OS X - Tips, Tricks and Questions (1 Viewer)

I thought I'd start a new thread to start Ron and I (and who ever else) hit the ground running wit our new apple machines. So with that in mind what are some tips and tricks that we're going to need to know? I'm sure I'm going to have a bunch as soon as I get my new MacBookPro as I've only really poked around on OSX on a co-workers machine..still I'm looking forward to the challenge.

These are fairly basic, but here goes:

1. The Dock has two sections. The left one has applications (only), and the right one can have icons for documents, folders, disks, and the Trash. The left section is both a mini-"Start Menu" and a "task bar"; an application will show up if it "lives there" OR if it is running. Don't panic if you accidentally drag an application out of the Dock and it goes up in smoke. Only an alias is gone; not the program. You can put the program icon back into the Dock by finding the real program file and dragging its icon to the Dock.

2. Drag and drop (including between applications) is often more convenient / intuitive than cut and paste. Try it a few times; once you do, I think you will see what I mean.

3. "Save to PDF..." is a standard feature of the Print dialog. This is great for distributing documents; even if everyone doesn't have WhizBangEditor, they can read .PDF. And it's a convenient way to archive any tidbit of news that you may want to read later (fewer dead trees).

4. Be sure to use a three-button mouse. Although Apple was big on ensuring that everything could be done with one button, the right-click support in Mac OS X is a MAJOR win for anyone accustomed to Windows. Note that many of the USB mice in the Windows aisle will just plug in and work, no driver needed.

One thing to keep in mind, Apple's Mighty Mouse can be configured to right-click. But I still like the Microsoft mice best, and am currently using their Wireless Laser Mouse 6000.

Macs these days also support optical digital output, meaning that DVD playback can be pass-through in 5.1 sound.

I picked up a couple of AirPort Express units back when Apple had them for $60 (amazing, a sale!) But I never used them for print capabilities. Today, I took the plunge--for the current Epson R340, it was a breeze. I ran a USB cable to the AirPort, opened the Printer Setup Utility, and the printer was already there! The driver was included, and instantly recognized. For the old HP PSC 950, I had to download an open source driver, but once installed it worked like a charm.

I like to maximize my screen real estate, so I hide the dock and turn magnification on. This is done by way of the Apple Menu.

I invested in a serious UPS for this machine, last year's Quad G5. It is an APC Back-UPS RS 1500, which I found at Best Buy. It connects to the Mac via USB and is instantly recognized by the OS. You can set automatic shutdown parameters in the Energy Saver control panel.

Does your cell phone have Bluetooth? You may be able to synchronize your address book, using the iSync program.

Can't think of much else off-hand. I sure enjoy coming home to the Mac after using XP by day!

- Steve

This link was a great read for a quick intro to OS X

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/m...mac-224674.php

My MBPro arrived today and I've spent the last few hours slowly setting it up and importing my email etc. There's a lot to like about OSX and some really odd things that are going to take some getting used to.

I managed to get my email into Mail via a trip though Eudora so that wasn't too bad and I've got some 3rd part apps installed. I can see why some people don't like dmg files...they're bizzar from a windows user perspective as no two behave the same way...at least not from what I've seen so far as some have nice graphics telling you what to do while others like Logitech's mouse software had a nice 'windows' like installer. I'm sure it'll all make more sense once I understand just what's happening but from a novice stand point its confusing.

Another odd thing from my perspective is the minimizing of apps. I get that unless I close it its not really 'gone' but if I minimize mail for example and then open firefox and then Cmd tab to mail why doesn't it maximize the app instead of just showing me the top tool bar?

I can also see that I'm going to need a quality USB hub asap as the one on the right hand side is right where my house goes so its pretty much useless on my desk.

- fixed. Bought a nice silver 4 port USB hub from Wal-Mart of all places.

Speaking of the USB ports I have a 1 gig kingston USB key that I'm using to transfer data. Its working fine but when I try to eject it by dragging the icon into the trash it doesn't really eject it as the blue LED is still flashing?

I have a 200 gig external USB drive that's presently formatted in NTFS. OSX see's the drive and knows how much data is being used but it doesn't show me any of the files or folders. I thought OSX could read but not write to NTFS? I'll reformat it to Extended shortly but not before I'm done migrating over to the notebook.

In XP I was able to set my mouse so that the scroll wheel's click function acted as a middle button. That meant that in Firefox I could scroll wheel click tabs or links to close/open them etc. I'm installed the logitech software for OSX but it doesn't seem to work the same way. Any tips?

- party fixed. Apple Click does open links in new tabs so I've set a custom function for the scroll wheel to do that. It won't close tabs but with FF2 that's not a big deal as there's the 'x' on each tab now.

I love the keyboard though and over all the build quality is top notch. Over all for a 2.16 C2D with 1 gig of ram though its not as fast I'd expected it to be. I'm going to add another 1 gig stick as soon as my wife shuts down her PC
- added second gig of ram and that really helps. These shouldn't ship with less then 2 gig....though IMO that's true of any PC I touch these days

It will eject it in an orderly fashion. That would include finishing up any write operations that were buffered in virtual memory and not actually flushed onto the USB drive. This may account for the flashing ... if it doesn't, perhaps the USB drive is one that always flashes a LED whenever it is powered.

Thomas on my PC's the LED's would turn off when it was unmounted.

Make sure nothing is open WRT to your USB stick. That includes any Finder windows showing the contents of your stick (similar to Windows).

Regarding minimizing apps, I just hide them (Apple-H). When you need them back, Apple-Tab does it. In fact, I have a little app called "SpiritedAway" running that auto-hides apps I haven't actively used for a certain amount of time.

-Christian

Nice thread Andrew. I also just got a MacBook, and a 20 Inch Imac....
I bought the Loitech S530 Mouse/keyboard kit. Much nicer mouse, and right clicks no problems....

I've been using my Logitech MX510 mouse since I got the MBP but I'm slowly getting used to the way the touch pad works...the two finger scroll is a nice feature.

Its very handy that I work at a place that has a 'communications' dept that all use mac's so i kept going over there asking questions today as I came across something I didn't know how to do. They keep laughing at me but are happy none the less to see another person join the flock esp. one from the IT dept.

I got XP installed last night via parallels so that went smoothly.

In FireFox how to do enable favicon's in the toolbar? They're there in XP's toolbar but not in the mac version? The icons do show up in the bookmark list though so I know it see's them.