A scroll new world
Yet another way to see more of what’s in a window or pane is to scroll through it. Scroll bars appear at the bottom and right sides of any window or pane that contains more stuff — icons, text, pixels, or whatever — than you can see in the window. Figure 2-2, for example, shows two instances of the same window: Dragging the scroll bar on the right side of the smaller window would reveal the icons above and below the six (whole) icons that are currently visible. Dragging the scroll bar on the bottom of the smaller window would reveal items to the left and right of the six that are currently visible.
FIGURE 2-2: The same window twice. Use the scroll bars in the front window to see the icons above, below, to the left, or to the right.
Simply click and drag a scroll bar to move it up or down or side to side.
If your scroll bars don’t look exactly like the ones in Figure 2-2 or work as described in the following list, don’t worry. These are System Preferences you can configure to your heart’s desire, as you discover in Chapter 6.
Here are some ways you can scroll in a window:
Click a scroll bar and drag. The content of the window scrolls proportionally to how far you drag the scroll bar.
Click in the scroll bar area but don’t click the scroll bar itself. The window scrolls either one page up (if you click above the scroll bar) or down (if you click below the scroll bar). You can change a setting in your General System Preferences pane to cause the window to scroll proportionally to where you click. For what it’s worth, the Page Up and Page Down keys on your keyboard function the same way as clicking the white scroll area (the vertical scroll bar only) in Finder and many applications. These keys don’t work in every program, though, so don’t become too dependent on them. Also, if you purchased a mouse, a trackball, or another pointing device that has a scroll wheel, you can scroll vertically in the active (front) window with the scroll wheel or press and hold down the Shift key to scroll horizontally. Alas, this horizontal scrolling-with-the-Shift-key works in Finder windows but not in all applications. For example, it works in the Apple TextEdit application, but not in Microsoft Word.
Use the keyboard. In Finder, first click an icon in the window and then use the arrow keys to move up, down, left, or right. Using an arrow key selects the next icon in the direction it indicates — and automatically scrolls the window, if necessary. In other programs, you might or might not be able to use the keyboard to scroll. The best advice I can give you is to try it — either it will work or it won’t.
Use a two-finger swipe (on a trackpad). If you have a notebook with a trackpad or use a Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, just move the arrow cursor over the window and then swipe the trackpad with two fingers to scroll.
(Hyper)active windows
To work within a window, the window must be active. The active window is always the frontmost window, and inactive windows always appear behind the active window. You might not see an inactive window if it’s behind a bigger window, active or not.
Only one window can be active at a time. To make a window active, click it anywhere — in the middle, on the title bar, or on a scroll bar. It doesn’t matter where; just click anywhere to activate it.
Look at Figure 2-3 for an example of an active window in front of an inactive window (the Applications window and the Utilities window, respectively).
FIGURE 2-3: An active window in front of an inactive window.
The following is a list of the major visual cues that distinguish active from inactive windows:
The active window’s title bar: By default, the Close, Minimize, and Zoom buttons are bright red, yellow, and green, respectively, and the inactive windows’ buttons are light gray. This is a nice visual cue. Colored items are active, and gray ones are inactive. Better still, if you move your mouse cursor over an inactive window’s gumdrop buttons, they light up in their usual colors so you can close, minimize, or zoom an inactive window without first clicking it to making it active. Neat!
The active window’s toolbar: Toolbar icons are darker and more distinctive; the inactive window’s toolbar icons are light gray and more subdued.
The active window’s drop shadow: Notice how the active window has a more prominent shadow? This tricks your eye into thinking the active window is in front of the inactive one.
One last thing: If you’re wondering how to resize a window, just hover the cursor over a window’s edge or corner or over the dividing line between two panes in the same window (such as the sidebar and the main area of Finder windows). A helpful little arrow appears as a visual cue that you can now drag the edge, corner, or dividing line to resize the window or pane.
Dialog Dealie-Boppers
Dialogs are special windows that pop up over the active window. You generally see them when you select a menu item that ends in an ellipsis (…).
Dialogs can contain a number of standard Mac features (I call them dealie-boppers), such as radio buttons, pop-up menus, tabs, text-entry fields, and check boxes. You see these features again and again in dialogs. Take a moment to look at each of these dealie-boppers in Figure 2-4.
Radio buttons: Radio buttons are so named because, like the buttons on your car radio (if you have a very old car), only one at a time can be active. (When they’re active, they appear to be pushed in, just like the old radio buttons.) Radio buttons always appear in a group of two or more; when you select one, all the others are automatically deselected. Here’s a nifty and undocumented shortcut: You can usually select check boxes and radio buttons by clicking their names (instead of the buttons or boxes).
Tabs: When a dialog contains more information than can fit in a single window, the info may be divided among