Apple 145 manual Choose a command, Telling the Macintosh to do something involves two steps

Choose a command

Choosing a command involves using a combination of the trackball actions you’ve reviewed.

1.Point to the Special menu title in the menu bar.

2.Press to pull down the Special menu.

3.Drag to the first item in the menu (the Clean Up Desktop command) so it becomes highlighted, and then release the trackball button.

When you choose Clean Up Desktop, the hard disk icon and the Trash return to their original positions (as long as they’re already close).

Giving orders to your computer

Telling the Macintosh to do something involves two steps:

1.selecting an object on the screen, and

2.choosing the action you want to perform on that object.

When you select an object, you’re telling the Macintosh to act upon that object.

The objects you can select include an icon on the Macintosh desktop, a sentence in a word-processing program, and a picture in a graphics program—to give just three examples.

Most of the actions you can perform on the selected object are listed in the menus at the top of the screen. The items, or actions, in the menus are called commands. When you choose a command, you are telling the computer to take the action you’ve chosen on the selected object.

So—you tell your Macintosh what to do by using a very simple “language” with only two kinds of words:

nnouns (the objects), and

nverbs (the actions)

and with only one rule:

nFirst the noun, then the verb (to this object, do that action). In Macintosh terms: select an object, then choose a command.

36 Chapter 2: Working on the Desktop