Quite often, I am asked one of two related questions: 1) "Why can't I delete this pesky file? My Mac says the file is locked, and I can't delete it unless I do something special!" or 2) "Gaa! I can't copy <insert name here> to my flash drive or another hard drive because it's locked—help!"
Well, I will answer those questions, and much more, after the break.
Note from Jeff Geerling: The following post was created by my brother, Joel, while he was a student at Saint Louis University (which is where I received my bachelor's degree in Philosophy!). I'm reposting his content on my blog since SLU no longer hosts student content on their website. See also: SLU for U (The Original), SLU for U 2 (The Sequel).
To make this little animation, I used an application called Flash (version 4) from a company named Macromedia [note: Macromedia has since been bought by Adobe, who now sells the Flash animation program]. The Flash multimedia technology had become very poplular and nearly standard (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. come with the Flash plug-in preinstalled) on the Internet over the past few years. Besides creating animations like mine, Flash can even be used to create crisp, interactive websites (when used tastefully).