tonya Engst have been publishing Mac-related content since they created the online newsletter, TidBITS, in 1990 (http://www.tidbits.com/). Adam and Tonya are known in the Mac world as writers, editors, and speakers. They are also parents to Tristan, who thinks ebooks about clipper ships and castles would be cool. Production Credits Layout: Sharon Zardetto Link-making AppleScript: Matt Neuburg List macros: Sharon Zardetto Take Control logo: Jeff Tolbert Editor in Chief: Tonya Engst Publisher: Adam Engst 206 This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon ISBN: 1-933671-30-0 December 2007, Version 1.5 Copyright © 2007, Sharon Zardetto and Andy Baird. All rights reserved. TidBITS Publishing Inc. 50 Hickory Road Ithaca, NY 14850 USA http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/ TAKE CONTROL electronic books help readers regain a measure of control in an oftentimes out-of-control universe. Take Control ebooks also streamline the publication process so that information about quickly changing technical topics can be published while it’s still relevant and accurate. This electronic book does not use copy protection because copy protection makes life harder for everyone. So we ask a favor of our readers. If you want to share your copy of this ebook with a friend, please do so as you would a physical book, meaning that if your friend uses it regularly, he or she should buy a copy. Your support makes it possible for future Take Control ebooks to hit the Internet long before you’d find the same information in a printed book. Plus, if you buy the ebook, you’re entitled to any free updates that become available. Although the author and TidBITS Publishing Inc. have made a reasonable effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein, they assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. The information in this ebook is distributed “As Is,” without warranty of any kind. Neither TidBITS Publishing Inc. nor the author shall be liable to any person or entity for any special, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including without limitation lost revenues or lost profits, that may result (or that are alleged to result) from the use of these materials. In other words, use this information at your own risk. Many of the designations used to distinguish products and services are claimed as trademarks or service marks. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features that appear in this title are assumed to be the property of their respective owners. All product names and services are used in an editorial fashion only, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is meant to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this title. This title is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Because of the nature of this title, it uses terms that are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Inc.; to view a complete list of trademarks and registered trademarks of Apple Inc., visit http://www.apple.com/legal/ trademark/appletmlist.html. This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15! FEATURED TITLES Now that you’ve seen this book, you know that Take Control books have a great layout and real-world info that puts you in control. Click any book image below or visit our Web catalog to add to your book collection! Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac Take Control of Fonts in Leopard by Joe Kissell by Joe Kissell by Sharon Zardetto Keep your Macintosh running smoothly with Joe’s easy-to-follow, common-sense maintenance program! $10 Whether your Mac won’t turn on, kernel panics, or is too slow, you can troubleshoot the problem with Joe’s expert advice. $10 Install, organize, and use your fonts with ease in Leopard with Sharon’s detailed advice and humorous touch. $10 Take Control of Customizing Leopard Take Control of Users & Accounts in Leopard by Matt Neuburg by Kirk McElhearn More Titles! Delve into even more topics, including: • Leopard! Time Machine, sharing files, upgrading to Leopard, and more! • Buying gear: Macs, cameras, and digital TVs. Find real-world advice in this road map to customizing Leopard, including new features, such as Time Machine and Spaces. $10 Get the most out of Leopard with real-world strategies for creating and managing user accounts! $10 • And… Lots more topics, including backups, iPod, iPhone, podcasting, .Mac, Wi-Fi, iWeb, domain names, and how to run Windows on a Mac. This is a free sample of “Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon.” Click here to buy the full 209-page ebook for only $15!
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