Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon (Buy)

Excerpts: Currently available articles marked with bullet. Click to download.

- - - - - - - - - - - 2010 - - - - - - - - - - -

Feb • Oh, What a Tangled Web: Part I of several Web-related collections.

- - - - - - - - - - - 2009 - - - - - - - - - - -

Dec • The Age of Disc-o: Part I of CD & DVD affairs.

Nov: Punctuate: Punctuation characters with special meaning on the Mac

Oct: Hy-phens and Dash-es: Those little lines that we use, overuse, and misuse.

Sept: Font Types: A little bit (very little) of a pun in that title. Types of fonts the Mac uses.

Aug: Size Matters: Get your mind out of the gutter! This means "matters of size" - from bits to yottabytes (which is a lottabytes).

Jul: Repeat after Me: Terms that are often mispronounced.

Mar: Two-Faced Terms: Double the pleasure, double the edification, with terms that have two different meanings.

Feb: Triple-Threat Terms: Entries with not one, not two, but three different definitions.

Jan: Just My Type: Basic typography terms that every... well, okay, that most Mac users should know... because computer fonts were brought to the masses by our beloved platform.

- - - - - - - - - - - 2008 - - - - - - - - - - -

Jan: Leopard's Little Spots: Sometimes the little things mean a lot. Some of the new, little things in Leopard.

Feb: Video Plug-ins: Nope, not add-ons. Plug-ins, as in connectors.

Mar: Whatchamacallits: It’s not a scroll box, because it’s not square at all. And they’re not tooltips. What are all these things called?

Apr: End of a Classic Era: Goodbye pre-OS X systems – even the “fake” one under pre-Leopard OS X. We were sort of surprised to find we had so many operating-systems entries.

May: When Good Computers Go Bad: And, sometimes they do, so this is a collection of some of the bad entries. (Maybe we should reword that sentence…)

Jun: Music to My Ears: Before Apple was a computer company, there was Apple the record company that the Beatles founded. Never mind the mess that caused later – just peruse these musical entries.

July: Etymology 101: You think you know what WiFi was derived from? How about Ogg Vorbis? These and other entries with interesting origins.

Sept: As Seen on TV: Out with the old (analog), in with the new (digital).

Oct: Le Mot Juste: Juste – I mean, just – a collection of words that are perfect for their jobs.

Nov: Eponymy: Leotards, chauvinists, boycotts, and sandwiches. All words derived from people's names – none of which are Lex entries. But we do have some interesting terms that are, indeed, based on peoples’ names.

Dec: Jumping the Snark: We’re not above pithy commentary. In fact, we’re often somewhat below it, as these entries show.

Would you like material for your User Group newsletter or other publication?

Whether you publish on paper or online, or both, what User Group isn't always looking for extra, informative material every month?

We've put together a series of excepts from Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon and are making it available to user group publications for free. (Absolutely free? No strings attached? Well, you have to give credit where credit is due, and you'll have to include a copyright notice and agree not to edit things... are those strings? We think they're just simple, reasonable conditions.)

- - - - - - -
The missing months: Medical adventures precluded the January installment of the XLex. Further ones will put me out of commission for the March installment, too, the next will be for April (no Fooling!).
And, we're getting to the end of this "service" because, after two years of excerpts, the book is pretty well picked-over -- and some of it is out of date and can't be excerpted (at least, not without confusing people!)
But, there are a few months of excerpts left, and I hope by then to come up with another way to provide User Groups with newsletter-worthy information.

What you get

An article of approximately 550 words, with 3 to 5 excerpted items from the Lexicon on the topic at hand.

We'll provide an RTFD (TextEdit) document with embedded web-ready graphics, as well as occasional higher-res versions of the graphics for your printed publication, all in one zipped, easy-to-download file.

How (and when) you get it

Simply click on the appropriate link at left. We're setting this up as a monthly column, so only two links will be active at any given time (to allow for the overlap of late-comers and early birds).

Please Sign Up!

You don't have to sign up, or in, or register, or anything like that to avail yourself of this material. But we'd like you to; we'd like to be able to say, at some point: "Join the 1,347 other User Groups around the globe who publish the X Lex." (And you might want to add your user group to the list of links on the top page of 33 Things Books, too - just say so!) Just click here to tell us who you are.

Questions? Comments?

Questions or comments about this service, click here. For more general questions or comments about the Lexicon, you can email Andy or Sharon directly.

Samples from
Take Control: The Mac OS X Lexicon

400K: The capacity of the Mac’s first disk, which held the System (with about a dozen fonts and a handful of Desk Accessories) and Finder, an application (MacWrite or MacPaint), and a few documents. To put that in perspective, Mac OS  X’s Widgets Calculator is just under 400K by itself, and its Calculator application is 7,270K; the original Calculator desk accessory was 8K. If the size of a program’s window were indicative of its size on the disk, this is how the original Calculator would measure up against the current one.

Bonjour: Apple’s behind-the-scenes, make-it-simple technology for finding “share-able” things on your local network, such as other Macs, printers, and servers. Even iPhoto and iTunes use Bonjour to find shared photos and music. Bonjour and services like it are special because you don’t have to worry about setting up network configurations to get things to work; in fact, the generic form of Apple’s Bonjour technology is called Zeroconf, for “zero configuration.” Bonjour was formerly Rendezvous, but Apple had to change the name because of a trademark issue—quel dommage!

You can, for instance, use Bonjour in iChat to talk to someone on your local network instead of over the Internet: open the Bonjour window (Window > Bonjour) and use it just like a Buddy List to talk to people locally. Some children do not seem to appreciate this extra avenue of parental communication on a home network.

CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black): The four inks needed to print full-color images. (K comes from the term key plate, which is used in printing to apply detail, usually in black ink; you should think of it as K for black, which differentiates it from B for blue.) Images intended for printing are often saved in CMYK format, while those meant for display on the screen are usually saved in RGB format.

What makes cyan, magenta and yellow special? Put cyan and magenta together, and you get blue; mix magenta and yellow and you get red; yellow and cyan make green. (You probably know from pre-school Play-Doh™ experience what you can do once you have blue, red, and yellow!) Spread out the ink dots using a halftone technique, and you can get just about any tint or shade you like… except pure black. Mixing the three colors makes a very dark brown, but for a true black, you use black ink, which is why it’s CMYK and not just CMY.

documentation: Something that no longer comes with software.

secondary click, secondary button: Apple’s occasional references to clicking for a contextual menu, usually done by Control-clicking. The Keyboard & Mouse preference pane’s Trackpad screen for later-model laptops refers to a two-finger procedure for a secondary click, while the Mighty Mouse setting for secondary button calls up the contextual menu.

UWB (ultrawideband): An emerging wireless standard that can transmit as fast as 480 Mbps over a few feet and 110 Mbps over a few yards. The companies behind FireWire, USB, and Bluetooth are working to extend their data formats to work with UWB. (Imagine putting down a hard drive in the vicinity of a computer and having them recognize each other and transfer data faster than a FireWire 400 connection!)