You can do all that in the X11 environment of OS X, you know.
hmmph. page wrapped, shoulda quoted. “that” = using apt-get and/or playing mix-and-match from unstable and stable distros alike.
Ah I didn’t realize you were being rhetorical.
I guess if a person doesn’t know about docks or any other menu configurations then they’d use the default one in Ubuntu. I think there is a wide gulf between novice computer user and someone capable of installing programs without a package manager. Maybe more advanced users are happy installing there own programs, but I, a beginner to intermediate user, am very happy letting the package manager do it’s thing.
I was under the impression that it takes care of the libraries and such for you. If one program needs Library A v. 1.1 and another needs Library A v, 1.2 the package manager should realize that and keep both of them there. Perhaps I am just mistaken about what the package manager does.
cd /
su root
rm .
had a friend who was just playing around…
remember the -r for extra delete goodness…
I wasn’t trying to whoosh you, I just misunderstood your statement. I thought it was a specific real question and you were trying to understand the concept of a dock. I see from your additional post that you were being a hypothetical new user and wondered whether that new user would know what a dock is. I don’t know. Haven’t been a new user in a long time. The use and operation of the dock is explained in the new user tutorial. As for installation-it is part of the OS, you get it whether you know what it is or not. I don’t think it is removable at all. Like many parts of the Mac experience it is great if you like it, but the Mac way is pretty much the only way to go on a Mac. XP and of course the various *NIXs are quite the opposite. Though come to think of it, I have never seen a “custom” XP box that looked significantly different from out of the box. But I imagine it is possible.
You know, that’s completely untrue.
Every Mac I’ve ever seen looks different.
The Dock can be disabled. I use something called “DragThing”
The UI is very customizable.
I find that each person’s Mac I work on is personalized to their style.
I’ve been running Dockless since the heyday of MacOS X 10.1.x; I’ve got my GUI pretty heavily modified to look and feel like OS 9 (except with preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a Terminal when I want one, robust networking, etc).
The Mac is not unmodifiable, but changing the look and feel is reserved for people who are a bit beyond the entry-level computer user. I think that is reasonable. Linux isn’t set up that way because Linux in its entirety is not for the entry-level computer user.
I loves me some DragThing! It’s actually the only shareware utility that I carried over from Mac OS 9 to OS X (most everything else I used ended up incorporated into Mac OS X in one form or another).
I’m to lazy to do all of that shell typing. I prefer sudo rm -R /
Errr, damn, balthisar isn’t listed in sudoers.
Well, I don’t know about her, but I’ve always hated the way Macs handle application windows. It’s not as bad these days switching applications with the dock, but still, when I want a window to completely fill the screen space, I want to be able to hit a button and have it happen. Not hit the little green button and have it open somewhat to some weird Soup Naziesque determined size. And damn it, why aren’t all four corners and sides used for resizing?
Seriously, I never figured out how you’re supposed to easily switch applications in OS9 or earlier.
Well, I’ve only been using Macs for 2 years, so I was never exposed anything prior to OSX.
But, app switching on OSX couldn’t be better. The dock is the best for pulling up any app that’s running, or launching your favorites. But, you can also alt-tab like in windows (although the key is command-tab in apple). Even better is Expose. I set Expose up to activate when I move my mouse to the corner of the screen. So, now with one flick of the wrist I can see all open windows or just windows associated with the current app. It’s incredibly nice, and something I really miss when I use windows.
As far as the resizing the windows, I think it’s better on the Mac…they have it in just the lower-right corner to save space…so they don’t have to have comparatively large borders just for window resizing. Just a personal preference.
I agree with you about maximizing a window. I have no idea why it doesn’t work the same as on windows. “Zoom” doesn’t work like maximize all all, and doesn’t make sense to me.
There was an icon in the right of the menu bar, showing the foreground application. (Optionally, the name of the application was shown to the left of this.) Clicking on that icon brought up a menu of your other active applications.
This menu could also be dragged and “detached”, making it a little desktop palette window, if you liked interacting with it that way.
This feature did not always exist. I believe it was in MacOS 8, certainly, but might also have been in 7.6.
I accidentally discovered that Adobe apps (Illustrator, so far, anyway) have full screen mode on the Mac similar to the standard MDI mode on Windows. For “big apps” that require a lot of real estate (like Photoshop and Illustrator and XCode), I prefer for the entire screen to be filled up, like Windows MDI. What I always hated was that when I didn’t want to fill the full screen in Windows, all of the multiple documents would still be limited to the same MDI window (MDI=multiple document interface). Looks like the new office apps break away from this, thank goodness.
Zoom button on my Mac bugs me. I try to zoom iTunes, and instead of filling my screen, I get the damned, bloody mini-player.
As far as dragging, I know I can use any edge in Windows, but I’ve got in ingrained in me to use the same designated corner as on the Mac. Heck, even FireFox for Windows provides the nice little dragging-corner graphic for me.
It’s interesting that I try to use my mouse as little as possible, but yet I always use the task list or the dock to switch applications rather than Alt- or Cmd-Tab. Oh, I know, I often hit Alt-Space, N or Cmd-H, and get back to my previous app that way.
Why would you, under any normal circumstances, want a window to take up your whole freaking screen? You running a kiosk or something?
On a 13" screen, the only way to browse the internet comfortably is for the browser window to be as large as possible. The best way to read a PDF is with it as large as possible, filling as much of the screen as possible. The only way to work easily in a word processor or spreadsheet program is for that to be as large as possible.
I’m sure I can come up with lots of other examples.
While some of us are talking about Macs, can I take moment out for witnessing about Quicksilver (does this belong in GD?).
I heart Quicksilver. I want to hug it. Quicksilver is my secret software boyfriend that I’m gonna marry and have babies with. I want to bake Quicksilver a yummy cake and rub its feet and make it a drink and cook dinner for when it gets home.
And I’ve got a huge, 24" screen. Under most circumstances, I don’t want a window to take up my whole screen. But in the examples I mentioned, I do. When using Illustrator, Photoshop (and similar programs), it’s totally awesome to be able to have as much of the image on the screen as possible at any given zoom level. With XCode, there are so many tool bars, panes, editing windows, sub-panes, and such that taking up the whole window is convenient, too. The best thing about a huge screen with something as mundane as FireFox, though, is being able to put a proper page aspect on complying web pages. There’s another thread about reading speed recently, and I neglected to mention that when pages go wide, it kills my scan speed. Tall and narrow is the way to go for the web. Lots of sites have stupid minimum widths, though, that are wider than I’m comfortable with.
For code (outside of XCode) I still prefer to limit TextWrangler or TextMate to 80 columns, so I’m definitely not full-screen there.
You’ve got to try serious work in an drawing program to appreciate full-screen, 24" wide screen programs.
Preach! I only have a 19" monitor, so I accomplish the same thing via screen resolution. I run at 1024x768 when I’m surfing (and have my browser window at full-screen size, since it’s comfortable at that resolution). But when I’m in Photoshop I switch to 1280x1024. I’d actually prefer to work at 1600x1200, but the monitor I have now flickers at that resolution (it’ll only do 1600x1200 at 60Hz).
Wow! Thank you so much for all the great advice and discussion. Here’s my update.
Bought the Macbook Pro one week ago. Initial experience is positive but it’s clear the transition will take a little longer than I thought. I’ve heard it said that the biggest hurdle for lifelong PC users switching to Apple is to un-learn bad PC habits. I can see a little of that already, but as someone mentioned above, the biggest adjustment for me will be to resist the urge to work under the hood so to speak on the Apple as I’m used to doing on the PC.
Out of the box, Safari could not/would not/will not open hotmail. It can’t be so simple as Apple v. Microsoft, but then again maybe. It took all of about one minute to download and install Firefox and in the next moment hotmail was up and running. Haven’t set up client based email yet. Safari also had issues w/Google’s Blogger that were also solved by using Firefox.
Also bought an iPod at the same time. Procrastination paid off big time as the same price that two weeks ago bought an 80GB unit now buys 160GB worth of iPod. I’d been using the iTunes player on my PC for the last few years so I had a decent music collection all ready to go. Transferring the collection to the Macbook via a portable hard drive wasn’t hard but no matter how many Apple recommended procedures I tried, I could not transfer the existing library file and basically just had to recreate a new library on the Macbook (only a minor annoyance). After high def tv, the iPod may be the coolest entertainment invention ever.
I was highly interested in all the above discussion about Access. While I’ve no particular love for that product, I do use it for cataloging albums, cds, dvds, christmas card lists, etc. I need a simple database for Apple, so recommendations are welcome. I also use a now obsolete music editing program on the PC called Cool Edit (was bought out by Adobe and renamed), so I’m going to check out the Apple software for this but am going to miss Cool Edit. I’m looking forward to using Aperture for photography, and anyone else considering this should note that it is available at less than half price with student/teacher discount at the Apple store online.
My accounting system at work is written in Access so if I ever want to run it on Apple, I’ll have no choice but to use Parallels or equivalent to run Windows on the Macbook (the idea just seems wrong).
One final note about my work PC. I spent the last 5-6 months wrestling with variable slowness, freezing, crashing, etc. Tried EVERYTHING. Scanned for viruses, spyware, trojans using every imaginable scanning tool; even though this seemed like the most obvious culprit, all scans came up negative. I’ll spare you the laundry list of the ninety-hundred things I tried, but the experience was the kick in the pants I finally needed to make the move.
Even still, I’m not ready to move all work stuff to Macbook just yet, so as a last resort I called Support.com, and I’m here to tell you that they fixed the problem, they spent over five hours working on it, and it cost me the sum total price of $99.00. By far the best deal ever in tech support. Again I won’t bore you with everything they did, but some of the key items were getting rid of obsolete versions of Java, getting rid of remnants of Norton which were rampant, even though I had uninstalled it when switching to AVG (one of the many moves I made to no avail). For anyone else who has dumped Norton and thinks they’ve uninstalled it, go to Norton’s website and download and run the Norton Removal Tool - it’s apparently the only way to really get rid of all the tentacles.
Finally, the last thing that Support.com did that was the final element of the solution was to download and install something called a “hive cleaner” from Microsoft. I haven’t really researched this, but the short description is that this somewhat ominously named utility totally cleans your system of all old, unneccesary junk that could be clogging your processor (this was my main problem), and it does it automatically every time you shut down. So even though you can download this for free from Microsoft, it begs the question, why is this utility not already built into Windows?
So, even though this particular problem on my work PC was not one of infestation by malware, the protection for same played a part. And I doubt anyone who runs a PC and spends any time online has not had to deal with virus attacks, spyware and malware at one time or another. For the post that this is “not a Windows problem” I beg to differ. Check the charts for the top ten selling software titles. The last time I looked, one title is an Office suite that helped make Bill Gates a gazillionaire, the other nine titles all have to do with virus and spyware protection. Thanks again to everyone who offered the benefit of your experience and advice on this thread. Cheers!
The only people who are going to suffer from not being able to run Access is that subset of users who have developed, and are dependent upon, applications in it with VBA forms and code - folks who just require a cardfile-type database function, or a fully-fledged back-end database, will be able to find a number of alternative solutions on any platform.
You might be able to run Cool Edit in emulation/virtual machine - you can still download the old free (PC) version here.
Alternatively (or additionally!) you might want to try Audacity - it’s available for PC, Linux and Mac - and it’s a really great audio editor - I use it a lot.