Miles to go …

I got a new Apple MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160 GB HDD and other good stuff) and excited about that! However I’ve been a Windows user all along and this is my first interaction with a Mac.

So here are some basic tips/tools to get you started if you are in the same situation:

• Start with Mac101 - This will get you familiar with Mac, basic terminology, some keyboard hints and other misc stuff.
• Keyboard mappings between a Windows and Mac keyboard are very different. It would help to print out the mappings and keep them handy. It can take more than a day to get used to the new mappings. Some specific ones are:
  • “Right-click”ing is not intuitive – Enable Two-Finger Click on the Trackpad
  • No Forward Delete key, Mac equivalent is Fn + Delete
  • No dedicated Home, Page Up or Page Down keys, Instead use Fn + Cursor keys
• Install the following tools
• • Thunderbird & Message Filter Import/Export AddOn. For personal address book, export/import using LDIF format.
  • Firefox & Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. I wish there is an extension synchronizer that will span across Firefox instances on different machines.
  • Adium – Pidgin (nee Gaim) for Mac is your IM solution
  • Neo Office (Open-source full-featured office suite based on OpenOffice) – Allows to create blogs like this
  • JDK 1.5.0_07-164 is pre-installed
  • GlassFish V2 and NetBeans 6.0

Also read 10 tips for Mac users switching from Windows and a more comprehensive list at Switch to The Mac.

The box came installed with Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) as opposed to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Leopard Updates are available for $9.95 until Jan 4th, 2007.

Some other striking difference in the terms of UI are:

• The menus, instead of stacked to each window, are always available at the top.
• “Windows Control Panel” is available as “System Preferences” on Dock (the toolbar which is, by default, at the bottom of the screen).
• Minimize/Maximize/Close buttons are to the left instead of to the right.
• Maximize button only maximizes to the required extent instead of occupying the entire desktop.
• Important keyboard shortcuts
• • F9 – Shows all open windows
  • F10 – Shows all open windows for the current application (every thing else is greyed out)
  • F11 – Hides all windows and shows the Desktop
  • F12 – Show Dashboard

Here are some other tasks that I tried:

• iMovie is really cool, I could easily create a movie (with in-built camera) and upload a video directly to youtube. Really good intuitive interface.
• Create clean HTML pages (like this blog): TextEdit (the default editor) adds redundant markers and viewing HTML source code is not intuitive/easy. So does NeoOffice. Microsoft Front Page is really good at that and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed editing my blogs using it. So I’m looking for something comparable on Mac. I found this HTML editor shootout  but most of the editors seem to require some manual addition of HTML tags. Googling further, I found KompoZer (based on Nvu) and liking it so far. Part of the reason is that the look-and-feel is quite like FrontPage

These tips will at least get you started where you can check Email, IM and Web, view your documents, import key settings from Firefox/Thunderbird and unleash the potential of GlassFish and NetBeans. Lots of other tips are available here, here and here. I’ll post more as I learn them. Feel free to post your favorite tool/tip/guidance here.

A complete archive will be available here.

Technorati: windows mac apple tools osxtips

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