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I hear a lot of traditional Windows power users complain that the Mac and the Mac Finder doesn’t show enough. To a certain degree, they’re right. A lot of data is hidden from the average user. There’s a little hint I wanted to share with everyone, though. This will hopefully explain the way Mac does things, in comparison to Windows.

On Windows, you have an .exe file and that’s that. With Mac applications, a program is usually a .app file, and is usually a series of files that come bundled together inside of a package. If you right click (or CTRL+Left click) any application (program) in Mac OS X, you’ll get an item in the menu that says “Show Package Contents”. What that will do is allow you to peek inside the application. You’ll see all the icons, and everything that the application needs to run. It all comes together in a nice little package.

If you’re into knowing more, and being really Geeky… you can install something called FinderPop. This is for power users like myself. When you install FinderPop, it will install a few things into your right click menu. For instance, if I right click my desktop, it allows me to look at my desktop and processes in more depth. I can get a list of running processes at any given time, simply by right clicking the desktop. I can reveal that process and its location on my hard drive… information about it… and much more. All of this is done with just a mouse click or two. FinderPop doesn’t really add anything new. It just makes it easier to find what’s already there.

A lot of things may work differently in Mac and Windows. They’re files, folders and objects still. They’re just managed differently. When you find tools like FinderPop, it can make things much easier on you.

I’m interested to hear what other software you know of and use to make life simpler on a Mac. I’ll definitely pass along all of the good ones.

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