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General Macs Books
Edward C. Baig
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Published:
May 31, 2016

Macs For Dummies

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Overview

Take a bite out of all your Mac has to offer with this bestselling guide

So, you joined the cool kids club and bought a Mac. Kudos! Now, do you dare admit to your sophisticated Mac mates that you still need some help figuring out how it works? No worries, Macs For Dummies is here to help! In full color for the first time ever, the latest edition of this long-running bestseller takes the guesswork out of working with your new Mac, providing easy-to-follow, plain-English answers to every possible question in the book!

Whether you're trying to figure out the basics of getting around the OS X interface, learning the ins and outs of turning your Mac into a sleek productivity tool, or anything in between, Mac For Dummies

makes it fast and easy to navigate your way around your new Apple computer. You'll get the know-how to rocket into cyberspace, browse the Web, send messages, back up files to the Cloud, deal with security issues, get productive with leading Mac apps, and have fun with one-stop shopping for music, movies, and media.

  • Navigate OS X El Capitan with confidence and ease
  • Use your Mac to power your audio and video systems
  • Add your Mac to your home network
  • Troubleshoot common problems when your Mac starts misbehaving

Fully updated to cover the latest hardware and software releases, Macs For Dummies offers everything you need to get your geek on—and make your Mac your minion.

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About The Author

Edward C. Baig is a veteran Mac authority and the technology columnist for USA Today. Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus is the technology columnist for the Houston Chronicle and has written the "Dr. Mac" column for many years. Together, these two experts have co-written all editions of iPhone For Dummies and iPad For Dummies.

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CHEAT SHEET

Macs and Windows computers have unique operating systems. They see things differently, and most Mac users would argue that Macs do things better. Macs come equipped with helpful keyboard shortcuts and a short list of procedures to follow if your Mac freezes.Mac versus Windows terminologyA Mac operating system and a Windows operating system generally perform the same basic tasks.
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Macs are full of fun and useful applications. Check out the following features as you need them or have the time. Your Mac adventures await. Macs play chess. Challenge the computer or watch the computer challenge itself (Applications). Macs are multilingual. Display menus and dialog boxes in more than a two-dozen foreign languages.
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One of the most fun things you can do on your Mac is to peruse and share your photo creations. The pictures and movies that you make in Photo Booth turn up at the bottom of the Photo Booth program in an onscreen photo strip. To admire an image, just click the corresponding thumbnail.You also have several options for sharing the picture or movie with others.
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If you don’t want to scroll through menus looking for a particular command, you can use handy Mac keyboard shortcuts to do things with a keypress or two . . . or sometimes three. Command Shortcut New Finder Window Command+N New Folder Shift+Command+N New Smart Folder Option+Command+N Open Command+O Close Wind
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Once you have captured your image with Photo Booth, your Mac gives you other fun options. Now the real fun begins. You can summon your inner mad scientist and apply a series of warping effects. Here’s how: Click the Effects button. A Brady Bunch–like grid appears, with each square revealing a different effect, some silly and some creepy.
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Some of you, of course, are musicians who own real external instruments, as opposed to the options available in Mac’s GarageBand. If you’d rather not use the onscreen keyboard to control software instruments, you can connect a MIDI keyboard through a USB cable (on most newer gear) or a MIDI adapter (on older equipment).
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Welcome to the Mac’s email variation of Smart Folders, Smart Mailboxes. Just as Smart Folders are constantly on the prowl for new items that match specific search criteria, Smart Mailboxes do the same. They’re tightly integrated with Spotlight search.You can set up Smart Mailboxes as a way to organize all mail pertaining to a specific project or all mail from a specific person.
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Smart Albums can be very helpful for organizing your Mac photos. Just as you can create Smart Playlists in iTunes, you can sire Smart Albums in Photos based on specific criteria, such as keywords, photos you’ve rated highly, pictures taken with a particular camera, or the shutter speed. To create a Smart Album, follow these steps: Choose File → New Smart Album.
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Some software that you run on your Mac benefits from knowing where your computer is located. If the Safari browser knows where your Mac is, for example, it can take advantage of geolocation-capable sites that can help you find close-by ATMs, coffeehouses, and pizza joints. Of course, Safari Suggestions and Spotlight Suggestions are hamstrung when the Mac has no clue as to where it is.
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As wonderful as this Mac feature is, Faces sometimes misjudges who’s in your photos. Here a few common mistakes you may come to, um … recognize: The photo bomber: Photos sometimes shows a face of someone who’s in the background of a crowded scene, such as a picnic or a ballgame. The 2D celebrity: Photos can mistake the face of a picture within a picture for a real person if, for example, someone you know is posing in front of a movie poster.
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You can get transit directions on your Mac. The Maps app is useful, of course, for helping you determine where you are, what is around you, and how to get to the next place, even accounting for traffic. But you’re not always going to want to (or be able to) drive to that next destination, even if it is too far from your current location to walk.
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iPhone owners with Macs can make or receive a call from or on the computer. And your Mac, with its bigger speakers, can substitute as a fine speakerphone. Incoming calls appear as notifications.This does not refer to FaceTime calls, but rather regular calls made over cellular to ordinary phone numbers. Ringtones come through the Mac the same as they do on the phone.
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Your Mac is full of neat tricks. You probably will never know all of the cool things it can do.Ah, the question posed by the (ultimately) defiant HAL 9000 computer in the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turns out that your Mac can play a mean game of chess too, without, as HAL did, turning on its human masters.
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A lot of times, you listen to music in the background while working on other stuff on your Mac. But you still want to be able to control what you’re listening to — and see the Up Next list. The MiniPlayer lets you control and see what you’re listening to in a smaller window that doesn’t hog a lot of room on the screen.
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Most recent Macs have ditched the optical drives that were once staple features. If you’ve been employing such drives for years to install software, you’re probably left wondering how to complete the task given their absence.You can connect an optional USB accessory to replace the missing drive, of course. In many instances, you can download new programs directly from the Internet.
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Mac Messages lets you block people and decide who can see you’re online, but exactly how you can go about it varies by account. To find the available settings, follow these steps: Open Messages Preferences from the Messages menu. Click the Accounts tab and choose the account in which you want to apply privacy settings.
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Open Photo Booth on your Mac by clicking its name in the Applications folder, clicking its dock icon, or clicking its Launchpad icon. You can snap an image right away merely by clicking the oblong red shutter button below the large video screen that serves as a viewfinder. When you do so, a three-two-one countdown ticks off.
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Unless you’re planning to write a book, you’re probably wondering why the heck you’d ever want to take a picture of your Mac’s computer screen. Consider a few possibilities. Maybe you want to take a picture of the screen for a presentation at work. Or perhaps you want to show precisely what a funky error looks like to the person who just might help you correct the problem.
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Apple Music is available on your Mac. Streaming Internet radio stations have their place and are great. But Apple (like many of its industry rivals) curates its own streaming radio stations for your listening pleasure. The result is the radio portion of the Apple Music service, which you can get to by clicking the Radio tab in iTunes.
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You Mac makes life easier with Smart Folders. When you go to all the trouble of selecting specific attributes for your search query, you may want to revisit the search in the future — incorporating the latest information, of course. Let’s presume that, when you conducted your Spotlight search, you clicked Show All in Finder.
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Are you the bossy type who likes to bark orders? Lucky for you, your Mac doesn’t mind taking orders. For people who are physically unable to type or handle a mouse, speech recognition and dictation (spoken commands) may be the only way to get things done on a computer.First, choose →System Preferences  →Dictation & Speech, and then click the Dictation option to turn the capability on or off.
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Sometimes the person you want to share something with is yourself, as in when you start something on one device (be it a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, or even an Apple Watch) and want to resume on another device. The Handoff feature enables you to do just that, as long as every device is on iCloud, signed in with an identical Apple ID, and on the same Wi-Fi network.
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How awesome would it be to locate photos on your Mac based on who’s in them? Your wish is Apple’s command. The magical Faces feature is based on facial detection and recognition technologies. The feature is off by a few whiskers here and there: Photos may fail to recognize a face or falsely match a name with a face.
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Your Mac has a handy Maps Feature that can give your more information about your photos. Many of today’s cameras (and virtually every state-of-the-art camera phone) are so clever that they can detect where they are — and, by proxy, where the shooter is — when a picture is snapped. So it stands to reason that if your camera knows where a picture was taken, Photos can exploit location information for your benefit.
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A Mac operating system and a Windows operating system generally perform the same basic tasks. Those operations just have different names and are found in different places. This table shows the rough equivalents between the two. Mac Term Rough Windows Equivalent Utilities, Applications Accessories Option key A
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Macs and Windows computers have unique operating systems. They see things differently, and most Mac users would argue that Macs do things better. Macs come equipped with helpful keyboard shortcuts and a short list of procedures to follow if your Mac freezes.Mac versus Windows terminologyA Mac operating system and a Windows operating system generally perform the same basic tasks.
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Okay, so you’re ready to defect and become a Mac user. But frankly, you’ve invested time and energy over the years in getting your Windows files and preferences just as you like them. The information you find here describes ways to replicate your Windows environment (within certain limits) on a new Mac. Help from Apple When you buy a new Mac at the Apple Store, and opt for the $99 One to One service, you can get a certified Mac technician, not so modestly known as a Genius, to transfer all your data.
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Safari lets you create your own widgets by clipping out a section of a favorite web page. The beauty is that you’re giving birth to a live widget that gets refreshed whenever the underlying web page is updated.In Safari, navigate to the web page you want to transform into a dashboard widget; then click the web Clipping button.
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You can actually transform the newest Macs into fully functioning Windows PCs, even ones that run the latest Windows 10 operating system. That bears repeating: You can actually transform the newest Macs into fully functioning Windows PCs.For all their differences, the Mac and Windows are more alike than you may initially grasp.
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You know that frustrating, annoying, sometimes panicked feeling you get when your Mac isn’t doing what you expect? If an application freezes or your computer is generally misbehaving, try these tips to escape with minimal disruption. Use Force Quit when an application is unresponsive. Choose Force Quit from the Apple menu or press Command+Option+Esc keys.
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Did you know you can use iCloud to share photos from your Mac? What if your first child was born recently, and you want to share images of the adorable infant with everyone? It’s not practical to invite everyone over to your house to view albums (unless they’re all willing to take turns changing diapers). And emailing the pictures to your entire extended family isn’t practical, given your lack of sleep.
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