samuel.bowles.es

While I am sure articles of this sort abound on the web I am writing this down so I can point my friends to it. It seems every month or so I hear of another friend who’s made the jump from Windows to Mac. Since I “do stuff with computers” for a living I’ve gotten used to people asking for help with this, that, or the other thing to which I’ve always been able to respond, “Oh, sorry, I don’t use Windows - I use a Mac.” But the tide is shifting and this is my attempt to stem it.

Here are a few of the resources, tools, and tips I would recommend to new Mac users.

Links to Resources:

I recently came across My First Mac. I haven’t browsed the site in-depth but it seems to have a nice selection of topics for new Mac users introducing concepts like their recent “Definitive Guide to Installing Downloaded Mac Apps”. This is something that seems to confuse many first-time Mac users. I’ve seen many a desktop littered with unnecessary remnants from past downloads.

When I have a question about why my Mac is doing something strange, how to do something I’ve never done, or how to fix a niggly thing I don’t like I start with Mac OS X Hints. Mac OS X Hints adds new hints to their site daily and has amassed an incredible breadth and depth of tips and tricks.

If I can’t find the answer there I might try Apple’s own support site. I would start with the search field at the top but this only infrequently solves my issue. I’ve found Apple’s discussion forums to be far more helpful. Look for the discussions link on the support page and once there try your search again.

Apple has been experimenting with video tutorials in their support section but the selection is still quite limited. Hopefully they will add more of these soon.

For general interest Mac news I would recommend Daringfireball. John Grubber writes about all things Apple which unfortunately as of late has been a bit much iPhone coverage for this slightly jealous and poor “european”.

Regarding Hardware:

Buy a Case - Most people I know are buying portables of one flavor or another which is understandable - they are flexible, portable, and my preference as well. So the first thing you’ll want to get is a case. Although I’ve yet to own one I have been impressed with Incase. A number of friends have owned these cases and they seem both rugged and stylish.

Buy RAM - The one piece of hardware you can buy with the most impact on your Mac experience is RAM also called Memory (not hard drive space - that’s something different). RAM is your computer’s short-term memory; it is what makes running multiple applications, switching between them, and cutting-and-pasting faster. Overall adding RAM to your computer will noticeably increase it’s speed. Apple has just recently begun offering laptops with a reasonable amount of RAM and it’s my suspicion that this is simply because the next version of Mac OS X will be gobbling up even more.

Buy RAM but don’t buy it from Apple. Apple charges a premium on RAM that is out-of-line with the market. This is primarily because most people are intimidated by the idea of opening up their new laptop to install anything. Don’t be! It’s not hard. No, really, stop looking at me like that. On newer MacBooks and MacBook Pros the instructions for installing new RAM are printed on the inside of the battery compartment. If you can use a screwdriver you can install it yourself. You can get cheaper RAM from a number of reputable dealers including Crucial Technology.

Buy an External Hard Drive or a pile of DVD-Rs - Finally depending on what you can afford either buy an external hard drive a bit larger than your internal hard drive or a pile of DVD-Rs (this assumes you bought a model that can burn DVDs). You need a place to store backups. Backup, backup, backup. Yes, Macs do crash less in my experience. But no they are not invincible super-machines. When something goes wrong you still need a backup plan and there’s rumors that the next version of Mac OS X will make backing up easier than ever before.

Regarding Apple’s Products:

Don’t buy .Mac - At this point the service that Apple offers under the title dot Mac is not worth the investment. This may change in the future but for now you’d be better off buying a similarly priced Dreamhost account and publishing your web content there.

If you buy a portable purchase Apple Care - I know there are high-profile Mac users who never buy Apple Care but I’m not one of them. While I would forgo it on a desktop I always buy Apple Care for laptops. Unfortunately (as careful as I am) I have gotten my money’s worth out of Apple Care on every laptop I’ve owned. In my opinion accidents are simply inevitable with a highly portable yet still quite fragile computer.

Don’t buy Quicktime Pro - Quicktime is Apple’s movie player and until recently you had to purchase the pro version in order to use it full-screen. Apple finally realized this was astoundingly low and there is now no real reason for the average user to upgrade (as it should be IMHO).

Do buy iWork - Apple’s “office” suite is called iWork and includes two applications: a word processor called Pages and a Powerpoint-like application called Keynote. The suite costs a mere $79 (US) and either application alone is worth the price. Pages is a surprisingly capable word processor which does everything I’ve ever needed. It opens, edits, and saves Microsoft Word documents and has some very attractive templates inbuilt.

Keynote blows Powerpoint out of the water. It’s transitions are beautiful, it’s layout features a breeze, and it is infinitely easier to use than it’s cousin. It also opens your old Powerpoint files with reasonable integrity and saves to the format as well (though I doubt you want to do that.)

Third Part Applications:

Now that you have this shiny new Mac you’ll want some applications to run on it. Here’s a few highlights from my Applications folder:

Microsoft Office - I don’t recommend buying Microsoft Office unless you are a Word power-user or you can not live without Excel. And even then I would recommend trying out the alternatives first. This isn’t because Office is a sub-par program. To the contrary the Office suite on Mac is probably even more capable and well-designed than it’s big brother. The problem is the price-tag to feature ratio. Currently retailing for $350-$400 the Office suite simply cannot compete on price with either iWork (mentioned above), Tables (a 39€ spreadsheet application) or some of the free open source alternatives such as Bean (a word processor).

That said I do have Excel installed and long for the day there is a full-featured (lower-cost) alternative. I have however done away with Word and Powerpoint entirely in favor of the iWork suite.

Overflow - I use this great little app frequently to keep my Dock (the clear launch bar at the bottom of the screen) clean. I’ve seen far too many new users with an incredibly overfilled Dock that they have to scrub back in forth looking for the app they want to launch. Overflow is the solution offering a nice organized way to keep your Dock tidy while keeping slightly less used applications easily accessible.

Adium - Most of my friends from the U.S. are on AOL’s instant messaging system but in Europe MSN seems to be the chat client of choice. In order to keep all my friends on the same easy to use list I use Adium. Based on the same code as the Gaim project (now known as Pidgin) and similar to Trillian, Adium allows you to use mutliple chat networks including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Google Talk, and more without thinking. I organize my “buddies” into groups by time zone.

SuperDuper! - This is the application I use for backups it comes highly recommended from a number of respectable sources. I’ve yet to need to recover from tragedy but from everything that I have read (and I researched this one pretty extensively) this is the best application out there for the job. While I am on this topic I should also mention that Apple’s Backup.app which comes with dot Mac has one of the worst reputations out there. Buyer beware!

Quinn - After all that backing up you’ll want to take a break and play a game Quinn is Tetris for the Mac and a very nice version indeed. Best of all it’s free!

Firefox - I use Safari (the web browser that Apple includes) as my day-to-day browser and it is a rare occasion indeed that I switch over to Firefox but every so often there is a website that refuses to work in Safari. This is when I pull out Firefox and 99% of the time everything works fine.

Parallels - I use Parallels mostly for web development when I need to test if a website works equally well under Windows but you may have another reason to need Windows. With the advent of the MacBook and MacBook Pro the core technology that powers Macs is the same as that which powers Windows based laptops. This means that you can run Windows right alongside Mac applications cutting-and-pasting as you go. If you want to reboot back and forth between the two operating systems (no cut-and-paste there) you can do it with Apple’s Boot Camp for free or you can buy Parallels to use them side-by-side.

Linotype FontExplorer X - Want to install more fonts than came with your Mac? If so you might want to install Linotype FontExplorer X a more powerful application than Apple’s Font Book which comes with your computer. It allows you to activate and deactivate fonts, browse them, organize them, and view details about their creator etc.

Textmate - This application is a bit more techy and most users probably wont need it but I felt compelled to include it simply because it’s the application I probably spend most of my day in. If you need a full-featured text editor for writing HTML or other types of code you’re probably not reading this article but this is my favorite tool for the job. I used to use BBEdit but today I could hardly imagine going back.