Top Mac Tips Please

Nelski

Hi everyone

Very excited to be on my new Macbook typing this:j as a long in the tooth PC/windows user I wondered if any of you can give me your top tips for getting the most out of it please. I am thinking of booking some training but wont be able to do this for a few weeks so in the mean time would love your tips.

Anything I should know

Thanks in advance

Idiophreak

As a new Apple user, you have a number of obligations...the first of which is to shamelessly promote your Apple product wherever possible.

Take an hour out of your morning (and evening) each day to enjoy your Macbook in public. Sit in starbucks, by the window, have your tastly half-caf frap in one hand, navigate effortlessly to various fanboy blogs and journals in the other. Jog with your ipod on display and your white headphones shining in the streetlight, however uncomfortable this might be....

Oh, you get the idea...I'm late for a meeting...sure someone will come along with serious suggestions soon

iviv

Throw it away and buy a PC.
Wait, thats what mac users usually say...

Assuming its capable of running boot-camp, you'll probably want to set that up so you can dual boot into XP. Because while Macs can run alot of things, you'll probably run into programs that can't be run in OSX, so you'll want a copy of Windows to hand, just in case.
Otherwise, I've not had much experience with macs, so can't help with tweaking it.

geordie458

Idiophreak wrote: »

As a new Apple user, you have a number of obligations...the first of which is to shamelessly promote your Apple product wherever possible.

Take an hour out of your morning (and evening) each day to enjoy your Macbook in public. Sit in starbucks, by the window, have your tastly half-caf frap in one hand, navigate effortlessly to various fanboy blogs and journals in the other. Jog with your ipod on display and your white headphones shining in the streetlight, however uncomfortable this might be....

Oh, you get the idea...I'm late for a meeting...sure someone will come along with serious suggestions soon

I almost spat my nescafe all over my desk!!!! Rings true though doesn't it. Us mere IBM compatible users can only sit in envy at the user experience you are now privvy to. There are a few Mac experts in here who will be only too happy to help with your new personal computer made by Apple. I wish I could afford one though lol.

Nelski

Idiophreak wrote: »

As a new Apple user, you have a number of obligations...the first of which is to shamelessly promote your Apple product wherever possible.

Take an hour out of your morning (and evening) each day to enjoy your Macbook in public. Sit in starbucks, by the window, have your tastly half-caf frap in one hand, navigate effortlessly to various fanboy blogs and journals in the other. Jog with your ipod on display and your white headphones shining in the streetlight, however uncomfortable this might be....

Oh, you get the idea...I'm late for a meeting...sure someone will come along with serious suggestions soon

Thank you for your advice and I will do my best to serve the mac community in the appropriate manner. any links for some really good fanboy blogs that sounds right up my street :j

Cant find the delete button or how to right click so things are going to be fun maybe I will book that training after all.

Thanks iviv I have got a windows software loaded as most of my docs for business are on the main pc in my office.

I guess its of case of you're either a mac or pc person on here but for the moment I am both.

BillScarab

Idiophreak wrote: »

As a new Apple user, you have a number of obligations...the first of which is to shamelessly promote your Apple product wherever possible.

Take an hour out of your morning (and evening) each day to enjoy your Macbook in public. Sit in starbucks, by the window, have your tastly half-caf frap in one hand, navigate effortlessly to various fanboy blogs and journals in the other. Jog with your ipod on display and your white headphones shining in the streetlight, however uncomfortable this might be....

Oh, you get the idea...I'm late for a meeting...sure someone will come along with serious suggestions soon

That sounds exactly like the smug git sat near us on the ferry back from France the other day.

Enjoy it. I can't believe you'll need any training, it's not that different from Windows just keep clicking on things you'll soon work it out. So long as you can start up Safari and find google you won't have problems.

iviv

Now we'd better run before Leopard and co come and moan at us

Nelski

Im not a smug git honest

thanks anyway

iviv

Not yet. But its like a poison, it will slowly seep through your veins!

To actually add some more positive input into this thread, I'm not sure what comes with mac, if there are any programs that can open/save .doc files for sharing with windows users. But Open Office runs on OSX and can cope with most file types.

Bob63

OpenOffice 2.x is rubbish on Mac - but NeoOffice is a good alternative. OpenOffice 3 / StarOffice 9 are in beta and will both run on Mac with the native interface i.e. will look very nice. I'm running StarOffice 9 beta right now.

Get hold of iStatPro for you dashboard. It is an invaluable tool to show what is running.

Consider upgrading the RAM to 2GB or more if you aren't already running with that much.

Look at some of the cool plugins available for iPhoto and iMovie to enable direct upload to online services such as Flickr, YouTube, SmugMug etc.

Get Growl which is a cool desktop notification tool that integrates with loads of Mac apps.

Adium is a neat multi-protocol chat client that works with Google, AOL, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, IRC etc. Nice to have all your eggs in one basket...

Buy a nice case to protect your beautiful new laptop. I got an Incase neoprene cover. It keeps the Mac nice and safe inside my rucsack.

As others have said, enjoy the envious looks you get from other people as you use the coolest computer on the planet

DotComBoyUK

In additition to the above I would recommend:

Software
Virtualbox as a way of accessing windows when you need to (Its a free VMware equivilant) obviously you need the windows licence

Firefox 3 by far a better browser than safari. Download the quartz plugin to view PDF's in a browser
Take advantage of spotlight (Magnifying glass in the corner) to find documents, contacts etc...

Use iSync to keep your phone and contacts upto date, if you have a nokia check there site they have integration into iPhoto and iTunes when syncing multimedia phones


Learning the OS and Touchpad
Learn 2 finger scrolling with the touchpad
Right mouse button equiviliant by tapping the touchpad while already having 1 finger on the pad

Have a look at http://easyleopard.com for some tips on using the interface

Have a look on ebay and pickup a second hand copy of Mac OS X Leopard the missing manual

Setup stacks to access documents and applications (See the above site for a howto)

Get an external Harddisk and take advantage of timemachine to ensure you backup all the photo's documents you create.

Hope that all helps and remember to just play and enjoy the more you use it the more you will learn.