AppleWorks comes loaded on all iMac computers.
I’m still learning my way around MacOS X. It’s a different world, a new beginning. I am at heart a curmudgeon and do not intend to stop using MacOS 9 any time soon, but I’m trying to pick up X as well. I like the things I can do with it (like sending outbound mail without referencing an ISP’s or corporation’s SMTP server) but the multi-user / permissions thing annoys me at times, too. I’m used to an operating system I knew well enough that I could assemble it into the right folders if you dumped all the files loose, and there was no such thing as a munged installation I couldn’t rescue by copying in replacement files and messing with or deleting settings. Now I feel like I have to familiarize myself with tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of files and possible settings and whatnot in order to replicate that degree of control and confidence under OS X, and I’m not sure it’s possible for me to get to that point.
I used to be just like AHunter3 – I knew what every single file on my computer was, and could fix the operating system the old, Macintosh way. I could put applications anywhere I wanted them. The whole hard drive was mine for documents. But no longer. Now I’m actually 100% on Mac OS X – I don’t boot into Mac OS 9 nor run Classic. I’ve kind of adapted (settled?) for the “Windows mentality” and just leave all of that other stuff alone. I don’t touch it. Never. And what’s really cool is I don’t have to! Maybe I’m lucky, but it “just works.” Sure, I have no idea what half of any of the files are; I just accept that they’re there and take up hard drive space.
What does continue to bug me is application location. I have no problem accepting that they have to live in /Applications, but from that point on, I want my own organization. For the most part, I can move all of the third-party stuff around all I want, and I have good organization. Apple is the guilty one that just dumps everything into /Applications and expects them to be there during upgrades. If you move them, you get only half of an upgrade, i.e., you get an application package with only the new contents, while your real, unupgraded application continues where it used to be. Oh well.
OSX is great for multiuser business environments. It is overkill for the home user who just wants to turn on his computer and get on with life, stick things where he wants and change anything anytime. OS 9.1 rules!
Actually, I still pretty much put applications wherever I want them. There are very few apps that care where you put them under OS X. 90% of mine are on an entirely different partition from my OS X boot partition and mingled with OS 9 applications that serve parallel functions, organized by broad function type.
Of course it probably helps that I don’t use many Apple applications. I think Movie Player or whatever it’s called nowadays is the only one left, aside from little utilities like Key Caps and Disk Copy.
As for cracking the books, I can recommend David Pogue’s “OSX: The Missing Manual.” It’s hefty and detailed, but very user friendly. Just skip the chapters that don’t interest you.
With all this talk about doing things as root, I thought I’d mention a handy shareware application called Pseudo. Pseudo lets you launch applications as root, which can come in handy when an app needs to alter a file but the system won’t allow it.
Count me in. Good control freak that I am, it made me deliriously happy that i could identify, manipulate, and alter just about everything in my computer, even though I know next to nothing about programming or that sort of thing. For the peace of mind of it, and for the troubleshootingness of it. I have always been the queen of workarounds.
Now that I’ve made the leap, that’s what I’m trying to stick to. The whole system-within-a-system concept gives me the willies.
Argh!! I HATE that. Being the video vixen that I am, not to mention the neatnik, I abhor (possibly) wasted drive space!!! I must know what it is so I can KILL it!
I’m not completely certain what you’re referring to, since I’m still stumbling around trying to figure things out, but it sounds annoying and like something I must learn to control. Grrr.
Another book that will quickly acquire lots of dog-eared pages is MacOS X Unleashed by John Ray. If you’re an old Mac addict rather than a Linux transplant but you want to know how to do more in Unix than “cd” and “ls”, this is the book. Much more detail and more introductory projects (including compiling your first Unix source code and baking your own Unix apps) than most other similar books.
He’s about to put out a newer edition that includes Panther, and since the old edition really dates back to 10.0, you might want to wait for the new.
After a long time lurking, this is what it took to finally get me registered. Tks so much Stoid. For we are surely birds of a feather. A lot of disjointed jargon to be sure, but Mac is still Mac (to a point!) relax and and enjoy the ride.
To answer the unanswered question, type it 4 me now is a keyboard input method. To check whether it’s turned on or not go to system prefs and international and input method. If it got installed correctly just make sure the check box is checked. It should then give you first a US flag icon in the menu bar, pull that down and choose TI4M. (honestly there is a teeeny bug in that you have to do this every time you start up but god bless Richard for making an OSX version) As far as the data file goes, anywhere sensible/accessable is fine.
Now from one old mac-hack to another, yes the file structure digging down all the way to your docs folder is a pain. Use the dock if you like to alias whatever folders/files you use regularly. Or might I suggest Dragthing?
9 Classic/system within a system? There for you convenience to use legacy apps. Configure the sys folder as you would have in the past but if you use it only once in awhile for the odd utility, keep the extensions/control panels lean. It’ll run/startup faster.
And neatnicks that we are I appreciate wanting to know what every file is. It’s taken me a year already and if I accomplish that feat before I leave this life it will be an accomplishment. Just remember the early days in 1997, if you don’t know what it is, don’t monkey with it. And if you absolutely must monkey with it, backupbackupbackup. As others have said, there’s plenty to learn just navigating and setting up your new system. And besides, with a new G5 how much hard disk space do you really need? (jealous, jealous).
Preferences are in two locations now. Your home folder/library and System/library. If something gets wiggy check there. They’re just preferences.
Best of luck, relax and enjoy. I’m most pleased with the switch to X and given time I’m sure you will too.
And tks for the impetus to become a fullfledged doper!
Stoid what I meant is for example: take the Mail application from Apple. Apple wants it to live in the root of /Applications. When I first started with Mac OS X back in the public beta, I treated my Mac like I always did – I put Mail in /Applications/Internet. Of course in the public beta and when 10.0 came out up until we got Jaguar, Apple would send out a lot of updates via Software Update. Mail was one such upgrade. After performing the upgrade, I find that my /Applications/Internet/Mail program is untouched, while a folder exists at /Applications/Mail with just the upraded portions of the Mail application! This wouldn’t have backfired if the installer were smart enough to realize that Mail didn’t exist where it expected it to. This is realy DOSish/Windowish behavior.
In Mac OS X, Applications can really be Folders called a Bundle that Finder makes look like applications. That’s why (I assume, anyway) I got a new /Applications/Mail folder after that particular real-life experience.
Most of the installers (like for Adobe or Macromedia) give you a choice to “Select Folder…” during installation. Some things, like Norton Utilities, Maya Learning Edition, and (notably) just about anything from Apple (like FCP, Keynote) don’t give you that option. Everything ends up in /Applications, which becomes a distugusting mess, which is very non-Mac like. Actually, it’s rather Unix-like; everything ends up in some bin directory.