Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

Get the last word on Mac OS X terminology!

We Mac users sling technical jargon around every day, but if you've ever felt uncertain about what a term actually means, help is here. Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon is your definitive guide to over 500 of the most important Macintosh- and Internet-related terms. And we're not talking about some dry old dictionary here, either—these definitions—which include 30 new definitions for Leopard&mdash are loaded with useful tips and advice. Check out the free 39-page sample to see what we mean!

“Got a relative who is new to the Mac or computers? This is the perfect book for them, but even old dogs like me will find useful information.” —Rich Lefko, MyMac.com review

More Info
Contents & Intro
FAQ
Excerpt: The Letter M

This book is a great guide for Macintosh users everywhere who have trouble keeping up with the latest jargon, for new and intermediate level Mac users, and for anyone who enjoys smart and witty technical writing.

Questions answered in this book include:

What's the 501 folder for?
What's the deal with all the different CD and DVD disk formats?
Where can I find my Mac's MAC address?
What does "snapback" mean, and how can I find and use it?
How do I type the different kinds of dashes?
What's the difference between composite and component video cables?
What are cookies and breadcrumbs on a computer?
Why does a TextEdit file with images becomes a folder on a Windows machine?

“The voice is that of a droll but knowledgeable buddy.” —Joanne Tighe

“I've never had an ebook before. It is a clever idea and lends itself so well to cross-referencing and searching. And this is the most interesting, useful book I've come across for ages. Funny too.” —Hazel Findlay

Book Info

209 pages
Version 1.5
Updated 14-Dec-07
2.0 MB download
ISBN: 1933671300
Free sample with Table of Contents, Intro, Quick Start, and section starts.

About the Author

Sharon Zardetto has been writing about the Macintosh professionally since 1984, including nearly a thousand articles in Macintosh magazines and over 20 books. She's best known for writing several editions of The Macintosh Bible, along with The Mac Almanac.

A Macophile since 1984, Andy Baird has taught about Macs, written about them (including The Macintosh Dictionary), written software for them, and spent way too much of his adult life sitting in front of them. Andy lives and travels in his motorhome, "Skylark," keeping in touch via satellite Internet.

Book Reviews

MyMac (5 of 5)
mac.nz (10 of 10)
Contact us for review copies

Author Interviews

Tech Night Owl Live (Jul-07)
MacVoices (Jul-07)
Contact us for interview requests

Read Me First

Welcome to Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon. This book explains a little bit of everything; in fact, it's The Mac OS X (and then some) Lexicon because it's never just you and your Mac. It's you and your Mac and the Web, and your email, and that article you just read that threw 17 new acronyms at you or assumed that you knew all sorts of networking terms. Or it's you and your Mac and Finder features you've never touched, such as burn folders, smart folders, or proxy icons, and that mysterious Services submenu.

Most of the changes in this version were made to keep pace with Leopard: we've added about 30 new entries, and changed about 40 existing entries because Leopard's little cat feet (apologies to Carl Sandburg) left paw prints in areas big and small. Leopard-inspired changes are marked with a Leopard spot in the margin. When the entry title is marked, it's a Leopard-specific entry; when the text is marked, as with this entry, there's Leopard-related info in it.

Because we added so much new material about Leopard, along with updating the ebook to cover other changes since it was released in July 2007—changes like Apple adding Numbers to iWork and "brick" picking up a whole new meaning—we didn't change the version number from 1.0 to just 1.1; we upped it to version 1.5.

Introduction

Are you tired of seeing references to Carbon and Cocoa and not knowing what they are or remembering which is which? What exactly is iLife? Is that Bonjour choice in iChat's menu for when you're typing en francais? Do you have hot-swappable devices—and would you know if you did? Is a dual-layer DVD the same as a double-sided one, and is either one a Blu-ray? Do you want to know the basic definitions and concepts for things like: permissions, metadata, hypertext, base station, partition, phishing, public-key encryption, and that mysterious Services submenu? Do you need hip boots to wade through the alphabet soup of SDRAM, RSS, RTF, IMAP, EULA, OEM? We could go on... and we do!

But wait! If you already feel familiar enough with all the terms you run across when you're working (or playing) with your Mac, and you don't feel the need to look up anything, it may come as a surprise when we say we wrote this book for you, too. Because this is not a book for just looking up things; in fact, that's probably its secondary use. We wrote this book so you could enjoy reading it—and learn along the way.

Discover interface features that you may have ignored until now, such as proxy icons, burn folders, and clippings. Learn about hard spaces and soft hyphens, and which "dash" you should use for a minus sign. Find out where the term spam came from, what relationship a flog has to a blog, and what an 8x CD speed is 8 times faster than. Add a few new words to your vocabulary: anacronym, netizen, Ogg Vorbis, favicon, pharming.

The catalyst for this project was, in fact, the Carbon vs. Cocoa conundrum. Sharon ran across the phrase "Carbon application," for the umpteenth time, in a respected Mac magazine, where there wasn't even a quick parenthetical clue as to what that meant, and for the umpteenth time thought, "Carbon, Cocoa... why did they both have to start with C?!"

A survey of the general Mac press and book offerings, and an inspection of Mac menus, dialogs, and the Help system showed an incredible amount of jargon and some surprising assumptions as to how many terms every user is presumed to know in all sorts of categories: Mac hardware and software; general computing and basic networking; email and the Web; and items that interface with our Macs, such as the iPod and the Apple TV.

So, Sharon tracked down her old friend Andy Baird—which might have been difficult since he's a fulltime RVer who lives and travels in his motor home, but, in fact, was a cinch because he has a satellite Internet dish. She suggested he take a vacation from retirement to reinvent a project they worked on together a decade and a half ago, The Macintosh Dictionary. The lure of doing a just-click-a-link-and-go version of a lexicon was obviously strong, because here we are.

We were quite amused, though hardly surprised, that in the interval since that last joint project (eons in computer years), not only has the technology advanced, but users' views and interests have changed so much that many of the non-tech entries of that volume are not even on today's radar screen: Steve Jobs's reality distortion field, for instance, probably still exists but users don't care as much as they used to about the personality quirks of their products' CEOs. But we did bring one Dictionary entry forward to this Lexicon verbatim: check out Internet.

"This is great stuff—as a genial right-through read for new users or a comprehensive reference for those, like me, who are supposed to 'know everything' about Macs, this book is invaluable—and such a good price!"
—Mark Webster in his mac.nz review

To see what Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon is all about, you can download a 39-page sample showing the first page for each letter (and thus the full list of terms), or you can read the first three pages of the letter M right here.

Mac

Macintosh. That's right, it's not an acronym, so if anybody writes "MAC" when describing your computer, you can look down your nose at them. And it's not an apple (although it is an Apple), so folks who write about "McIntosh computers" are picking their fruit from the wrong tree.

MAC (Media Access Control)

The unique hardware address built into every network adapter on your computer, and every networkable device—including Palm PDAs, VoIP over Wi-Fi phones, and printers with Ethernet. No two devices in the world have the same MAC address, allowing devices on a local network to easily differentiate themselves. MAC addresses are used only on local networks, not routed to wider networks or the Internet, so this is not the address the outside world sees—that's your IP address. The MAC address for a Mac's built-in Ethernet or AirPort adapter is sometimes accessed when you register or "activate" software so the software will be associated with that specific machine and not work if you copy it to another machine. You can find MAC numbers in the Network preference pane: choose the adapter from the Show menu, and then look for the AirPort ID or the Ethernet ID (for the Ethernet ID, click the Ethernet button).

.Mac

dot.MAC. Apple's subscription-based Internet service is a peculiar beast. It isn't an ISP (you don't get a dial-up account, so you still have to supply your own Internet connection), and it isn't a content provider. So what do you get for your hundred bucks a year? Well, .Mac can host your Web site... although just about every ISP does the same at no extra charge—and you still need an ISP to use .Mac. The storage space it provides for your online iDisk has recently increased ten-fold, to 10 gigabytes (a combined limit for data and email)... although the usefulness of this feature is severely limited by the speed of your Internet connection and Apple's slow servers. .Mac gives you an email address... but if you have an ISP, then you already have one or more of those.

So, does .Mac offer anything special? It lets you synchronize your calendar, Address Book, bookmarks, and email between computers; that's handy, even if there are other, free, ways to do it. .Mac's main advantage is its ease of use, and its level of integration with the Mac Desktop; you can even easily set up a Web site that allows users to access files in your (password-protected!) Public folder, a trick one of Sharon's designer friends uses for her FTP-phobic clients.

macro

A series of commands triggered by a single click or keyboard command—with the underlying assumption that the user has defined the commands to be carried out.

Automator's somewhat clunky build-it-yourself workflows are limited both in what they can do and where they can do it; AppleScript is great, but difficult to learn and overkill as a macro utility. Photoshop provides "actions," which are program-specific macros, while Microsoft Mac Office 2008, due in late 2007, is, sadly, dropping its internal macro support. So, check out Startly's QuicKeys, the best all-round macro-maker for more than a decade, and a newer kid on the block, Script Software's iKey.

MacRoman, Mac OS Roman

MacRoman is the early font-encoding scheme unique to the Mac; the first 128 characters matched the ASCII standard, while the encodings (and some of the characters) in the second 128 were unique to the Mac. It's called Mac OS Roman in Safari's View > Text Encodings submenu, which helps on only the extremely rare occasion that you're viewing an old made-on-a-Mac, for-a-Mac Web site.

MagSafe

The nifty magnetic connector for the power adaptor on newer Mac laptops. If somebody trips over the power cord, it simply pulls off the laptop, instead of pulling the laptop off the table. Apple's site refers to it as "a magnetic connection instead of a physical one." Hmm... so magnets are... what? Metaphysical? Spiritual?

Mail

Apple's email program (someone obviously forgot the i prefix). In the previous version of this book, before Leopard came out, we complained about Mail's lack of integration with iCal, the absence of a To-Do feature, and the fact that the "thread" feature didn't include messages sent on a topic unless it was a part of a Reply All to a group. We said we were looking forward to Leopard's version of Mail with crossed fingers.

Well, we've uncrossed them: Integration with iCal? Check! Point to a date in a message, and turn it into an appointment. To-Do's? Check-- and shared with iCal, no less. Threading including your own replies-- well, at least in smart mailbox setups. Along with other nice features, (Notes), cute (?) features (Stationery), and great features (RSS feeds treated like email messages)... Leopard's Mail is finally Mac-worthy.

Please don't send us any cute emails with Stationery: it unnecessarily clogs the Great Bandwidth; it's usually hard to read; even when it's not hard to read, the text doesn't start until it's an inch or more below the edge of the message area, so it requires extra scrolling. (Unless, maybe, it's a birthday greeting; cute and special occasions can go together.)

mailing list

An email discussion group managed by software such as LISTSERV. The list server has a directory of all the members' email addresses; when an email comes to the list server from a member, the server sends a copy of the message to every member. Since group members can become overwhelmed by the number of messages, there's also a "digest" option. In this mode, the list server collects the messages received in a 24-hour period (or until a certain file size is reached), and sends them out in a single, long message to members who have chosen this option.

malware

malicious + software. Any kind of nasty software—virus, worm, Trojan horse—whose purpose is to cause problems. "Prank" software that unintentionally causes harm is not usually labeled malware, but maybe we can name it: moronware?

Hope you enjoyed this brief excerpt!
The book has over 20 additional M definitions.

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