Mac

[cellio]

My Mac Mini arrived Friday, faster than I expected. In an act of will I did not punt my congregation's Friday-evening services, attendance at which required starting Shabbat two hours early, to play with it (and go somewhere else later). I did verify that a VNC server is running on my PC and reachable from my laptop, so I can skip the dual-monitor/keyboard/mouse-on-one-desk setup. So now, off to rearrange bunches of hardware and load up a new machine.

If you've got favorite Mac tips & tricks, sites, software, etc, please feel free to share. I've used an iBook (running Tiger) casually, but as a main machine it's new to me.

Comments

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if these are the kind of tips you're looking for, but for me the biggest adjustment to Mac OS X has been the organization of all open windows by application, and the fact that an application can be running without any open windows (running in the sense that you can command-tab to the application to access its menu bar at the top of the screen). The single feature of OS X that I use most often is Exposé (System Preferences -> Exposé and Spaces), which allows you to "zoom out" and see all of your open windows (either across all applications or within the currently active application), so you can click on the one you want. Exposé has replaced alt-tab for me, except in those cases when I am just switching back and forth between two applications (more generally, when I don't have to look at the list of applications while switching). Particularly nice for me is having Exposé mapped to a corner of my screen, so now I can effectively "alt-tab" using just my mouse hand. Another nice touch about Exposé is that it allows you easily to bring only one window to the front, in contrast to command-tab, which brings all windows for that application to the front.

[cellio]

Thanks! And yes, I welcome these kinds of tips. I did play through Apple's video intro for people coming from Windows, but there's only so much they can cover in five minutes or so. I know there are a lot of nifty things tucked away inside MacOS; I haven't found more than a few of them so far.