Finally getting to try Unity...lot's of little Q's

Unity Engine
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FWIW, I’ve read through the 2 included tutorials, searched forums, poked through the documentation…but while I’m finding unity to be very powerful, slick, and almost too easy in some ways, others are just baffling, not-clear-to-me UI things…
(Using Unity 1.2.2 Via Rosetta, alas, on an intel iMac)

I don’t quite understand Unity’s project management metaphor. I have a project directory, say it’s named “Bob”. Inside that is a “bob.unity” file…but there are assets,library and temp in the same directory. So if I rename the directory, does it screw up my .unity project file? Under file there’s a “new project” option, all well and good, but there’s also just a plain “New”…asks if I want to say “Bob”, say yes or no, get a new, blank project…except it says “untitled - bob” I can’t close it, but if I try to save it says “Save scene”…so, I’m working w/ scene that’s a part of “Bob”? But it’s asking to save, by default, into assets. So I’m confused…

Next up is the Hierarchy window - I keep trying to create folders to organize my objects, a la bins in Final Cut/Premiere/Media100 but to no avail. Looking at it, I should think I could create a folder “house” and put other instanced items under it - door, chimney, tree, etc, and that any changes made to the parent “House” would trickle down to child objects…but so far I’ve not seen any way to do this. It seems also I should be able to subclass an imported mesh-object, say “flower”, so that any changes made to it’s parent are replicated in any instances of in a scene/project, so you don’t have to go make changes to code in 48 places…but I don’t see how to do it.

Where is my material list? In the default assets there’s a “materials” folder, for the forestfloor and redbox4…but those just point to a shader…There’s a textures folder, so you can see tiny little previews of the texture, but no way I see to actually see the texture without applying it. When I think “Material”, I think of an entity, say “Green Glass” or “Cardboard”, that can have a texture, spec/bumpmaps, etc defined. If I want to make something look a certain way, you grab your desired material (or just a texture, or just a shader, if you wish) and drag it onto an object. But here I see bunch of self-referencing items that confuse me…and dragging them onto items does nothing, apparently. Can someone help?

When loading a new project(scene?) in demo mode, the “buy me” splash always hides behind other windows…

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“bob.unity” is a scene file. “Bob” is a project folder. “New” makes a new scene, “New Project” makes a new project.

You want to use and understand prefabs here. Make a prefab that is a single or collection of game objects like “Door” “Flower” “Tree” Chimney" etc then instantiate them in your scene to make the entire house. To make a prefab, click “Create” in the “Project” window and then choose “prefab” from the menu. then drag something from your scene down to the prefab you created. You can overwrite your prefab as many times as you like to update it but if you drag something very different onto it you will get a warning asking if you ment to do that.

In the otee example project the materials are usually in a folder called “Materials” in the same folder as the textures that they use. By default when you drag a texture onto an object unity will create a “Materials” folder in the same folder as the texture you dragged in if there isn’t a folder there already and them make a new material in the folder. To clarify, a image icon means a texture, an orange ball icon means a material and a page with a “S” on it means a shader. I try to get almost all of my materials in one place in my projects if I can.