OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide (7 page)

About [Application Name]

Opens a window with the application’s version number,
copyright info, and whatever else the program’s developer thinks
should be there.

Preferences

Opens the application’s preferences window. What you can
control from this window varies from application to
application—it could be very little or a lot. For info on the
Finder’s preferences, see the section
Mastering the Finder
.

Services

All the services that the current app can use appear in a
list when you highlight this option. Check out
The Services Menu
for details.

Hide [Application Name]

Hides all of the current application’s windows. If you
have 50 Safari windows open and don’t want to manually minimize
each one to see what lies beneath, then choose this option. To
get the windows back, just click the application’s Dock
icon.

Hide Others

Hides every application except the one you’re
using.

Show All

This is the antidote to the
Hide command. Whether you’ve hidden a single
application or every application, Show All will return all the
hidden application windows to full visibility.

Quit [Application Name]

Quits the current application. (You can also invoke this
command by pressing ⌘-Q.) Most people’s inclination is to quit
any application they aren’t using, but that often isn’t
necessary. OS X is very good at allocating resources, so leaving
an application idling will generally have very little impact on
the system.

The Services Menu

The Services menu is the most complex option in the
Application menu. It offers you quick access to functions provided
by other programs, which are called
services
. The services available
to you depend on the applications installed on your Mac and the
program you’re using. In some applications, the Services menu won’t
have anything to offer (the menu will read “No Services
Apply”).

TextEdit (which you can find in the Applications
folder) provides a nice example of what the Services menu can do.
Figure 3-5
shows the options available
when you’ve selected some text in TextEdit. If you want to send the
selected text as a Mail message, for example, all you need to do is
choose New Email With Selection, and Mail will pop open a new
message with the text already inserted. Clicking the Services
Preferences option opens the Keyboard preference pane to its
Services section, where you can customize the Services menu. You can
also create your own services with Automator (see
Automator
).

File

This menu typically contains options for saving, opening,
creating, and printing files. For apps that use iCloud, when you
select Save in this menu, you’ll get a choice to save the
document locally or to iCloud.

Edit

Here you’ll find the old Mac standbys: Cut (⌘-X), Copy
(⌘-C), Paste (⌘-V), and Undo (⌘-Z).

Window

This menu lists all the open windows for the current
application, as well as some commands for working with
them.

Help

Depending on the application and its developer, this menu
can either be very useful or a waste of space. When you open the
Help menu (either by clicking it or by pressing Shift-⌘-?),
you’ll see a search box and a few other options. One of the
really nice things about the Help menu in OS X is that it won’t
just regurgitate an entry in a database—instead, if possible, it
shows
you how to do what you want to do.
For example, suppose you want to create a new folder while using
the Finder. Open the Finder’s Help menu, type
new folder
in the search box, and
then put your cursor over the New Folder entry in the list that
appears. The Help system will then show you which menu contains
the New Folder option and highlight it with a floating blue
arrow, as shown in
Figure 3-6
.