New to Mac, Three questions on the UI

When I use Spotlight to search for for folders, why can't I find all the items?

Spotlight does not search everywhere. It ignores certain places, like system-related folders where users should not be storing documents. If you need to search everywhere, you can use a tool like [EasyFind|http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html]. I'm curious, though... where are the items you are finding that are not being found by Spotlight?

Second, I am trying to search for the theme songs in iPhoto, does anyone know where are they stored?

Theme songs in iPhoto? No idea what you're talking about there.

Third, is there any key short cut to jump to the menu items on a Mac, such as File, Edit, as on a PC, you can use Alt F, or Alt E?

Look in the menu, there will be a shortcut keystroke listed next to any menu item that has a shortcut. The cloverleaf symbol is command, a hollow up-arrow is shift, a weird symbol with a diagonal line and three horizontal lines is option. If the menu item in question does not have a shortcut, see System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts, where you can create your own. Finally, if you want to access all menu items via keyboard without memorizing shortcuts, press control-F2 and use the arrow keys to select the item you want. (Control-F3 does the same with the Dock.)

Hope this helps!

Hi John. I hope you enjoy your new Mac.

I don't know if it has changed in 10.6 but in 10.5, the earlier OS to yours, iPhoto's default slide music is found at;
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Music/

To get there via Finder, press Shift + Command + G to open the Go to Folder dialogue, and paste into the line this path,
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Music/
which will then reveal the files in a Finder window.

I did not understand how to search for files using Spotlight. I think it is a three year post graduate course.

I used instead Terminal's locate command, which found the file and produced the path.

locate Acoustic/ Sunrise.m4a
/Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/Resources/Music/Acoustic Sunrise.m4a

roam wrote:
I did not understand how to search for files using Spotlight. I think it is a three year post graduate course.

Spotlight can find almost anything. The problem is getting it to show you everything it can find, & for that a post grad course in the sometimes baffling world of "Apple Logic" might indeed be required. 🙂

For example, it really will find "Acoustic Sunrise" in the iPhoto app, but to get it to show you that you must first navigate to /Applications/iPhoto.app/Contents/ in the Finder (which requires use of the "Go" command or right-clicking on the app's icon & selecting "Show Package Contents") & then clicking on "iPhoto" in the "Search:" field instead of "This Mac."

That tells Spotlight that you really, really do want to search within the normally hidden iPhoto application package. The logic -- such as it is -- is that a system-wide "This Mac" search of everything would typically return too many results to be useful (& perhaps take users into places they should not normally go), so system-wide searches show you only the results from selected folders, mostly those in your home folder.

Sometimes this is a good thing but the end result is you can't search within a lot of places unless you already know where to look for them.

Sometimes this is a good thing but the end result is you can't search within a lot of places *unless you already know where to look for them.*

Yes, and for a search engine that is a very strange characteristic.
In the above posting, the only clue, were those media files are shown collected in a folder called Music.
We know now where that folder is, bit did we know before?