Bob LeVitus - OS X Mavericks For Dummies

OS X Mavericks For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948029

ISBN: 978-1-118-69188-5 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-70762-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-70749-4 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Introduction

Y ou made the right choice twice: OS X Mavericks and this book. Take a deep breath and get ready to have a rollicking good time. Thats right. This is a computer book, but its fun. What a concept! Whether youre brand spanking new to the Mac or a grizzled Mac vet, I guarantee that reading this book to discover the ins and outs of OS X Mavericks will make everything easier. The publisher couldnt say as much on the cover if it werent true!

About This Book

This books roots lie with my international best seller Macintosh System 7.5 For Dummies, an award-winning book so good that now-deceased Mac cloner Power Computing gave away a copy with every Mac clone it sold. OS X Mavericks For Dummies is the latest revision and has been, once again, completely updated to include all the OS X goodness in Mavericks. In other words, this edition combines all the old, familiar features of previous editions but is once again updated to reflect the latest and greatest offering from Apple as well as feedback from readers.

Why write a For Dummies book about Mavericks? Well, Mavericks is a big, somewhat complicated personal-computer operating system. So I made OS X Mavericks For Dummies a not-so-big, not-very-complicated book that shows you what Mavericks is all about without boring you to tears, confusing you, or poking you with sharp objects.

In fact, I think youll be so darned comfortable that I wanted the title to be OS X Mavericks Made Easy, but the publishers wouldnt let me. Apparently, we For Dummies authors have to follow some rules and using For Dummies and OS X Mavericks in this books title are among them.

And speaking of dummies, remember thats just a word. I dont think youre a dummy at all quite the opposite! My second choice for this books title was OS X Mavericks For People Smart Enough to Know They Need This Book, but you can just imagine what Wiley thought of that. (Cmon, thats the whole point of the name! they insisted. Besides, its shorter our way.)

The book is chock full of information and advice, explaining everything you need to know about OS X in language you can understand along with timesaving tips, tricks, techniques, and step-by-step instructions, all served up in generous quantities.

Another rule we For Dummies authors must follow is that our books cannot exceed a certain number of pages. (Brevity is the soul of wit, and all that.) So I wish I could have included some things, but they didnt fit. Although I feel confident youll find everything you need to know about OS X Mavericks in this book, some things bear further looking into, including these:

Information about some of the applications (programs) that come with OS X Mavericks: An installation of OS X Mavericks includes roughly 50 separate applications, mostly located in the Applications folder and the Utilities folder within it. Id love to walk you through each one of them, but that would have required a book a whole lot bigger, heavier, and more expensive than this one.

I brief you on the small handful of bundled applications essential to using OS X Mavericks and keep the focus there namely, Calendar, Contacts, Messages, Mail, Safari, TextEdit, and the like, as well as important utilities you may need to know how to use someday.

For what its worth, many books cover the applications that come with OS X Mavericks, as well as applications commonly bundled with Mavericks on a new Mac, such as iLife; the one my publisher suggested I recommend is OS X Mavericks All-in-One For Dummies, written by Mark L. Chambers, which is (of course) also published by Wiley.

Information about Microsoft Office, iLife, iWork, Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, and most other third-party applications: Okay, if all the gory details of all the bundled (read: free) OS X Mavericks applications dont fit here, I think youll understand why digging into third-party applications that cost extra was out of the question.