I have reached the age where my kids (grown, except the last one) give me gifts intended to improve me. I remember that age. I tried that with my own mother, in a mild way. Really, she would have just loved that backpack, if only she’d given it a chance.
So the Christmas gift of two of my sons to their parents was…a Mac.
Now, they always wanted a Mac. I confess I did too, at first. I wanted an Apple, but what I got was a Kaypro, and once I had it, I had it for a long time. Then I had to learn DOS systems in order to keep up at work. Eventually I broke down (I mean, the Kaypro did) and I got a PC clone, and then rather grudgingly I upgraded to something that would run Windows. Bitching all the while.
Well, now my kids have dragged me into the Mac age. And, dammit, I never thought I would say this. But I’m lost. I miss Windows. I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t want to learn a new software. I don’t want to have to buy a new version of PageMaker. Darn it…I need a combination of the sobbing smiley and the really mad one.
Yeah, and don’t expect me to edit this. I’ll be lucky to get back here.
OS X has several things that always bug the heck out of me. One is that only the lower-right corner is draggable. Another is that I’ve never liked the way that any Mac OS has handled multiple applications/windows. I much prefer the taskbar in Windows than having to command-tab between applications or hitting whatever the hot-key is to display all windows simultaneously (F9, I think.) The fact that tabbing between fields skips radio buttons and drop-down menus drives me nuts. Years of using control for shortcuts often comes back to bite me when I need to use the command key. The simple fact that Apple doesn’t seem to believe in a two-button mouse.
It’s not all that different. You got a mousie pointer (exactly the same size and angle and everything, except black with a white border instead of white with a black border). You double click things and they either launch or open depending on type of thing clicked. You right click them and a menu of options pops out to the side. Overhead you got menus with commands in them.
Down at the bottom you got this stripe. It’s like the Windows taskbar. (It’s way way too much like the Windows taskbar for my tastes, so being an old-school Mac curmudgion I banished mine, but I digress). It’s a little different, in that apps that aren’t open are mixed with apps that are — the ones that are open and running will have a little triangle deelybopper under them. You use this Dock thing to launch apps and also to switch around between running apps, so it’s like Start menu and task bar united into one. The trash can is in there, too.
(If you hate this Dock thing, there are alternatives).
Menus: there’s one menu, overhead in the top white stripe with the blue apple, instead of inside the application window. There is no application window, only document windows. The Mac is designed to let you multitask, to have documents from multiple open programs visible to you at the same time. So document windows don’t tend to take up the whole screen (unless the document is so wide and so tall that it needs it), and you can usually “see past” the document to see other documents and the Desktop and so forth. That may seem weird at first but you’ll get used to it.
Bootcamp will let you install Windows on your Mac. I will agree with you that Mac OSX is a complete pain in the butt to work with. Linux is a lot easier to work with (at least KDE, don’t get me started on Gnome desktop enviroments) for that matter.
How old is your computer? Adobe hasn’t made PageMaker in years. I started designing on PageMaker, and I’d probably kill myself if someone took away InDesign and made me use PageMaker again.
The old (dead!) computer is one I got in 2001. I have PageMaker 7.0.* At my office I was forced to use a much earlier version of Pagemaker and I did nothing but bitch about it and made stupid errors.
*Or that is ::weeps:: I had it, and it’s there, on my now-defunct old hard drive. I know I’d like InDesign much better and was going to upgrade, but can I do that on a Mac? I know enough about Publisher that I don’t miss it, yet. Didn’t use it much, thank goodness.
The first time I saw this, I thought it was great. I know of many clueless Windows users* who, after clicking on the maximize button of a window, will jump in their chair and say, “whoa, where did everything go??” I hate having to explain how all those other documents and browser windows are still there, just behind the main window. It still doesn’t sink in until I grab their mouse and minimize the big, screen-hogging window. Then they’ll say “whoa, everything’s back now!”
I was playing around with a MAC this weekend and even though there aren’t any actual button on the mouse (except for those two on the sides, not sure what they do), it still responded to my index & middle finger doing the left & right-click. It feels like the L&R click buttons are part of the suspension, but there is still a left & right-click response.
*not because they use Windows, because they’re just clueless.
You’ll get the hang of it. Like somebody said upthread it’s a lot like Windows. Little differences here and there in the OS (you have a dock instead of a start menu, etc), but by and large the learning curve is not long.
The most popular Adobe programs are available for Mac. If you used Firefox, you can go get the Firefox for Mac. – there’s even a Mac version of MS Office if you don’t like the Apple software.
If you find you need one off help, ask here (as always) or try these guys.
Okay, there’s a program out there, and I cannot for the life of me remember it’s name, that will simulate a Windows environment so that you can install Windows programs on your Mac. I have it bookmarked at home and I will come in and rave about it when I get it running - As much as I love my Mac, there were a lot of programs I loved having on the PC that I can’t find for the Mac.
If it works, I’ll let you know. It seems to me that if you have good computer, you ought to be able to run all good software on it.
Hey, at least you can use your fonts now. When we were running OS 9.1 in my journalism classes we had to use special Mac-only fonts, and all of our cool Mac fonts didn’t work on our one lone PC.
I run Windows on my Macbook, and I have the Mighty Mouse-which has the roller thingy, left and right click stuff and if I click them at the same time, I make lil windows out of all that is open (have no idea what the technical term for that is)–I love it.
I think each system does something well. I like Safari and the rest of OSX, I prefer Windows for Word docs etc. YMMV.
In my office everyone has a Mac and a PC, and it’s pretty common for new employees to go through this. I usually do a 20 minute rundown of the basics, and then answer questions of “how do I do X?”. If you have an apple store nearby, they would probably run you through a similar demo. I’ve never had a coworker take more than a couple days to get comfortable with & functional in the system.
The selections on the right are all about learning the OS and the basic software. (Some of them are quite good-- my team produced the French, German, and Japanese versions, so I have seen them a lot)
(I also second the vote-- InDesign is a big improvement, and you’ll never want to go back.
I highly recommend David Pogue’s Missing Manual series for getting you up to speed. I bought the Panther edition, since that was the OS shipping when I got my last PowerBook, but you’ll want the Tiger Edition. (I bought a book because I was going from System 9 to using the third revision of OS X. Big jump, I thought. In some ways yes, in some ways no.) He explains how things work in a clear way, he frequently mentions parallels between Windows and OS X since many people who buy his books are switchers, and he has a section in the back that references equivalents for Windows programs. It’s about $20–30 and is well worth the money.
