5.1. Opening Mac OS X Programs
You can launch (open) a program in any of several ways:
• Click a program's icon on the Dock, the Sidebar, or the Finder toolbar.
• Use Spotlight. Hit -Space bar, type the first letters of the program's name, and
then press Return or Enter.
• Double-click an application's icon in the Finder.
• If you've added the Applications folder to your Dock (or, better yet, a folder
containing aliases of only the programs you use), click the Dock icon to open the
stack (Section 4.2.2
). Then click the program you want (or even type the first few
letters of its name and then press Return).
• Highlight an application icon and then press -O (short for File Open) or
-down arrow.
• Use the submenus of the menu's Recent Items Applications command.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
What's with the Big "Duh"?
So, I've just installed Leopard, I'm all excited, and I double-click an Excel
document. And now the Mac asks me: "You are opening Microsoft Excel for the
first time. Do you want to continue?" Well, HELLO! I double-clicked the icon,
didn't I? Does Apple think I'm some kind of idiot?
It's not you Apple's worried about. It's the silent parade of evil hackers, lurking
out there in Internet Land, waiting for the right moment to bring down the Mac.
See, in the Windows world, spyware authors have to be sneaky about how they
install their stuff on your PC. You wouldn't be so stupid as to double-click an
application called Spyware Installer™, of course. So the spyware tricks you into
running its installer. It commandeers a certain document type (like MP3 or
JPEG), reassigning it to its installer. You innocently double-click some
document, but an unanticipated program opens—and you've just opened
Pandora's box.
In Mac OS X, that can't happen. When double-clicking some document opens a
program for the first time, this dialog box appears, just to let you know what's

RAM at all. But when you then use that program to open a huge, complex
document, the system supplies more memory automatically. Then, when you
close that document, Mac OS X automatically returns the RAM it was using to
the pot, so that it's available for use by other programs and functions.
It's true that the About This Mac command no longer opens a little graph
depicting how much RAM each program is using, as it did in Mac OS 9. There's
no longer much point. The answer is always, "Exactly as much memory as it
needs, and it's changing minute by minute."
Still, if you're desperate to know how much memory each of your running
programs is using at this instant, open your Applications Utilities folder.
Open the program called Activity Monitor. It presents a table showing what
percentage of your Mac's memory each running program is using.
Then there's the matter of virtual memory, which helps you open more programs
simultaneously than should fit into the amount of RAM (electronic memory)
your computer has. This feature works by using a chunk of hard drive space as
temporary overflow RAM when necessary. Of course, real memory delivers
information to your Mac's brain many times faster than the hard drive, which is
why virtual memory has a reputation for sluggishness.
In Mac OS X, virtual memory is turned on all the time. But these days, it doesn't
slow down your machine much, for a couple of reasons. First, each program
uses only as much RAM as it needs to begin with, so far less is wasted. Second,
virtual memory in Mac OS X puts only pieces of your programs onto the hard
drive, minimizing the slowdown effect. In any case, even if you have 50
programs open, Mac OS X devotes much of your Mac's actual RAM to
whatever program is frontmost, so the active program doesn't grow sluggish.
You'll notice the sluggishness kicking in only when switching programs or
when working on an absolutely huge document that overwhelms your installed
RAM. (Want to see how much virtual memory has kicked in? Mac OS X can
show you. See Section 16.8.5.6 for instructions.)
Therefore, "out of memory" messages are unheard-of in Leopard. You may,

This Application menu (Figure 5-1
) offers a number of commands pertaining to the entire
program and its windows, including About, Quit, and Hide.
Figure 5-1. The first menu in every program lets you know, at a glance, which
program you're actually in. It also offers overall program commands like Quit and
Hide.
5.1.2. Quitting Programs
You quit a program by pressing -Q, the keyboard equivalent of the Quit command.
(In Mac OS X, the Quit command is at the bottom of the Application menu.)
But Mac OS X offers two much more fun ways to quit a program:
• Control-click or right-click a program's Dock icon and then choose Quit from the
pop-up menu.
• When you've pressed -Tab to summon Leopard's "heads-up display" of open
programs (Section 4.3
), type the letter Q without releasing the key. The
highlighted program quits without further ado.
UP TO SPEED
When Programs Are Actually Folders
You may have noticed that OS X programs don't seem to have 50,000 support
files strewn across your hard drive. To open AOL, you no longer need to first
open an America Online folder; you can just double-click the AOL icon. That's
a much better arrangement than in Mac OS 9 or Windows, where many
programs must remain in special folders, surrounded by libraries, dictionaries,
foreign language components, and other support files and folders.
The question is: Where did all those support files go?
Mac OS X features packages or bundles, which are folders that behave like
single files. Every properly written Mac OS X program looks like a single,
5.1.3. Force Quitting Programs
Mac OS X is a rock-solid operating system, but that doesn't mean that programs never
screw up. Individual programs are as likely as ever to freeze—or, rather, to hang (to lock
up and display the "spinning beach ball of death" cursor). In such cases, you have no
choice but to force quit the program—the computer equivalent of terminating it with a
blunt instrument.
Doing so doesn't destabilize your Mac; you don't have to restart it. In fact, you can
usually reopen the very same program and get on with your life.
You can force quit a stuck program in any of several ways:
• Control-click (right-click) its Dock icon, or just hold your mouse down on it. Once
the shortcut menu appears, press Option so that the Quit command now says Force
Quit (see Figure 5-2
). Bingo—that program is outta here.
Figure 5-2. Top: You can force quit a program from the Dock, thanks to the
Option key.
Bottom: When you press Option- -Esc or choose Force Quit from the
menu, a tidy box listing all open programs appears. Just click the one you
want to abort, click Force Quit, and click Force Quit again in the
confirmation box. Often, you may have to force quit a program twice to make
it really go away. (Using more technical tools like the Unix kill command,
there are other ways to jettison programs. But this is often the most
convenient.)

• Press Option- -Esc, the traditional Mac force quit keystroke.
• Choose Force Quit.
Either way, proceed as shown in Figure 5-2
.
Again, force quitting is not bad for your Mac. The only downside to force quitting a