As I mentioned in this thread, I was forced to switch from Mac to Windows in the mid-90’s. At last, I’m in a position to move back over to Macintosh. I’ll still be keeping the *#%#@$ Windows machines for a while (to handle software development and heavy lifting), but I just ordered an upgraded Mac Mini for all my personal stuff. So, on to the questions…
What are the best Web sites to read to catch up on the Mac world? I’m seriously out of date.
Are there any “just can’t live without 'em” utilities that you’d recommend (other than what comes with the Mini)?
Any tips on filesharing between the Mac and my various Wintel boxes (Win2000 and WinMe)?
It looks like my favorite email program (PocoMail) isn’t available for Mac. I need a mail program that supports multiple email accounts, lets me build complex filters, can import my old email, and has good spam filtering. Any recommendations?
Since you must have a lot of PC files, MacLink is a good program for making PC files readable by the Mac. I have to use it at work a lot.
If you like fonts, Adobe Type manager is a nice way to have a lot of fonts, but not clog up your machine, since you can choose which fonts you want open.
When you’re sharing files between Macs and PCs, there are a lot of characters to stay away from - basically anything you can’t put in an E-mail address. Also, sometimes there are problems with files with long file names made on the Mac that don’t show up on the PCs.
When you make files on the Mac that you want to eventually use on the PC, remember to give them file extensions (eg. .jpg, .eps, .qxd) so the PC knows what kind of file they are.
OSX comes with a great assortment of utilities and I don’t use anything else regularly. Howver, this is very individual.
OSX can mount cifs volumes. Just select “Connect to Server…” from the Go menu in the Finder and type in the address preceeded by cifs://. I believe cifs is a standard sharing method under Windows.
Apple Mail is an excellent email client. It easily supports multiple accounts, has good import capabilities, and good spam filtering and comes with OSX. I’m not sure about importing from PocoMail and haven’t used the filtering capability.
I don’t think they make Adobe Type Manager for OSX anymore. The only real option for a font manager is Extensis Suitcase. I used to love ATM, s’too bad Adobe’s given up on it for OSX.
If your files from your old computer show up as default files, try adding a file format suffix to the end of the file name. An example would be, if you have a JPEG image that is defaulting to an unknown format, you would then type “.jpg” and it will then default to whatever application you have the system set to open such a format… in this case it might be Apple’s own Preview. This goes for other formats, such as Word documents (.doc or .txt) and PDFs.
But most of the time the Mac is good about discerning file formats.
I also frequently visit MacCentral.com for all the latest Mac news and tips and all that.
Not sure about the email… I use either Entourage or Mail. Both are very competent.
I really like (and contribute frequently to the forum at) Dealmac. It’s a bit more laid back than some of the others, but it is a bunch of nice people who offer excellent technical advice and a fair amount of auxiliary macintosh info as well as a lot of interesting off-topic posts. Check it out.
They’re good, but I have a slight preference for macupdate.com, because generally the download link (the link in the “Size” column, like VersionTracker has it) does a direct download, instead of taking you to a summary page.
I also recommend macworld.com for product reviews. They’re connected with the monthly magazine of the same name, but you don’t have to subscribe to the magazine to read past reviews.
And before I forget, welcome back to the fold, InvisibleWombat.
I appreciate all the feedback. I think I’ll have plenty to check out in the near future.
I’m hoping that Apple hasn’t lost their touch for networking. In the mid-90’s I had an office network I managed which had mixed Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix (Solaris) machines. Adding a Mac to that network was trivial. I’m so frustrated with the Windows boxes at home now I could just scream. My wife has a Win98 machine she has to use for some legacy applications, and a Win2000 system for day-to-day use. I have a WinMe notebook. My son uses a Win2000 notebook. All four work fine with the shared Internet connection. None of the systems can see the Win98 machine, and it can’t see them. My wife’s Win2000 machine can read/write my WinMe notebook, but my notebook can’t access her computer. Both of those can read/write my son’s system, but it can’t access my notebook.
It’s disgusting that I’ve managed networks up to 100 systems and I used to design networking classes for Cisco systems, and I can’t get this cursed Windows network to behave. I’ve asked three techs, and they all told me to upgrade to Windows XP. Guess what? By the time I finished all the hardware upgrades and paid for WinXP, it would cost more than buying a Mac. Humph!
Make sure you grab Desktop Manager (wsmanager.sourceforge.net) and Launchbar or Quicksilver (do a Google search for them, I don’t know what the URLs are).
My brother just got an iBook and went to his deployment in Iraq. I gave him DVDs of interesting videos I’ve downloaded over the years, and it’s been a PAIN to get them to play on a Mac.
Apparently Apple is completely indifferent to the idea that almost no video out there is actually in Quicktime format.
You really need the VLC player - an open source project that plays almost everything.
Oooh, wanted to add for the record: there are a lot of third-party plug-ins for QuickTime that will let QuickTime work with just about any format out there.
I forgot to mention Fink, available from fink.sf.net, a Unix software package manager. This is almost a “must-have” in my opinion. Although you can download, compile, and install many Unix programs yourself — and some certainly prefer to do this — Fink makes the whole process a lot easier.
I occasionally hear rumors that Apple will someday include some sort of package manager with the OS, but in any case it hasn’t happened yet. And this is one minor annoyance to me: Apple doesn’t supply updates of their built-in Unix software (Perl, Python, Bash, etc.) along with their regular OS updates. You have to go build these yourself, if you want them.
I used Eudora for years on Windows. I switched to PocoMail mostly because I was unhappy with Eudora’s clumsy spam filtering, and it had a number of annoying bugs. I got tired of having to pay for an update to get my bugs fixed. Is the Mac version more solid? Does it now have a good spam filtering system?
Depends on what you’re wanting from a spam filtering system. It now has SpamWatch, which I guess is another one of those semi-automatic Baynesian things you train by saying “this is spam”, “this is not spam”. I don’t have any use for it, all my filters are manual ones.
IMHO the big weakness of Eudora’s spam filters is the two-clause limit (I’d like to be able to say *If fron header contains x or from header contains y or any header contains z and body contains any 2 of a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, or i, then transfer to trash, label it “Nigerian-style conmail, Version 5”, skip rest) plus the inability to do a search of your own spam filters (now where the bloody fuck did I put the filter that looks for the string “SDMB”? or “Now what in hell caused this email to be labeled ‘Financial spam’ and trashed?”), although holding down the shift key with a representative message selected and then selecting “Filters” is at least a halfass workaround.
All in all, my fantasy of a better spam filter system is Eudora’s but on steroids.
For the love of God, please throw me a bone. I drove 20 miles to an official Apple store and made the appointment with the “Genius”, who only was able to confirm I wasn’t burning coasters and that OSX was recongizing the discs and seeing files on them.
Other than that, he just recommended VLC and MPlayer. I DLed VLC for Windows, and the user interface sucks. I had to go way around the barn to find out how even to rewind or fast forward.
Please, please, please tell me what you’re talking about.
Sorry, but that’s kind of ridiculous. I know for a fact it can’t play .avi files at all (I’m told), and my experience I was describing proved that it can’t play XVid codecs.
