After years and years of using all flavors of Windows, I made a rash decision today and walked home with a MacBook Pro.
I bought Office for it since I can’t possibly live without that, but other than that, it is a virgin Mac, totally vanilla. I also picked up a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse. Nice.
So, tell me o great Mac users, what kind of stuff should I be doing with this machine?
Cool tools I should be installing?
(Please, no PC/Mac sux nonsense. I now have three Windows machines, two Linux boxes, and one Mac in my home, so I ain’t partial to any side.)
Fiddle around with the iLife suite and learn how easy it is to make great looking DVDs, photo slideshows, and definitely play around with Comic Life, which rules. Get a good handle on Address Book and iCal and mail.app and iChat and how tightly and seamlessly integrated they are with each other.
I personally prefer Safari and use it as my default browser, but Firefox is good to have as well because some sites just plain don’t work on Safari, and a few work better on Firefox. But the sites I’ve came across that need Firefox are few and far between.
I am very pleased. It’s all working quite smoothly – I even got my wireless network printer working after a few false starts.
How about my mp3s? I have a Linux server with thousands of mp3s on it, but when I navigate to the network drive and double-click a file, iTunes pops up and apparently copies the file onto my local hard drive before playing it.
That ain’t what I want. I want it to play them in place, as Winamp does.
Open the Script Editor. It’s in the Applications/Utilities folder
Go to the file menu, where it says Open Dictionary, and open the AppleScript dictionary of various programs.
Google for pages containing the phrases “tell application” and “end tell” and experiment with what you find.
Some applications have the built-in ability to execute AppleScripts that you’ve written, thereby bossing around other applications, making all of their features essentially expansion-sets of the features of the applications that you’re in.
AHunter, I’ve had my Mac year now and I still haven’t figured what to do with Apple Scripts - what are they, and why would I want to use them (in non-comp-geek terms)?
Or aren’t they something that a non-hardcore person should even mess with?
They’re mostly geek fun. I use them fairly extensively in FileMaker because FileMaker can execute them, so instead of just being able to deal with its own data, FileMaker can manipulate files or tell your email program to create new entries in the address book and new filter rules based on info in the fields, that kind of thing.
Since the syntax is close enough to spoken English, you can Google for phrases you find in the AppleTalk Dictionary of any of your programs and see how other people have used those commands, and then see pretty easily how to modify those snippets to fit your own needs.
You can also launch Automator and choose from among snippets of AppleScript that are already made available to you in modular fashion, and assemble workflows.
The Unix nerds would of course tell you to forget AppleScript, fire up the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilties) and discover all you can do with perl
With good reason. This machine is absolutely sweet!
That did the trick!
I’m not quite at the point where I’ll be AppleScripting stuff yet.
I did go to a Unix console and try a few commands just to see if it really was Unix. At least it appears to be a quite proper bash shell. Sweet.
I installed Bootcamp and did an install of XP Home on a separate partition. It went almost perfect – there’s some problem getting Windows to recognize the Bluetooth radio properly. I figure that I shouldn’t be bothering to try to get Windows to work on this machine anyway since that’s tantamount to treason.
I’m installing Palm Desktop and Hotsync Manager right now.
What about standard text editors? I know that I can always go to vi if I need to, but what can I use in place of my beloved TextPad?
TextEdit also comes preinstalled and is about equivalent to WordPad on Windows machines. Not nearly as good as TextWrangler, but it’s on your system already.
TextEdit is quite nice but despite its name I don’t think of it as a text editor; it interprets text-formatting code rather than displaying it — for example, if you open an .rtf file you’ll see it formatted as if you’d opened the sucker in Word, whereas if you open the same file in TextWrangler or BBEDit, you see the underlying rtf code ITSELF.
To me a text editor shouldn’t ought to interpret any code, it should display it.
How do I get Safari to block ads? I used it for a couple of days and then installed Firefox as I realized just how many annoying Flash ads there are on the unfiltered Internet.
Bootcamp/Parallels anyone? Any good or bad experiences with these?
Man is that pricey!
I guess it must do far more than just edit text. I would be happy to pay something like $30 (the price of TextPad) or even a bit more for a good editor. $125 is a little too expensive for a text editor.
Kind of, actually. As a longtime Mac user, Safari “feels” more like a Mac application. Firfox has a few very minor quirks that make the interface the tiniest bit inconsistent with majority of other apps I use, so I use Safari. However, since you don’t have any preconceived notions of what a Mac app should “feel” like, go for Firefox.
It’s not unreasonable. If you write code, you spend probably 90% of your productive time in a text editor. If you do it professionally, it’s easily worth that much to get a good one.
