New Mac Users Tutorial

by DPollitt on March 28, 2008
in Life, Technology

Many of you may know that I use both Macs and PCs on a regular basis. Of course in the business world almost everyone is forced into using Windows, but after working all day on one, its really great to go home to a Mac that just works. I just have a Macbook laptop, which is exactly what I want, powerful, light, can run OS X and Vista, has great battery life, and is reasonably priced. So when my brother decided to recently purchase a Mac laptop, I quickly made up a list of what he’d need to get and know right away to get used to OS X from XP. Heres the list -

Software -

VLC Media Player
Adium Chat (all in 1 chat client alternative to ichat)
iStat Menu
iStat Pro
Quicksilver (most amazing mac app ever created)
The Unarchiver (like Winrar or 7zip)
Handbrake (like DVD Fab)

Notes: Don’t install too much crap the moment you get it.
The programs it comes with are pretty sick anyways.

The only other program that I would recommend getting right away would be VMware Fusion. I think for most users it is a better option then Boot Camp, and for the occasional user it will be much more convenient. VMware Fusion will allow you to run Windows XP inside OSX without restarting the machine. It’s a great trick for using some Microsoft programs you can’t get on the Mac such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Internet Explorer. It’s not the best solution for gaming purposes, but if your switching to mac you probably aren’t a big gamer to begin with.

Tips-

Right click can be achieved by going into preferences>mouse/keyboard options then turning it on. You can then use two fingers on the trackpad and click at the same time to get a right click. In the same preferences screen you should also turn on scrolling with two fingers, which is really slick.

You are supposed to learn how to do keyboard shortcuts not right click, anyways thats what Steve Jobs wants. So learn those if you can.

Hitting CMD(apple key, but is gone on the newest keyboard setups) then space bar will bring up spotlight. Spotlight is like search engine for your entire computer. For example just hit cmd-space quick and type ’safari’ then hit enter and typically it will give you what you want. For more complex searches Spotlight can also find text within certain files.

Screenshots are awesome in OS X – ‘cmd shift 3′ will do a screenshot and copy it to a file on your desktop, but theres lots of sweet stuff you can do with screenshots that you can’t do in Windows(without added software).

Heres a good list of shortcuts you’ll want to have access to -

http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html

Most programs will tell you how to install them, which is simply dragging the install file to your ‘apps’ folder. To delete a program drag the app file to the trash.

Cmd-option-esc is similar to ctrl-alt-delete on windows if you need that(you wont).

Delete/backspace works pretty weird compared to windows. Try hitting FN-delete to get it to do actual deletes.

Cmd-esc opens up front row, or you can use the remote.

Ctrl-eject will bring up shutdown window, or ctrl-shift-eject will put the screen to sleep

Thats about it, you’ll find simple things like importing photos or connecting an MP3 player are remarkably easy on a mac. With some of these basics down, it won’t be long before you’ll wonder why anyone would want to use Windows.

-DPollitt