Follow along with this simple exercise. Move your cursor over the iTunes icon on the dock. (This icon looks like an audio CD with a green musical note on it.) Click the trackpad button (or tap your finger on the trackpad) once. Whoosh! Tiger launches, or starts, the iTunes application, and you see a window much like the one shown in Figure 1.
If an application icon is already selected, you can simply press Command+O to launch it. The same keyboard shortcut works with documents, too.
In addition to the dock, you have the following other ways to launch an application or open a document in Tiger:
- From the Apple menu: A number of applications can always be launched anywhere in Tiger from the Apple menu:
• System Preferences: This is where you change all sorts of settings, such as your display background and how icons appear.
• Software Update: This uses the Internet to see whether update patches are available for your Apple software.
• Mac OS X Software: This launches the Safari browser and displays software you can download for your Mac.
- From the desktop: If you have a document that you've created or an application icon on your desktop, you can launch or open it here by double-clicking that icon (clicking the trackpad button twice or tapping the trackpad twice in rapid succession when the cursor is on top of the icon).
- From the Recent Items selection: When you click the Apple menu and hover your mouse over the Recent Items menu item, the Finder displays all the applications and documents you've used over the last few computing sessions. Click an item in this list to launch or open it.
- From the Login Items list: Login Items are applications that Tiger launches automatically each time you log in to your user account.
- From the Finder window: You can also double-click an icon in the confines of a Finder window to open it (for documents), launch it (for applications), or display its contents (for a folder).
After you finish using an application, you can quit that application to close its window and return to the desktop. Here are a number of ways to quit an application:
- Press Command+Q. This keyboard shortcut quits virtually every Macintosh application on the planet.
- Choose the Quit command on the menu. To display the Quit command, click the application's name - its menu - from the menu bar. This menu is always to the immediate right of the Apple menu. (For example, Safari displays a Safari menu, and that same spot in the menu bar is taken up by iCal when iCal is the active application. In Figure 1, look for the iTunes menu, right next to the Mac menu.)
- Choose Quit from the dock. You can Control-click (or right-click) an application's icon on the dock and choose Quit from the right-click menu that appears.
- Click the Close button in the application window (refer to Figure 1). Some applications quit when you close their window, such as the System Preferences window or Apple's DVD Player. Other applications might continue running without a window, such as Safari or iTunes. To close these applications, you have to use another method in this list.
- Choose Force Quit from the Apple menu, or press Command+Option+Esc. This is a last-resort measure! Use this method only if an application has frozen and you can't use another method in this list to quit. Force-quitting an application doesn't save any changes to any open documents in that application!
