Product Description

This volume delivers a complete and detailed look at the Mac OS X platform, geared specifically at Java developers. Programmers using the 10.2 (Jaguar) release of Mac OS X, and the new JDK 1.4, have unprecedented new functionality available to them. Whether you are a Java newbie, working your way through Java Swing and classpath issues, or you are a Java guru, comfortable with digital media, reflection, and J2EE, this book will teach you how to get around on Mac OS X. You'll also get the latest information on how to build applications that run seamlessly, and identically, on Windows, Linux, Unix, and the Mac. The book begins by laying out the Mac OS X tool set, from the included Java Runtime Environment to third-party tools IDEs and Jakarta Ant. You'll then be brought up to speed on the advanced, Mac-specific extensions to Java, including the spelling framework, speech framework, and integration with QuickTime. In addition to clear explanations of these extensions, you'll learn how to write code that falls back to non-Mac specific code when it runs on other platforms, keeping your application portable. Once you have the fundamentals of the Mac OS X Java platform in hand, this book takes you beyond the basics. You'll learn how to get the Apache web server running, and supplement it with the Jakarta Tomcat JSP and servlet container.JSPs and servlets running on Mac OS X are covered, as is installation and connectivity to a database. Once you have your Web applications up and running, you'll learn how to interface them with EJBs, as running the JBoss application server on Mac OS X is covered. Finally, the latest developments in Web services, including XML-RPC and SOAP, are found within.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1176754 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
"The amazing Mac OS X Hints book is out now. Published by Pogue Press and O'Reilly, featuring 500 of the most amazing power tips for OS X. Collected by Rob Griffiths and edited by David Pogue, this invaluable book brings together some of the best hints ever for getting more from OS X." - MacFormat, November 2003.

Excerpted from Mac OS X Hints by Rob Griffiths. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 3 –The Dock

The Dock, a central and critical component of Mac OS X, combines several important operating-system functions into a single row of icons across one edge of your screen. It’s a program launcher, a program switcher, a document-storage site, an information hub, a floor wax, and a dessert topping!

Seriously, though, the Dock can help simplify your workflow, and you can personalize it to within an inch of its life. The hints in this chapter are designed to make your time with the Dock more productive. And if you can’t stand the thing, the last hint explains how to get rid of the Dock completely.

The Dock Makeover
You already know, of course, the basics of the Dock. Any icon you drag onto it is installed there as a large, square button (Figure 3-1). A single click, not a double-
click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, and programs you frequently access.

The other basic Dock information morsel is that folders and disks are hierarchical. That is, if you click a folder or disk icon on the right side of the Dock and hold down the mouse button, a list of the icon’s contents sprouts out. This is a hierarchical list, meaning that you can burrow into folders within folders this way. See Figure 3-2 for an illustration.

Tip: To make the pop-up menu appear instantly, just Control-click the Dock icon, or (if you have a twobutton mouse) right-click it.

3-1 Adding Icons
Nobody but you can put icons on the right side of the Dock. But program icons appear on the left side of the Dock automatically whenever you open a program (even one that’s not listed in the Dock). Its icon remains there for as long as the program is running.

This presents an interesting secondary way to add a program’s icon onto your Dock for good.

This also presents a third way to add a program’s icon—one that strikes many people by accident. If you drag an open program’s Dock icon, even by the tiniest bit, it may become a permanent addition to the Dock. That’s because you’ve just dragged the icon off of the Dock and then back onto it, and as you know, dragging any icon onto the Dock installs it there as a permanent fixture.

3-2 Removing Icons
To remove a program’s icon from the Dock, just drag it away from the Dock. (You’re not erasing the program—only its Dock representation.) If the program isn’t running, the program’s icon vanishes in an exciting puff of smoke.

If the program is running when you remove its icon, the picture bounces back into the Dock. Ah, but your gesture hasn’t been in vain; when you quit the program, the icon vanishes.

3-3 Resizing the Dock
If the Dock takes up too much room on your screen, or if you wish it were larger, Mac OS X offers two ways to change its size.

One way is to choose menu→Dock→Dock Preferences. In the Dock dialog box that appears, drag the slider on the Dock Size bar and the Dock changes size.

The other, much more secret way, is to move your mouse over the Dock’s divider bar. The cursor magically becomes a resize bar (Figure 3-4), so that you can drag either up or down to make the Dock grow or shrink. (Its expansion is limited by the edges of your screen, though. If you already have 436 icons installed, they may not have much room to grow.)

3-4 Hiding the Dock
To retain maximum monitor acreage, you can keep the Dock hidden. This trick is particularly useful if you use the Dock primarily to switch programs and otherwise don’t need to see it. It’s also a good option to remember when the Dock intrudes upon the windows of Classic programs, which, because they predate Mac OS X, generally aren’t smart enough to get out of the way of the Dock.

Choose menu→Dock→Turn Hiding On. Choose Turn Hiding Off, or press the same keystroke again, to make it reappear.

Of course, you may not ever need to. Even after it’s been hidden, the Dock springs temporarily back into view whenever you move the mouse to its edge of the screen, or whenever you press c-Tab to switch programs.

3-5 Moving the Dock to the Side
The bottom of the screen isn’t necessarily the ideal location for the Dock. Because most screens are wider than they are tall, the Dock eats into your limited vertical screen space.

Fortunately, you can rotate it in either of two ways:

• The indirect way. From the →Dock submenu, choose "Position on Left," "Position on Right," or "Position on Bottom."
• The direct way. While pressing Shift, drag the Dock’s divider line, as though it’s a handle, directly to the side of the screen you want.

You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most Mac OS X programs position their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the Dock and its labels might get in the way.

3-6 The Top-Mounted Dock
Apple provides three standard screen positions for the Dock: left, right, and bottom (see hint 3-5). But that leaves one possible spot unexplored: the top. If you’re a Macintosh iconoclast—you know, the kind who uses Curlz MT as your everyday font—you might want to do something wacky like move the Dock to the north edge of your monitor. Here’s how:

Tip: Instead of trudging through the following steps, you should know that you can also put that Dock at the top by clicking a single button in TinkerTool, a free program that’s available.

The same alternative applies to hints 3-7 through 3-10.

Customer Reviews

Get the hints
Excellent. This collection of OSX hints garnered from author Rob Griffiths' wonderful MacOSXhints.com site is the natural follow-on for those who have got to grips with OSX thanks to David Pogue's equally good MacOSX: The Missing Manual, and now feel confident enough to tinker under the bonnet (hood, to our Stateside mates).
Warning: It's not for newbies to OSX. Some of the hints require you to drop into the Terminal and have a fiddle with the Unix underpinnings of Jaguar. That said, those fiddlings are clearly set out in step by step, er, steps, and you would have to be either severely educationally-challenged or dyslexic to get them wrong. I've only had the book a couple of days and already I've set up Safari so it can fool "diva" web sites that don't recognise Safari into thinking it's another, supported browser; changed my Mail alert to say "Oi mate, some geezer's sent you an email" in an unconvincing posh accent and screen-captured some of iTunes' more stunning visuals to use as desktop pictures. After being daunted by what I thought was the imposing strait-laced seriousness of OSX, this book brought back to me the real joy of the Mac - just how it has lost none of it versatility or ability to be adapted.
Eminently dip-in-able, if this book wasn't about computers it would make a fantastic loo book because there's something good on almost every page. But it might be more handy to keep it closer.
Good stuff for those of us who have grasped the basics and want to go that bit further.