Ok, you're running OS X Lion. Awesome! Let's hop over to the System Preferences and get acquainted with your computer. There are a few different ways to get there, but let's start out with a way that might not be entirely obvious, but is completely ubiquitous - the Apple Menu!
Look up in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, and click on the Apple. Your Apple might be blue, but we can change that through manipulating — you guessed it — your System Preferences.
When you click on System Preferences, you will be presented with the following screen:
This is the heart of your computer, more or less. From here, you can do all sorts of things like turn on file sharing, add user accounts to your system and encrypt your hard drive. Don't worry if your screen doesn't look exactly like this; I've added some things onto my computer to make it more useful, and there's plenty of time to cover that at a later date. I've also changed the arrangement of the System Preferences to be in alphabetical order (preferences for your preferences... so meta!) To do this, make sure you are in the System Preferences application (it should say "System Preferences" in the menu bar) and click on "View". Now, select "Organize Alphabetically" like so:
I find this a much easier way to navigate through the preferences. I don't have to guess what category someone at Apple saw fit to put Users & Groups in, I just need to remember that U is somewhere near the end of the alphabet.
We'll cover all of the included Apple preferences in detail, but for now, take a look at General by clicking on the General icon:
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| You can always find what you are looking for by using the search box in the upper right-hand side of the System Preferences window. OS X even helps you out by highlighting the icon(s) with a circle, and greying the rest. |
The following window will open up:
Experiment with these settings to your heart's content; you're not going to mess anything up. If you don't like something that you've changed, just go back into the General preference and change it back. Also, please note that these are preferences. You don't have to make them just like mine, but in case you're interested, this is how I set up all of my computers.
Two things of interest that you will only find in the General preferences:
1. Double-click a window's title bar to minimize
If checked, when you double-click on the title bar of a window, it will "minimize" to your dock. This helps get windows out of the way temporarily, and they are then instantly recallable from your Dock. I find this useful from time to time.
2. Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps
This is a new feature in Lion. If enabled, any window that was open when you quit an application will automatically open again when you re-launch that application. For example, if you are working on a text document in TextEdit and you quit the application while that document is still open (on your screen), the next time you launch TextEdit, that same document will pop up, just like you had never quit the application. This can be useful, especially if you tend to work on the same documents. However, if you are wondering why some documents are opening up automatically every time you open certain applications, it's because this option is checked. If you want to turn this feature off temporarily, hold down the "Option" key on your keyboard, and select Quit from any application's File menu. You'll notice that instead of "Quit", it now says "Quit and Discard Windows". The only documents that will open the next time you launch the application are windows that have something savable in them (OS X doesn't want to throw out something that you might need later).
You could also just make sure to close any document you don't want to automatically re-open before you quit the application. So, if you want three of your five currently open documents to automatically open the next time you use TextEdit (or whatever application), close two of the documents you don't want to open, leave the other three open and quit the program. The next time you launch the application, you should see those three documents.
Not all applications have been updated to support the "restore windows" feature, so some third-party (read: non-Apple) software might not currently behave as expected.
Feel free to play around with the General settings, and set up your computer the way you want it!
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