Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Utilities: Your Mac OS X Toolbox

The Utilities folder (inside your Applications folder) is home to another batch of freebies: another couple dozen tools for monitoring, tuning, tweaking, and troubleshooting your Mac.

The truth is, though, that you’re likely to use only about six of these utilities. The rest are very specialized gizmos primarily of interest only to network administrators or Unix geeks who are obsessed with knowing what kind of computer-code gibberish is going on behind the scenes.

AirPort Admin Utility

Don’t even think about this program unless you’ve equipped your Mac with the hardware necessary for Apple’s wireless AirPort networking technology. (That entails installing a $100 AirPort card in your Mac and attaching a base station, as described in Chapter 12.)

Even then, you don’t use the AirPort Admin Utility to set up AirPort connections for the first time. For that task, use the AirPort Setup Assistant (described below), which takes you gently by the hand and guides you through the steps involved in hooking up a wireless network connection.

After you’re set up, you can use AirPort Admin Utility to monitor the connections in an existing AirPort network. (You can also use this utility to set up new connections manually, rather than using the step-by-step approach offered by the Assistant.)

Files within Files within Files

It’s no surprise that you can include formatted text and pictures in a TextEdit document, but here’s a shocker: You can also embed an entire program ...