Mac Kindergarten

Apple has released an update to its current operating system. It’s recommended for every user. You can get Updates for your Apple operating system as well as all Apple programs, installed on your computer via the Software Update, found in the Apple menu.Watch out! Some updates can be quite heavy in file size (as this one, having more than 300MB). So make sure you don’t exceed your internet usage limits (if you have any, like some folks in Brisbane, Australia).

Install the Updates and restart. Done.

First improvement through the update

As some users (like me) found the transparent menu bar annoying, Apple decided (because of me….yeah, sure!) to provide an option to turn it off. To do so, just go to the System Preferences - Desktop & Screen Saver.

In the Tab “Desktop” you find the option to turn transparency of the menu bar on or off.

Here we go. Welcome to Mac OS X Leopard!

This is pretty much how Mac OS X Leopard looks like after you finished the inital boot of your Mac.

(click thumbnail to enlargen image)

You see the two main things the Desktop.

The menu bar at the top. It always stays there - not matter which program you have open. See the apple-icon to the very left in the menu bar. Click on it to access things like information about your Mac, System Preferences and also to shut down or restart your Mac. On the very right side of the menu bar you see different icons, such as the time, a little speaker (for volume control) and a magnifying glas.

This is Spotlight, which is used to search for all kinds of things on your Mac - files, folders, emails, dictionary entries, etc. We will cover Spotlight later. Of course you can play around with it. Just click on the icon to open the search box and enter something; e.g. “Leopard” (without the quotation marks). Just give it a try.

The dock at the bottom of the screen. It is used to launch programs and to indicate running programs (you see a blue light-spot below the icon). See also the folders on the right hand side (next to the trash bin). If you click on them, they open up in a nice way. Give it a try now. These two items - menubar and dock is what we will refer to in the future.