In general, new programs arrive on your Mac via one of two avenues: on a CD, or via an Internet download. The CD method is slightly simpler; see “Performing the Installation” later in this section.
For help installing downloaded programs, on the other hand, read on.
Programs you download from the Internet generally arrive in a specially encoded, compressed form, as shown in Figure 14-18. Study the end of the downloaded file’s name; it usually has one of these file name extensions:
.sit indicates a StuffIt file, the standard Macintosh file-compression format.
.tar is short for tape archive, an ancient Unix utility that combines (but doesn’t compress) several files into a single icon, for simplicity in sending.
.gz is short for gzip, a standard Unix compression format.
.tar.gz or .tgz represents one compressed archive containing several files.
Figure 4-18. Downloading a new program from the Internet may strew your desktop with icons. After the installation is complete, you can delete all of them. (But keep the .dmg file if you think you might want to install the software again later.)
The only thing you need to know about these compression and archiving formats is that StuffIt Expander can turn all of them back into usable form. In fact, StuffIt Expander, a program in your Applications→Utilities folder, generally kicks in automatically when you download a file. (If it doesn’t, double-click a downloaded compressed file to spur Expander into action.)
Once you’ve unstuffed (or untarred) a downloaded program, it often takes the form of a disk-image file, whose name ends with the letters .dmg (see Section 4.8.2). Disk images have been around for years on the Mac, but they’re extremely common in Mac OS X. All you have to do is double-click the .dmg icon. After a moment, it magically turns into a disk icon on your desktop, which you can work with just as though it’s a real disk (Figure 4-18). For example:
Double-click it to open it. The software you downloaded is right inside.
Remove it from your desktop by dragging it to the Trash (whose icon turns into a big silver Eject key as you drag), highlighting it and pressing
-E (the shortcut for File→Eject), or Control-clicking it and choosing Eject from the contextual menu. (You’ve still got the original .dmg file you downloaded, so you’re not really saying goodbye to the disk image forever.)
When the StuffIt Expander progress-bar dialog box disappears, you may have several icons on your desktop. Some are useful, some you’re free to trash.
The original compressed file. As illustrated in Figure 4-18, it’s safe to throw away the .sit, .tar, .gz, or .tgz file you originally downloaded (after it’s decompressed, of course).
Note
If you get tired of cleaning up after your downloads this way, you can tell StuffIt Expander to delete the pieces automatically. To do so, double-click the StuffIt Expander icon (in Applications→Utilities). From the StuffIt Expander menu, choose Preferences. Turn on both “Delete after expanding” checkboxes, and then click OK.
The .dmg file. Once you’ve turned it into an actual disk-drive icon (Figure 4-18, bottom), installed the software from it, and “ejected” the disk-drive icon, you can delete the .dmg file. Keep it only if you think you might need to reinstall the software someday.
The disk image itself. This final icon, the one that contains the actual software or its installer, doesn’t exist as a file on your hard drive. It’s a phantom drive, held in memory, that will go away by itself when you log out. So after installing its software, feel free to drag it to the Trash (or highlight it and press
-E to “eject” it)—or just let it sit there until it goes away.
Working with .tar, .gz, and .dmg files are all skills unique to downloading Mac OS X programs from the Internet. Installing software from a CD is much more straightforward.
In either case, once you’ve got a disk icon on your desktop (either a pseudo-disk from a disk image or a CD you’ve inserted), you’re ready to install the software. You can install many Mac OS X programs just by dragging their icons or folders to your hard drive. Others offer a traditional installer program that requires you to double-click, read, and accept a license agreement, and so on.
The Color Picker
Here and there—in System Preferences, TextEdit, Microsoft Office, and many other programs—Mac OS X offers you the opportunity to choose a color for some element: for your desktop background, a window, and so on.
The dialog box that appears offers a miniature color lab that lets you dial in any color in the Mac’s rainbow. Several color labs, actually, arrayed across the top, each designed to make color-choosing easier in certain circumstances:
Color Wheel. Drag the scroll bar vertically to adjust the brightness, and then drag your cursor around the ball to pick the shade.
Color Sliders. From the pop-up menu, choose the color-mixing method you prefer. CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. People in the printing industry will feel immediately at home, because these four colors are the component inks for color printing. (These people may also be able to explain why K stands for black.)
RGB is how a TV or computer monitor thinks of colors: as proportions of red, green, and blue. And HSV stands for Hue, Saturation, and Value—a favorite color-specifying scheme in scientific circles.
In each case, just drag the sliders to mix up the color you want, or type in the percentages of each component.
Color Palettes presents canned sets of color swatches. They’re primarily for programmers who want quick access to the standard colors in Mac OS X.
Image Palettes offers the visible rainbow arrayed yet another way: in cloudy, color-arranged streaks.
Crayons. Now this is a good user interface. You can click each crayon to see its color name: “Mocha,” “Fern,” “Cayenne,” and so on. (Some interior decorator in Cupertino had a field day naming these crayons.)
In any of these color pickers, you can also “sample” a color that’s outside the dialog box—a color you found on a Web page, for example. Just click the magnifying-glass icon and then move your cursor around the screen. You’ll see the sliders and numbers change inside the dialog box automatically when you click.
Finally, note that you can store frequently used (or frequently admired) colors in the mini-palette squares at the bottom. To do that, drag the big rectangular color swatch (next to the magnifying glass) directly down into one of the little squares, where it will stay fresh for weeks.
In both cases, where you decide to install the new program is suddenly a big issue. You have the following two alternatives:
In the Applications folder. Most programs, of course, sit in your Applications folder. Most of the time, this is where you’ll want to install new programs. Putting them in the Applications folder makes it available to anyone who uses the Mac.
Note
You can’t put anything in your Applications folder unless you have an administrator account, as described on Section 11.2.
In your Home folder. This option is valuable only if you share your Mac with other people, as described in Chapter 11. If that’s your situation, you may occasionally want to install a program privately, reserving it for your own use only. In that case, just install or drag it into your Home folder (see Section 2.1). When other people log onto the machine, they won’t even know that you’ve installed that new program, since it doesn’t show up in the Applications folder.
If you don’t have an administrator account, this is your only option.
This is the part where you’re so glad to be a Mac user. To uninstall a program, you just drag it (or its folder) from the Applications folder (or wherever it is), to the Trash. You might also check your Home→Preferences folder for the presence of a preference file, which you can also trash.
That’s it. There’s no Uninstall program, no Add/Remove Programs window, no left-behind pieces to worry about.
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