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A Month of Mac

My post yesterday titled Rethinking The Laptop resulted in three very specific pieces of feedback followed by me taking one specific action. The feedback was:

Dump Outlook
Get a solid state drive
Get a Mac

After mulling things around for 24 hours, I decided to once again try my annual switch to the Mac. Fortunately, I have a very nice Mac from last year’s effort (a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz with 2 GB) so I fired it up, configured Mail and iCal to work with my Exchange server, downloaded Chrome, Xmarks, and Tweetdeck, and away we go. I’m still getting used to the option key and trying to learn all of the key sequences that my cool Mac friends use, but I’m enjoying the screen and so far haven’t reached for my Lenovo x300 once today.

While I was swimming I decided that since I was going to be in Alaska for July, I’d bring only my MacBook, my iPhone, and my iPad. As much as I like my HTC EVO, I figure that if I’m going to really give the Mac a try, I need to go cold turkey (or – well – cold non-Mac) and see if I get over the shakes during my four week exile. I’ll either come back a Mac user or not.

As one of my friends tweeted, “get a Mac – friends don’t let friends use Windows.” So – be a good friend and remind me of all the fun apps that I need for my Mac to be extra cool. And where’s a tutorial for all those fun keystrokes that make the windows fly around the screen? Oh – and is there a great blogging client for WordPress or do I have to use WordPress’s web UI? And what about Digsby – is iChat good enough or should I try something else for all of my various chat accounts. Yeah – the list goes on, but what the hell.

Ross (my IT guy) bet me $100 that I’d beg him to ship my Windows desktop to me within a few days of getting to Alaska. Help me win the bet.

June 20th, 2010 Categories: Tech I Use Tags: apple, mac, windows

Mark Wood

Things from Cultured Code is a great alternative to OmniFocus, which can be a little heavy. I like that you can organize tasks by projects or “Area of Responsibility” which can contain individual items or projects. It syncs wirelessly with the iPhone and iPad versions, and supports multiple devices.
http://twitter.com/mcutler @mcutler

Great thread and most of my recommendations have already been posted. A handful of items to add:
* While Command-Tab cycles through your open applications (just like Alt-Tab on Windows), Command-' (that is, the tilde key) cycles through open windows in the foreground application.
* Drop MS Word and PPT in favor of iWork Pages and Keynote. As with the OS, they both take some getting used to (hint — it's all about the Inspector and being a non-model interface) but once you figure them out you'll be hooked. The trick is to unlearn all of the bad modal interface habits of MS Office.
* Excel vs. Numbers is a different story, because Numbers really can't handle large/complex models — I've built models that take 15 seconds to update in Excel but 5+ minutes in Numbers. With that said, for smaller jobs Numbers can be a huge time saver… the killer feature is having multiple independent tables on a single sheet. Hard to believe that Excel didn't have this capability years ago.
* I use Time Machine for regular backups and use SuperDuper! for weekly disk image backups. It's all about redundancy.
* I use Things for task management (another GTD tool). Most usable interface for me and syncs via wifi to iPhone and iPad apps. The downside is that you have to buy each one separately.
* Run Disk Utility -> Repair Permissions every now and again to clean up system file permissions. There's some debate as to how much it helps, but it feels good to do a little housecleaning.
* iStat Menus: puts most of what you have access to in Activity Monitor (the Mac equivalent of Windows Task Manager) in your menu bar. As a former IT admin, I like to know what's going on with my system at a glance. This was shareware but now is paid.
* Last one: it's worth getting familiar with Console (my advice: click Show Log List and select All Messages). Complete system logging in a relatively readable format. Let's you see exactly what is happening at a system level, and will be useful if you encounter any persistent application or system crashes.
Ok, that was longer than I expected but I hope this is helpful! Welcome to the club.
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_me_

the most important thing you can do to enjoy your switch is be patient and accept the differences. windows users HATE that you close an app on the left instead of right; they can't get the close a window vs. quit the app; installing apps is different…. and a variety of little things like that.

if you get passed those, simply learn the really useful stuff, like using spotlight to open things: press cmd-space type in your app (e.g. 'mail') and hit enter. mail opens. you can do this with almost anything, thus rendering the mouse irrelevant (funny when thinking about using a mac, eh?). learn the other keyboard shortcuts too.

once these things are normal for you… believe me…. you will never ever want to use windows. you won't have to reinstall the os, you won't have to optimize the system, you won't have all kinds of background crap running always slowing things down. and…. you pretty much never have to reboot so things start working again (i go weeks without rebooting).

oh yea, go get more ram. it will make things better. believe me. good luck.
http://twitter.com/mcutler @mcutler

One more thing I forgot:
* Click-to-Flash plug-in for Safari — blocks all Flash from loading by default. If you want to see a given Flash element, just click to load it. Also gives the option to load the YouTube movies in H264 format, though it can throw off some of the page rendering. Flash is a huge resource hog on any Mac — it's easy to watch using Activity Monitor or iStat Menus, or just listen for your fans to spool up.
* For browsing, I use Safari for reading (no Flash) and Chrome for entertainment (full Flash). If the system starts to get hot and bothered, I just close down Chrome and everything settles down.
http://intensedebate.com/profiles/apphackers apphackers

Diomedes IRC for your IRC client. http://apphacker.com I use it on mac and it's better than Colloquy.
http://intensedebate.com/profiles/dnenni Dan Nenni

As one of the enlightened people that avoid Apple products I decided to blog the reason why:
http://danielnenni.com/2010/06/22/open-standards-…

And thankfully Android is here to save my day!

D.A.N.

Bob Spryn

Wow. Your comment doesn't come across as pompous at all. I'm totally going to listen to what you say.

http://twitter.com/wooswiff @wooswiff

If you use iCal, I wrote a tool to let you add events via text string, as in "Movies with Mork Friday 9pm" instead of all those damn clicks that iCal forces you to do.
http://stdout.wooswiff.com/2010/04/02/the-osx-ica…
http://twitter.com/thorfi @thorfi

"windows fly around teh screen" – go to System Preferences -> Exposé & Spaces -> Exposé and just configure it.

If work is using a more modern cisco VPN, you can configure it directly in System Preferences -> Network
Ivan

At the end of the day you might need this: Anti-Social is a neat little productivity application for Macs that turns off the social parts of the internet http://anti-social.cc/
Josh Simpson

so many great suggestions! just a couple i didn't see mentioned…all are free and should be easy for you to learn and use.

Butler is a nice program if you need to program custom keystrokes…one thing that really bothered me about using excel on a mac was that i couldn't use F2 to edit cells…butler allowed me to program a custom key assignment just for that one application.

Cog is the go-to app for high-quality audio – if you have any FLAC files to listen to, use cog. i still love itunes for my mp3 management but being somewhat of an audiophile i am loyal to this lossless codec, and Cog is the way to go for mac users.

if you like to listen to Pandora, I recommend PandoraBoy for browser-free streaming.

Chicken of the VNC for, you guessed it, VNC.

Lastly, if you experience severe windows withdrawal, or need to run any other OSes but don't want to shut down and reboot with Bootcamp, VirtualBox is a free VM tool and can run pretty much any OS you throw at it from within OSX, albeit some tweaking may be required. the forums are great for info though and I've been able to solve pretty much any problem i've encountered.
http://startuptrek.net Steve Bell

Brad's been pretty quiet about Mac's lately…. but he's only 14 days into the "30 days with my Mac" discipline…. hey Brad you didn't slip back into WINDOWS useage, did you?? ha

http://intensedebate.com/people/bfeld Brad Feld

I'm on my Mac 100% of the time and loving it. I'm not even sure if I remember how to use a Windows PC anymore. We'll see in a few minutes since I'm about to use the one downstairs as a DVD player for the P90x workout that I'm about to do.

http://www.feld.com Brad Feld

Well – the Vista box from two years ago failed. It can’t seem to figure out how to play a DVD. I’m now hauling my Mac downstairs to play the DVD and do my workout!

http://startuptrek.net Steve Bell

Did you say P90X workout? Didn't you get the memo – that program is for people in their 20's! It's INSANE.

I have a friend who's 18 year-old son was on it, he wants to be a personal trainer and was doing P90x when i was over having dinner with his parents. The kids was a whooped dog within 3 weeks, lol:)

http://intensedebate.com/people/bfeld Brad Feld

It is deliciously insane.

http://startuptrek.net Steve Bell

If P90x turns out to be too easy, there's always "the Insanity workout", which puts P90X to shame!
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Darwin

Your "IT guy" won't have anything to do if you use a Mac.

IT Guy

Oh that's right, a MAC is like Jesus. The Mac will solve network problems and make updates to the website. Also the Mac will prepare you for a 911 type disaster. Yes, you are right the MAC is like Jesus it will cure all problems.

Bottom line MAC's are computers, computers need service. All computers have their own set of issues and MAC are no different. A business need to nimble to hit a home run, without a IT Person, MAC or Windows the business will be crippled.
Do me a favor, explain the process of mapping to a network drive and how a user can access it every time they are in the office or offsite.

http://twitter.com/AndrewKorf @AndrewKorf

Great post. I just upgraded my laptop and iphone and similarly excited about the beauty of apple's topline products currently. A couple apps I use all day are: quicksilver http://www.blacktree.com/ (launcher and search), taskpaper http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper (todo list with cloud syncing), getcloudapp.com (very simple cloud based file hosting), and I love this little scrolling google reader ticker called Snackr http://snackr.net/, for some time I have been using fluid to create my own app version of google reader http://fluidapp.com/, but need a new OSX blog reader – suggestions?
Bman

Clearly you need help. Step away from the crack pipe. Try to remember that Apple almost went under if it wasn't for the IPOD. Yep IPOD.. Not Mac. IPOD. At the end of 2009, Mac had 10% of the desktop market. 10%. Crack man bought em a Macintosh
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A Month of Mac

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