Thanks for all the help, this site is great!

Even Apple has got rid of the spring in Leopard.

@Daniel, hmmm, I have to say, you caught me
Anyone reading this, I would like to note, I made an error, as of System 10.5 Leopard, Apple no longer adds the “spring” that takes you to a registration page.

They do still customize the Dock to their liking, making the post still relevant. However, I thank Daniel for the correction.

And this is exactly why we started this site, and allow comments. I know we can not be correct all of the time. If our readers help along the way, everyone, including myself, can learn from this.

I have Leopard installed and just NOW dumped the spring – so it was there. I don’t know where else it came from?

Judie

@Judie
Thanks for the followup, I thought about it, and remembered the conditions. New installs will get the “spring”, but a new account within a new install will not. I guess the idea is a clean new install will need to register, other user accounts will not.

Thanks for letting us know.

I hope I didn’t confuse the issue. We bought a 5-pack thing and my first install was from a copy of the disk. It did not work. So it all screwed up *G*. So luckily I had archived stuff and it was still there, just not in the right place. We reinstalled everything with the original disks and it went fine the second time. But I still have a few issues and it looks like we’ll have to do a CLEAN install this time, which didn’t happen the second time. I’m groaning thinking about it. Thanks for your feedback. I like this site – hopefully it’s low-intermediate enough for me to participate.

@ Judie
The idea is to keep it very low/intermediate, and sure, we may toss in some advanced stuff, just cause I like those topics as well. Those posts will be introduced as such, with a clear link telling you to ignore it as it is not entirely important to all users.

Thanks again.

I am running Leopard. I somehow lost my download stacks in my dock. Is there any way to get it back?

Elizabeth – open a new finder window and in column view select your name under Places. Press and drag the Downloads folder back to your Dock. Remember Dock icons are aliases or shortcuts if you will. Good luck.

I found out this won’t work unless you take any other extant copies, even in the trash, and get rid of them. Thanks for the tip; I had tried doing that but your response made me think a little harder about why it wouldn’t work! It’s good now!

I have another question: can I buy a backup that will work with both Mac OS and Windows XP? Thanks in advance.

@Elizabeth, yes, you can share a drive for backup purposes with windows and Macintosh. You will want to format it on Windows, with 2 partitions. Then bring it to the Mac and format one of those partitions as a Mac style partition.

When I first got my Mac (switched from Windows to OS X about four years ago) one of the first things I did was accidentally pluck an icon from the Dock. It *poofed* and was gone.

There’s no undo for that action, which baffled me then and baffles me now – it reinforces the misconception that you can break stuff that way.

When I get my parents to switch I’ll run them through these basics.

@ Lars – in Finder go to Mac Help, off Help on the menu bar and type “adding items to the Dock” in the search field (upper right).
You can add or remove apps., docs, and files to the Dock to customize it as you wish. Mac Help (in Finder), as well as the “Help”
menus in any specific application you have running can be very useful in sorting out problems. At least in this case you won’t have to worry about the “poof” any more. Scott is correct, unless you start deleting or moving and renaming critical system files, there isn’t much that can’t be modified or restored as you want or need.

I just recently made the change from XP to OS X after trying and being repulsed by Vista. I have only had my Macbook for a week, but I am already loving it (some of my experiences with the switch are documented on my website here: http://www.zero101.com/).

This is a great page and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time for me. Thanks for the help and keep up the great work!

@ Chris – don’t have a suggestion for a different style cursor, but
you can change the size if you go to system prefs.>universal access>mouse & trackpad, toward the bottom of the pane -
cursor size slider. Enjoyed your website – good info..

@Lars, @Jim, looks like Jim has replied to you, just wanted to say thanks to Jim for taking the time to help another user out.

@Chris, MightMouse can do it, not with 10.5 yet, so keep an eye on their page for when they have a Leopard compatible release.

@ Lars and anybody else interested –
hadn’t visited the Apple site
recently so I’m not sure when this started, but if you go: >Mac>Find Out How>Mac OS X>Using the Dock, adding and removing items is specifically explained. There are multiple text tutorials; as well as, some video tutorials. OS X, Photos, Movies,Web, Music and
Documents are also topics covered. Well worth checking out…
a good supplement to Mr.Haneda excellent site! Keep the Cupertino folks on their toes.

@Jim, yes, finally, Apple is making headway in this regard, the videos are really well done. We aim to be more approachable, and be here to help where things are not clear, and also take it to a much simpler level.

Thanks for pointing out the other resources out there, they are indeed very good.

Hi, I appreciate your website. I have a question that I couldn’t find an answer to. Some websites include “contact us” links which when clicked automatically take you to a “new message” window in your email program. Mine automatically opens to my Lotus Notes email and I’d like it to take me to Yahoo instead. How do I do this? Thanks again!

@Agi, mailto links in web pages will go to the default email application you have defined on your Mac. Since yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc are not applications, but web pages inside an application, this is something that can not be changed by default.

There are applications that you can install that will help you with it:
http://www.bassetsoftware.com/osx/yahoomailer/

My user group turned me on to your site. . . Your now in my Dock!
This is going to be a great tool. I’ve learned so many Mac things over the years and then, well you know, my mind does not have a very good file system. Thank You

Years ago I think I was using Claris works and I remember that the pull down fonts list used to appear in the actual font so that you did not have to search by name. Now using AppleWorks6 and I can’t remember how I made that happen. Thank You for a clue.

@Ron, Fonts shown in the font face is now up to the application itself. You probably used to use NOW Menus or maybe some other app. There is http://unsanity.com/haxies/fontcard but that does not work on Leopard.