How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther

Mac OS X applications have many enhancements in addition to those I’ve already mentioned. Here’s a brief overview of some of the most important new features:

• iCal, Apple’s calendar and to-do application, has been streamlined, and its new Info drawer helps make managing your appointments easier. (See Chapter 15.)

• Mail, the e-mail application included with Mac OS X, now lets you view related messages in threads, uses the Safari HTML rendering engine for fast display of HTML messages, and lets you work with Microsoft Exchange mail servers. (See Chapter 10.)

• Address Book offers more than 250 Avery label templates, so you can print out your contacts on labels. You can print your entire Address Book on paper as well, and you can synchronize your Address Book with Microsoft Exchange servers. (See Chapter 15.)

• Preview, Apple’s tool for viewing images and PDF files, is now the fastest PDF reader on any platform. Scroll through PDFs quickly, view them more easily than with Acrobat Reader, search for text, and select text and graphics in PDFs to copy to other applications. (See Chapter 13.)

• FontBook, a new application in Panther, lets you install fonts by clicking a single button, lets you create your own font collections, activating and deactivating them as needed, and gives you a quick view of all available character variations in any font. (See Chapter 14.)

• TextEdit, Apple’s “simple” text editor, now lets you open and save documents in Microsoft Word format. You’ll only be able to import simple documents, without complex formatting and tables, but if you don’t have Microsoft Office, this lets you read text documents in Word format. TextEdit saves documents in RTF format, which all word processors can read, and you can now save files as .doc files as well. (See Chapter 13.)

On January 6, 2004, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, made his annual keynote speech presenting new hardware and software. One new product is an enhanced iLife suite, containing iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand, a new program for recording music. This suite is sold separately from Mac OS X, and is also included with new Macs purchased after that date.

But for readers who purchased boxed versions of Panther, or who bought a new Mac between the release of Panther and the release of the new iLife suite, you'll be in a kind of limbo. If you don't need GarageBand, you'll probably find that the minor changes to the other programs don't justify the price of the package (iTunes was not changed, and remains free). However, if you bought a new Mac after January 6, 2004, you'll have different versions of these programs on your iLife CDs or DVD.

In this book, I cover the Panther versions of these applications, since, at the time of writing, these were part of Mac OS X. The iLife versions, which are now considered to be separate from Mac OS X, contain minor changes that I won't address. You'll find that the interfaces are almost the same, so if you do have the iLife versions, you won't be disoriented.

To learn about the new features in these applications (which I cover in Chapters 17 and 18), see your Mac's online help. I explain how to use this help system in Chapter 22.