Your Mac: Something Useful & Something Fun

We realize here at IC that the majority of Shenandoah students grew up on a Windows computer. We are also sure that there are a few of you out there who are still intimidated by your MacBook Pro...that brushed aluminum mystery of a laptop that was handed to you at the beginning of the semester. We will be running Mac hints often on this blog so that you can feel more confident in operating your laptop.

Today we will tell ya something useful and show ya something fun! Let's get the useful part over with first.

Want to find a file, application or folder quickly? 1st press the Start button then go to "search" then go to...wait a minute here, There IS no Start button. There was one on my Windows machine. What the heck. Ok look at the very top right of your Mac screen. You will see an icon of a magnifying glass. This is the Mac Spotlight and works very similar (and a LOT better) then Start>Search. Click the spotlight and type in what you are looking for. It can be a file name, an application, even a sentence you wrote in a Word document! The Mac will find it.

Now the fun part. Do YOU have a boring dock? Do all your icons just sit there motionless? When your friend or roommate hovers over their dock at the bottom of the screen all the icon seem to magnify and it looks a lot cooler. Try this. Click the apple in the upper left corner and select System Preferences. Then in the 1st row click Dock. Here you can set up icon magnification, a couple FX, or autohide your dock. Give it a try!