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Tips and tutorials to help you use your Macintosh |
By Terry Lawrence, program director MacWest Computer Society, Vancouver. British Columbia In the first two installments of this series, I talked about how to find everything on your hard disk, and organizing all that material into alphabetical list view in a series of folders and subfolders so you can find it quickly without too much scrolling. However, there are much better ways to directly access and open the applications and documents you are looking for without opening the hard disk or any folders at all. An alias is a little Icon you create which looks just like the Icon for it’s parent application, document, or folder, except that it’s name is in italics. Each alias is connected to it’s parent application by an invisible thread, and when you double click on an alias, you open the parent application, control panel, document, folder, or whatever. The alias is a bit like the remote starter in your car: you just turn the ignition key - the alias - and the engine starts without having to open the hood and crank over the engine by hand. You can make as many of these aliases as you like, and park them wherever you want to. For example, you can leave aliases for a few of your more frequently opened programs such as Appleworks, your Email program, or your documents folder on your desktop for instant access to those programs. Better still, as we will see shortly, you can place them in your Apple Menu or your Contextual Menus where you can easily open them even if you are not in the Finder at the time. How do I make an Alias? Nothing could be easier. Simply select the Icon for the folder, application program, or document you wish to make an alias of, and click on it once to highlight it. Then hold down the Command key (the one with the cloverleaf and apple on it) and press “M” (as in Make), and an alias will appear just below the selected Icon. Drag the alias out of the hard disk window onto the desktop. Double click the alias, and the parent program, folder, or document opens. If you hit the “M” key several time while holding down the Command key, you will get several aliases, all fully functional. You can delete the word “alias” from the aliases by clicking in the name box, dragging through the word (or words) alias, and hitting the Delete key. This shortens the title. You can still tell the alias from the original, because the alias will always have it’s name in italics, (slanted to the right), while the lettering on the original Icon will be upright. Now that my desktop is covered in Aliases, what do I do with them? Pretty quickly your desktop will be covered in an unsightly mess of aliases, hiding your lovely desktop picture or teddy bear pattern. Let’s park them somewhere out of sight, but still accessable. Using Contextual Menus. There is a wonderful free program by Éric de la Musse called “CM Tools” , as in “Contextual Menu tools”. It is available for download from the MacWest website, or from: http://w3.ime.net/~elf66/ CM Tools has many features which you can access by Control Clicking (holding down the Control key while clicking the mouse button), but the one we are interested in here is the Launcher. When you run the CM Tools installer, it will place a folder called CM Tools Configuration in the Contextual Menu items folder in the System Folder. Within the CM Tools folder is a subfolder called Launcher. If you place aliases into this Launcher folder, when you Control click to bring up the contextual menus, all the programs, folders, documents, or whatever that you have placed aliases of into the Launcher folder will show up on your desktop. You can open any program, document, or whatever directly from the Contextual Menu, in any program, just by Control clicking to open the Contextual Menu, and then selecting the desired item to open. Organizing those Aliases into sub-folders. To better organize the contextual menu launcher, make some folders such as Internet, Applications, Documents, Utilities, etc., and place them into the Launcher folder. Then place the aliases for your utility programs, documents, application programs or internet browsers, etc., into the appropriate folders. Now when you open the contextual menus, you will see a list of names such as Internet representing the top level folders. Highlighting any one of these names will open a sublist showing the contents of that folder, which you can open directly by highlighting one and releasing the mouse button. Using the Apple Menu. The same trick will also work with the Apple Menu items folder in your System Folder. Rather than reinvent the wheel, just duplicate the folders you already made for the contextual menu launcher, complete with their contents, and drop them into the Apple Menu items folder. Be sure to make an alias of your Documents folder and drop it into the Apple Menu items folder, as it will show all the subfolders and individual documents, any of which you can open simply by clicking on the Apple icon in the menu bar. To duplicate a folder and it’s contents (or anything else, for that matter), just highlight the item you wish to duplicate, hold down the Command key, and hit “D”, as in “Duplicate”. Using the big, ugly, clunky official Apple Launcher. If you want to use the clunky Apple launcher to launch your programs, just drop your aliases into the Launcher folder in the System Folder. While you are at it, place an alias of the Launcher on the desktop, so you can close it when you are not using it, but still open it whenever you want to launch a program. |