Mac Basics: How To Launch Apps

There are many different ways you can launch apps on your Mac. You can use the Dock, LaunchPad, Spotlight. But it is also important to understand where the apps are actually located. There are also other ways like double-clicking a document or switching to an already-running app.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at how to launch apps on your Mac.
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So there are many different ways to launch apps on your Mac. One of the most obvious ways is to simply go down to the Dock here and click on the app that you want to launch. The app will launch. But what if the app isn't in the Dock. How do you launch is then? Well, there are several different ways. Let's first start off by looking at a exactly where these apps really live. In the Finder I'm going to go to a New Finder window. Then I'm going to use Go and Applications. This will take me to the Applications folder. If I Command Click here I could see it is at my main hard drive level in a folder called Applications. Here is a list of all my applications. You may see it as a list like this or you may see it as icons. You could certainly go here to launch an application. As a matter of fact the Go Menu has a shortcut, Shift Command A. When you see an app here in the Dock it's actually an alias or a shortcut to the app. So the app really isn't in the Dock. It's simply a link to the app. The app is really in the Applications Folder.
Now instead of going to the Applications Folder one easier way to launch apps is to go to Launchpad. Launchpad is right here in the Dock and if you click it it shows you all of your icons. You may have several screens of icons. You could see these dots here at the bottom and you could click on one of them to jump to a different screen. You could also use two fingers on your trackpad to swipe between the screens. You could just click on the icon to launch the app. Another thing you could do with Launchpad is narrow down the results by searching. Now Launchpad is automatically in search mode. You could see the Search field up here but you don't have to click on it. As soon as you activate Launchpad you could start typing. If I type a single letter there you could see it narrows down the apps to only ones that have that letter in the name. As I type more you can see it narrows it down more. Notice that the first item in the search result is selected. So all I need to do is hit Return here and it will launch the app. Now there's a keyboard shortcut for Launchpad. If you go to System Preferences and then go to Keyboard and then Shortcuts at the top here you can see Launchpad and you could see Show Launchpad and you can assign a shortcut to it. But a lot of Mac keyboards also have an icon at the top for launching Launchpad. In my case it's F4 and you may need to hold the fn key down to do that depending upon your settings. You can hit that key, start the search, and then hit Return and it will launch the app. 
Now another great way to launch apps is to use Spotlight. You can use the shortcut Command Space to bring up Spotlight Search. Then you could just type a few characters and it will do a search and usually the top hit will be the app that you want. So for Numbers all I need to do is to type those two letters there and now I hit return and  it will launch Numbers.
Now definitely the easiest way to launch apps is the Dock but what if the app isn't in the Dock. Well, you could add an app there. There are two primary ways to do that. One is if you're already running the app via another method, like for instance, let's run iMovie there using Spotlight. Now you could see iMovie appears on the right side of the Dock. Now if I wanted it to permanently stay in Dock I could Control click on it and then go to Options, Keep in Dock. I could also just drag it over to the left. Once I've dragged it over a little bit to the left and placed it somewhere it will stay in the Dock. So now when I Quit iMovie, iMovie remains in the Dock and I can launch it from the Dock from now on. If I ever want to remove an app from the Dock I could just drag it up. Halfway up the screen I get a Remove indicator there and I could drop it and now it's out of the Dock. 
I should add that there's another way to launch an app which is to simply double click on a document that belongs to that app. So, for instance, I have a Pages document. If I double click on that in the Finder it will launch Pages and open that app. For a lot of people this is the main way they launch apps all the time. Of course you can't really do that for apps that don't have any kind of document like a web browser, an email client, something like Reminders or Notes, or a game. 
I should also note that if an app is already running you don't need to relaunch it although clicking on one of the icons in the Dock will bring it to the front. But you could also use the App Switcher, Command Tab, and it shows you which apps are running. As long as you keep holding the Command key down the App Switcher will remain there and you could continue to use Tab to move through the different apps. When you get to the one that you want to bring to the front you simple release the Command key.
So as you can see there's a variety of different ways that you can launch apps on your Mac. You don't have to just pick one of them. I personally probably use all of these in any given week.

Comments: One Response to “Mac Basics: How To Launch Apps”

Loren Sims

3 years ago

On System 7 we always went to the Applications folder to find the app we wanted to run. A power user tip was to put an alias to the app in the Apple menu. We had all our main apps in that handy drop down menu, also a link to the Applications folder for anything else.
With Mac OS X I came to see the Dock as the replacement for the Apple menu.
In Snow Leopard the Applications folder is already in the Dock.
Now I use "Recent Applications" for my hot apps and LaunchPad for everything else.

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Mac Basics: How To Launch Apps

Comments: One Response to “Mac Basics: How To Launch Apps”

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