On Land

Adobe's PDF technology is built in to OS X at a low level. One of the primary benefits of this is the ability to save PDF files from any print dialog box, without using Acrobat or another third party solution. Anything that can be printed can be saved as a PDF, using any print driver on the machine, even for a printer that doesn't physically exist.

Rather than rewrite the basic overview of this feature, I will direct you to the Help menu in the Finder, where if you search for 'print PDF', you find several relevant articles. The PDF format is one of the fundamentals of modern data exchange, and if you don't know what it is, you should ask Adobe, rather than your colleagues.

If you use Entourage, ignore this post.

To attach a file to an email, you can drag it to the mail icon. Mail will start a new message with the file attached. Nice. (Entourage does the same thing.)

When sending files to Wintellians, don't do this. Start the new message, then click 'Attach'. Select the file, and check 'Send Windows-Friendly attachments'. I don't know what it does, but it sounds good.

If you do the drag and drop thing, you won't get this option.

(I assume Entourage, as a Microsoft product, is Windows-friendly by nature.)

PS: Don't send 'Windows-Friendly attachments' to Mac people.

Mac OS X 10.3, Panther, has built-in ZIP compression functionality in the Finder. Use it instead of stuffit. The ZIP format is more standard, and cuts down on problems with the Wintellians.

To create a ZIP file from anything, select the items in the finder, right-click, and choose 'Create Archive of [something]'. A file is created with the extension .zip. If you archived one item, the zip will have the same name. If you archived more than one, the file will be called 'Archive.zip'. Seriously consider changing this name to something more descriptive.

The original files remain.

Exposé is a window-clutter-management feature of OS X 10.3 Panther.

With one keystroke, you can 1) Show all open windows and select one, 2) Show all the open windows in the current application and select one, 3) Push everything aside and view the desktop. The default keys are F9, F10, F11 respectively, but they can be changed at System Preferences | Exposé.

This is the coolest thing in interface design since the mouse, and as ArchiCAD users, it's extra-cool for us.

Come to think of it, I do have a lot of windows open.

Software Update is a utility in OS X which checks for, well, updates for software. You have seen it pop up. By default it runs automatically once a week. It can also be run manually at any time from System Preferences.

Perhaps you have wondered what you should do about it.

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It is strongly recommended that you keep the Dock showing.

Doing so allows you to see at a glance what apps are running. If you are Close/Quit challenged, it almost certainly more than you think. (Running apps have the little black triangle.) Close applications you are not using, it leaves more memory for other things.

It also becomes easier to drag files to applications to open them. This is critical for people running both ArchiCAD 7 & 8 multiple versions of AC.

If the Dock is too big, click and hold on the 'joint' between the panels to resize it.

In AC7, you may have noticed a problem where Cmd+Opt+D doesn't work for drag a copy, and instead shows and hides the dock. In OS X 10.2, there is unfortunately no solution to this other than to change the keyboard shortcut for drag a copy, or to use the context menu. In 10.3, you can turn off the shortcut in System Preferences | Keyboard. I recommend that you do this anyway, in the spirit of this post. (In AC8, you should break the Cmd+Opt+D habit and use "Cmd+D Cmd" instead.)

The difference:

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Rill & Decker and this site officially recommend the use of Safari, the web browser from Apple Computer.

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The toolbar in Finder windows is customizable. Certain customizations I have stuck you with, and when they malfunction, you need to be able to fix them.

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I assume you have a CD burner.

Get a blank CD from the left most happy space cabinet. Put it in the CD drive.

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