That’s an old adage, but in my experience as a Macintosh trainer, I am convinced that the fact that the Finder is always there and that you never actually launch it causes Mac users to ignore how powerful a piece of software it really is. I’m going to suggest a couple of tips that I have used to organize my work with the Finder.

Use the Desktop as a desktop.
If you were working on a project or task without a computer, one of the first things you might do is clear your desktop or workspace and layout all of the files and materials you need to complete your project. Apple’s idea in creating the Macintosh Desktop space was to create a computer metaphor for people’s actual desktop. They expected people to use the virtual desktop in much the same way they used their physical desktop. They also used the folder and document icons as a metaphor for the file folders and papers people worked with.

Unfortunately, many people use their Macintosh Desktop for what I call “HyperPile”. My wife’s MacMini has the most cluttered desktop you’ll ever see. She has every possible slot filled with the icon of some file or other, and many of them have totally unintelligible names. However, that”s the same way she organizes her actual desktop and filing system. I’m never quite sure where a folder is supposed to be put in the file cabinet.

Organize Your Work with the Desktop and the Sidebar

1. Begin by clearing off your Desktop. Create the folders you need to properly collect your files just as you would with real file folders. After you have gathered and organized your documents, click on your user name in the Sidebar of any Finder window and store them in the Documents folder that was created when you first configured your Mac.
2. Decide what one or two projects you want to work on and either create or drag the folders with the appropriate files onto your Desktop. the reason you want the files you are using for your current work on the Desktop is because in any Finder window, including an Open dialog window for an application, the Desktop is only a key combination away. Simply type Command + Shift + D, and you will be taken instantly to the Desktop .
3. Finally, drag the icon for the folders on your Desktop onto the Sidebar of any open Finder window. This will create an Alias for these folders. You can also drag the icon for any applications you will be using for the project into the Toolbar or the Sidebar and create aliases for them as well. I usually put applications in the Toolbar and files and folders in the Sidebar. Now all the folders, files, and applications are only a click away in any Finder window.
4. When it’s time to work on a new project,

• • drag the Aliases from the Toolbar and Sidebar onto the Desktop to remove them (poof),
  • put your completed project’s files and folders away in your documents folder where they belong,
  • repeat steps 1 through 3 for your next project.

Follow these simple tips for organizing your workflow, and I promise you will spend less time looking for stuff and more time working productively on things that will make your business more profitable.

Finding Files or Folders

To manage folders and files, you need to know where they are. Is there anyone who hasn’t saved a file somewhere on a hard drive and then forgotten where we saved it? Never fear Spotlight is here!

Spotlight is the name of the wonderful tool in OS X that helps us find files and folders very easily. If you can remember just a word in the file or when you think you might have saved the file, the chances are you can find it with Spotlight.

Spotlight provides two methods for finding files: by content, and by meta data. Access the Spotlight content method by clicking on the small magnifying icon on the far right of the menu bar. Type any content text or meta data you want to find in the search field, and the results will be displayed in a vertical pop-up list.

To search for a file by its meta data, with no file or folder selected, type Command + F, or with a file or folder selected type Option + Command + space and the results will be displayed as folders and files in the List view in a Spotlight Finder window.

The list will show all the files or folders that match the search criteria. Here are the things you can do with the search results window.

• Select any file in this window and its path will be displayed in the Path Bar at the bottom of the window.
• Double click on either an icon in the list or on the Path Bar and it will be opened.
• Drag the arrow across the path and as you cross each path element its full name will be displayed

Power tip: Use Comments in a file’s or folder’s Info window Comment section to tag files for future searching in Spotlight.

Viewing Files

You can open any file in its creator application by clicking on it to select it and choosing File > Open in the Finder. Of course you can also double click on any file to open it in its creator application. You can re-define which application will open a document file. Select the file, and type Command + I. When the info window is displayed, click on the Open with: reveal triangle . A pop-up menu will list all the applications you have that can open that particular file type. For example, I set all text files to open with Bare Bones TextWrangler rather than Text Edit.
Did You Know? You can select a file then press the space bar and a preview of the file’s contents is displayed.

Moving Files and Folders

The simplest and most obvious way for most users is to click and drag them to where they want them to be. When you click and drag to move files in Icon View, the Finder Preferences will determine whether icons snap to a grid or not. The grid spacing can be defined in Finder Preferences pane which can be accessed by choosing Finder >Preferences or with the key combination of Command + , (comma)

Did you know? Spring loaded folders are another way to drill down into folders and reduce the time it takes to move files from one folder to the another. This techniques works in all views.

What do we do as Internet marketers? More specifically, what do we do on our Macintosh computers as Internet marketers? The next few posts may seem pretty basic, but I am going to focus on the routine things we do when we use Macs, and how we can do those even more proficiently.
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I remember when I first got interested in computers in the late ‘70s. The buzz words in schools was that we needed to develop computer literacy. Even then, I thought the need was computer proficiency. Our Macs are our tool. To be a productive with a tool a user must developing proficiency with it. Therefore, I’m going to focus on the tasks we do as Internet markets and how we use our Macs to do them as I write the next few posts.

If I were to put our work into task categories, it would include something like the following:

1. Manage and use our computer(s) drives, folders, and files
2. Connect our computers to sites on the internet to search for and use web sites to upload and download files from our web sites
3. Create content for our blogs and web sites including
   • text documents for our posts
   • images for posts and web sites
   • Audio and video for posts, web sites, YouTube and podcasts
4. Communicate with our readers/users via email, forums, chats, and webinars

I’m sure you will be able to tell me about other tasks I have missed via your comments, but let’s begin with these tasks. Let’s get started!

Managing our Macintoshes

I am convinced after all my years of supporting Apple employees and customers that most users never full advantage of the capabilities of the Finder, and yet it is one of the core technologies that makes the Macintosh so powerful. Mastering the skill of managing drives, folders and files on your Macintosh can be a significant productivity booster, and it is the Finder that enables us to do so. In the next couple of posts we’ll take a look at the Finder, at what it does, and how you can use it more proficiently.

The Finder is for viewing drives, folders, and files

Finder Windows – When you open any drive or folder icon a window is displayed. In their normal state windows have three parts, the Title bar, the Sidebar to the left, and the Toolbar at the top. The Sidebar and the Toolbar can be hidden by clicking on the oval button on the right side of the Title bar. There is a third bar, the Path Bar which can be displayed when a window is open by selecting the View menu and choosing the Show Path Bar sub-menu. Did you know? The Title bar will display a window’s path when you click on the window’s name while holding down the Control key. The path can also be displayed by selecting an open finder window and choosing View > Show Path Bar.

The Finder allows us to view drives, folders, and files in a variety of ways

Macintosh Finder Icons

Out of the box, the default view of drives, folders, and documents is the icon view. The Desktop always shows icons. Icons visually represent drives, folders, files and aliases. Drives, folders, and files all have the following meta characteristics/information embedded in them. This is important, as you will see, because we can search for things on our computers using this information.

• Name
• Date modified
• Date created – Determined the first time a folder is created or a document is saved.
• Size
• Kind – Defined by the creator of the file. However, this can be redefined in the info window
• Versions – Used to show application versions
• Comments – the user adds comments although sometimes the developer will put comments in Application and document files.
• Label – this is a great way to organize and find project files

While in the Finder choose View > Arrange By and select the meta characteristic by which you would like the icons arranged. You can also use the key combination Control+Command + 1 through 8. Remember, the Desktop always shows icons but open Finder windows can display the contents of drives and folders in several ways; as icons as we have seen, but also as lists and columns.

Aliases are a special kind of icon. They are two way pointers to any Finder element. When you move the file or folder the alias will still know where it is, or if you move the alias, it still keeps track of the file. The icons you see in the Dock and in the Sidebar of a Finder window are aliases. They are created by simply dragging the actual icon of the file into either the Dock or the sidebar. To remove them simply drag them out. This is a very flexible way to create temporary pointers to files that you are using regularly for a project or task. I move aliases in and out of the Dock and the Sidebar all the time. Did you know you can drag files or folders into the Toolbar too. The Finder will create an alias of the file or folder. Other ways to create aliases include selecting a file or folder and typing Command + L, or you can click and drag on a file or folder while holding down the Option + Command keys.

Macintosh Finder List View

You may find it more convenient to view things in a single List. To view any open window as a list choose View > as List or type Command + 1. List view displays files and folders in a vertical format. Folders in a list can be expanded downward and collapsed upward by clicking on the reveal/hide triangles to the left of each folder name. You can also click on the folder and type Command + down arrow or Command + up arrow to expand and collapse a folder in list view. This provides and easy way to drill down into folders.

Macintosh Finder Column View

An even more flexible view of lists is the Column view. The Column view displays nested folders in a horizontal format. Clicking on any folder in Column view displays any files or folders within it in a column to the right. Expanding the window to the right exposes more columns. Clicking on a file in any Column displays its viewable meta characteristics to the right

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how you can use the Finder to , of all things, FIND stuff.

Wow! Had a terrible day with WordPress yesterday all because I made a mistake while duplicating the iMarketOnMac site for testing purposes. In my FTP program, Fetch, you can open multiple remote windows and drag and drop files in between them. If you hold down the Option key while you do so it copies the files rather than moves them, just like you can do in the Finder.

So, without stopping to think about what I was doing I started to drag the site files for iMarketOnMac into a new folder in /public_html called imarketonmac_test. BUT, I forgot to hold down the Option key, thereby moving, not copying the files. Well, that would have broken the site for sure. Then without thinking again, I deleted the files I had just copied without moving them back into their original folder. Many of them had special tweaks to make improvements that my mentor, Lynn Terry of Self-Starters Weekly Tips, had suggested, so I am in the process of going back in and redoing them. I did have backups of my databases, but I had not backed up the site files. I’m spending today and tomorrow redoing them.

Now, for a guy who is marketing himself as a knowledgeable, well trained technical sort, why am I telling you this? Because I am also a teacher, this is a teachable moment, and I want you to learn from my mistake. Lesson to be learned? Before you do anything that might jeopardize your work, whether it is on your local computer or on a remote one, Backup! Backup! Backup!

On WordPress it is easy to backup your database with the WP DB Backup plug-in. I usually have it installed, but in trying to get iMarketOnMac up and running and make the changes Lynn suggested I didn’t follow my own advice, and  make a backup of my site files. Lynn is always telling us on the SSWT Elite brainstorming sessions that we should automate everything we can. WP DB Backup does a backup and then emails it to me every day when I go for my afternoon tea. HostGator, the hosting service I use for all my domains and websites, has a backup wizard that allows you to download a zipped copy of your entire site or parts of it onto your computer.

It creates a full or partial backup of

• Home Directory
• MySQL Databases
• Email forwarders configuration
• Email filters configuration

The files are backed up and included in a zip file for your convenience which you can then download. Since the backup takes place on the host, the only un-automated part  is when you download it.

I’ll be back to where I started soon. We’re going to take a look at the Macintosh Finder. I think you may learn some things you didn’t know you could do with it

Always Start With the Task

We always need to remember that our computers are tools we use to do the tasks that Internet marketing requires. I always taught my sales students that they must help their customers determine what the task was when ever they were  considering the purchase of any hardware or software. Frankly, that should be our job when we are recommending something to our readers.

The way to decide which tool is best for us is to ask questions which uncover:

• What our current Situation is
• What Problems we are experiencing because of our situation
• Measure the Implication or impact of those problems and what they cost in time,  dollars, and cents
• Measure the time, dollars, and cents recovered when the product we’re using meets our Need.

This is the meme developed by Neil Rackham in his classic book, SPIN Selling. If you want to sell to people, you need to read his book.Your sales copy will be greatly enhanced if you follow the principles of SPIN selling.

Here’s what the process should be. We decide if a tool is a good or better tool by determining what the work is that needs to be done and by deciding how well the tools we have or are considering acquiring will do the job.

My intention for iMarketOnMac is to writing posts that always always begin with a focus on the work we need to do as Internet marketers, and whether and how well the tools available to us will help us do the work. OK, let’s take a look at what we do and how we can do it better on our Macintosh.

I am going to organize my posts on iMarketOnMac along the lines of the three traditionally discussed characteristics of the Macintosh experience

• Ease of Use – The classic arguments in favor of the Macintosh is that it’s easier to use. Macintosh ease of use is no accident. Apple spends millions of dollars on researching the user experience beginning with how people go about their work without a computer. Macintosh ease of use is achieved in two ways; through consistency and flexibility.
• Consistency – Once you learn how to do something on a Mac, that skill and knowledge is more often than not transferable to other tasks on the computer. By controlling the user interface (UI) from its very beginning, Apple has ensured that the user experience is the same for every program. Although windows is much better now than it was a few years ago, you will still find programs whose interface is not consistent with other programs. What you learn when you use one program is not always transferable to another one. The result is confusion, and sometimes time consuming mistakes.
• Flexibility – We all don’t work the same way. Some of us like pictures (icons). Some of us like lists. The primary view of what is on your computer and how you access it should reflect the way you like to see things. Your Macintosh gives you a variety of ways to see view, find, use and move things. You can view file directories as folder or file icons, lists, or columns.

Tomorrow I’ll begin dissecting how the Macintosh enables Internet marketers to work easily and efficiently and concentrate on the business of earning from our efforts. beginning with the essential task for any computer user is managing the volumes (disks/drives), directories (folders), and files (documents)on our computers.

Tomorrow, a look at the a powerful program that is always running on a Macintosh called the Finder. It’s called that because what it does it making finding and managing files a breeze.

Why iMarketOnMac? That’s a legitimate question. The answer begins with another question, “Are there Internet marketers using the Macintosh as their primary platform, and is so, do they face challenges or opportunities that marketers on the Windows platform do not?” Well, there’s one that I know of . . . me.

Problems and Opportunities
When  I started my Internet marketing efforts, it was necessary for me to find and gather the software and hardware I needed to manage the many tasks a new Internet market must do. I soon found that most of the gurus assumed that we were using Windows based PC. SEO, content creators, submission software and the like were almost all PC based. I either had to find Macintosh based equivalents, or Macintosh software that would open the files created by the PC software. For the most part, I was almost always able to do so. Documents were almost always in HTML, text, or PDF format. Audio and video files were not often a problem because QuickTime player handles almost any of them.

I solved the problem of Windows only software by installing Virtual PC on my PowerBook G4 based Macs. I chose that solution even though I had a clunky PC below my desk because I didn’t want to deal with two computers and all the synchronization, backup, and maintenance problems associated with them.

The bottom line is that I was able to assemble a powerful set of hardware and software tools that would manage everything I needed to do. It finally dawned on me that I had the perfect  tool, and that it presented me with more opportunities than it did problems. When I upgraded my computers to Intel based Macs I could honestly say that working on Macintosh created even more opportunities that working on a Windows based PC would never offer without some major expenditures.

Time to Share
I have three wonderful mentors, Alex Sysoef, the creator of Expert WordPress, Lynn Terry, the publisher of ClickNewz and Self Starters Weekly Tips, and Paul Evans, the creator and publisher of Nicheology. Not only have they taught me much about the business, but they have taught me that sharing what you know and learn is an important part of being successful. That is is the real answer to, “Why iMarketOnMac.”

I know and have things that Macintosh based Internet marketers need to know. If you are an Internet marketer who uses a Mac, I can answer your questions and help you solve your problems. I am committed to doing so! My goal is to provide you with the tips, techniques, training and tools to hep you market more effectively and efficiently. In terms of an old Apple motto, to “Concentrate on the task  not the tool!”

Read my “About me” page, and you will also see that I bring some extra skills and knowledge to the task that others might not have.

Stay tuned! Subscribe to my RSS feed, newsletter, and also register for the forums. Together we can build of community of like minded Internet marketers who use their Macintosh computers to flourish and prosper.

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