Using the Go Menu in Mac OS X

Remember the transporter from Star Trek? Step on the little platform, assume a brave pose, and whoosh! — you're transported instantaneously to another ship or (more likely) to a badly designed planet exterior built inside a soundstage. Talk about convenience . . . that is, as long as the doggone thing didn't malfunction.

The Finder's Go menu gives you the chance to play Captain Kirk: You can jump immediately to specific spots, both within the confines of your own system as well as external environments like your network or the Internet. (You can leave your phaser and tricorder in your cabin.)

The destinations that you can travel to using the Go menu and the iDisk submenu include the following:

• Back/Forward/Enclosing Folder: These three commands are all basic navigation commands. For example, Back and Forward operate just like they do in Safari or your favorite Web browser. If you're currently inside a folder, you can return to the parent folder by clicking Enclosing Folder.

• Computer: This window includes your hard drives, CD and DVD drives, and your network — the same places that appear when you open a new Finder window with the Command+N key shortcut.

• Home: This window displays the home directory for the user currently logged in.

• Network: Did you guess that this one displays a window with all your network connections? Dead giveaway, that.

• iDisk: This window displays the contents of your Internet iDisk storage (or someone else's).

• Applications: This window includes all the applications that appear in your Mac OS X Applications folder (a neat Just the programs, ma'am arrangement that really comes in handy).

• Utilities: This window displays all the utilities in your Mac OS X Utilities folder.

• Recent Folders: This window displays a submenu that allows you to choose from the folders that you've recently opened.

You can also type the path for a specific folder (use the Go to Folder command) or connect to a specific network server (use the Connect to Server command).

Note that most of the Go menu commands include keyboard shortcuts, proving once again that the fingers are quicker than the mouse.