New iMac owner - Question for the experts!

[ewolson]

I'm a total newbie mac owner. I own an ipad and just ventured into the desktop when I received my new 27" base iMac with SSD yesterday... it's my first venture into the world of OSX from Windows and I have to say I am on a steep learning curve. I have the wireless keyboard, magic mouse and magic trackpad and yesterday after set up, I was browsing some websites and then responding to some emails in Gmail. While I was typing in Gmail or using excel, the screen kept shifting between my work that I was doing and the launcher. I couldn't get it to stop. For instance, in one email I was typing a pressed the number 4 and it flipped my screen to the launcher and didn't record the 4 in the email. I pressed the 4 again and it flipped back to gmail. I have no idea if I accidentally messed up a setting, but needless to say your help in getting this corrected would be great appreciated. I can't type with the launcher continuing to interrupt my typing.

Thanks for your help!

 

[joerf3]

Hello and welcome.

Can you please give a little more detail as to the problem you're having? When you say a "Launcher" is appearing, what exactly are you seeing?

What it sounds like to me is you may be hitting the "F4" key instead of the "4" key. On Macs, the functions keys actually activate other features and are not the normal function keys you may be used to on a Windows machine.

In this instance, if your are hitting the F4 key (which is located directly above the 4 key), you will launch the Dashboard feature. Pressing F4 again will make Dashboard disappear.

 

[ewolson]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to clarify a bit more. It wasn't just when I hit the 4 button. It was when I was typing in the letters area as well. What would happen is I would be typing and all of a sudden the desktop launcher would open, the page with all of the dock applications on the screen not at the bottom of the page. Does that make sense? so I would either have to click on Safari again or click the same button I just clicked to get back to the safari web browser. For instance, one time it was the space bar that caused the launcher to appear on the page and my safari browser to disappear. Maybe I'm not being clear enough, if you look on the dock and see the little space shuttle launcher icon and click on that, the resulting view is what was appearing when I was typing in Gmail or typing in excel. For instance, in excel, I was producing formulas in a cell and it kept switching after 2 or 3 numbers clicked... Hopefully this is more helpful to understanding what is happening.

 

[joerf3]

Thanks for your reply.

That is strange. To me, it sounds like your wireless keyboard may need to be reset/resynced and/or may need new batteries.

I personally don't use the wireless keyboard on my iMac as I have the extended keyboard but replacing the batteries in the keyboard may solve your problem.

If that still doesn't solve your problem, your next stop would be to make an appointment at an Apple store to have them check it out.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Good luck.

 

[rkaufmann87]

I'm a total newbie mac owner. I own an ipad and just ventured into the desktop when I received my new 27" base iMac with SSD yesterday... it's my first venture into the world of OSX from Windows and I have to say I am on a steep learning curve. I have the wireless keyboard, magic mouse and magic trackpad and yesterday after set up, I was browsing some websites and then responding to some emails in Gmail. While I was typing in Gmail or using excel, the screen kept shifting between my work that I was doing and the launcher. I couldn't get it to stop. For instance, in one email I was typing a pressed the number 4 and it flipped my screen to the launcher and didn't record the 4 in the email. I pressed the 4 again and it flipped back to gmail. I have no idea if I accidentally messed up a setting, but needless to say your help in getting this corrected would be great appreciated. I can't type with the launcher continuing to interrupt my typing.

Thanks for your help!

I am a little surprised none of the previous posters didn't supply the following links. Also you have 90 days of free AppleCare telephone support. That is assuming you didn't already purchase AppleCare. The phone number is in your owners manual, use that as your first line of help it's much more reliable and you get answers directly from Apple.

The links I'd recommend bookmarking are:

http://www.apple.com/support/switch101/

http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/

http://support.apple.com/videos/#macosx106

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16096111#16096111