When you open a document you will notice 3 coloured buttons at the top left-hand corner of the page. These are called the window controls. Very briefly, this is what they do:
 |
The RED button closes the page |
| The YELLOW button puts the page in the Dock | |
| The GREEN button makes the page bigger |
Let's go into this in a bit more detail:
RED button
The RED button closes your page (i.e. your window). Note, however, that closing a window is not the same thing as quitting your application.
Say, for example, that your Mail application is open. You click on the red button and the window closes, but Mail is still open. You can tell it's open if you look at the Dock; there is still that little black triangle under the Mail icon (i.e. postage stamp). The black triangle appears under the icon of every application which is open.
How to Quit
If you want to quit the application, you have to give the quit command. There are at least two ways to quit. Method One: go to the name of the application (i.e. Mail, Safari, iPhoto, etc.) and click on the name. The menu appears. At the bottom is the Quit command. Click on this. Method Two: hold down the Command (⌘) key, and press the letter 'Q' on the keyboard.
YELLOW button
When you click on the YELLOW button, your page/window is temporarily minimized. In other words, it is temporarily closed, but an icon for that page/window is placed in your Dock (on the right-hand side of the divider line). It will stay there as long as the application that created it is still running.
When you want to retrieve it, just click on its icon in the Dock, and the page/window will open up again.
GREEN button
The GREEN button will maximize your page. In other words, when you click on the green button, the page/window will become larger; in some applications it even takes up the whole width of the screen.
When you click the GREEN button again, it will go back to its former size. In other words, the GREEN button changes the size of the window with one click. Try clicking on the GREEN button repeatedly, and you will see the page/window switch back and forth between a larger size and a smaller size.
Appleworks documents work a little differently. When you first open an Appleworks document, and click on the GREEN button, nothing happens. However, there is another way to change the size of a page/window.
Re-sizing a Window
Try this: move your mouse pointer until it is on the bottom right-hand corner of the window. You will see three, small diagonal lines in that corner:
If you click on that corner and drag in any direction, the window will change its size accordingly.
If you have used this technique to re-size the window, and then click on the GREEN button, the window will return to its former size. This will work for Appleworks documents as well. Try it!
