The brainwashing is progressing in earnest. Today I managed to do a number of things on my own- I checked my email, cut and paste to my hearts delight, downloaded and watched a few videos to make sure I had the right applications for video, and then ordered PhotoShop.
Still no luck with iTunes, but I think it may be because I don’t have an account. As soon as I figure out how to do that, I will.
No problems other than the fact that Groupwise refuses to quit when I want it to (damned Novell- there has to be room for those bastards in Gitmo). I learned what force quit does, though.
Word, for whatever reason, pops up this spammy little window that wants to convert things. I chalk that up to Bill Gates being the antichrist (see, Mac community- I am learning!).
Also, I have learned that the borg gets really, really pissy if you type MAC instead of Mac.
*** Update ***
One thing I do hate- everything downloads to my desktop, which I am ok with. However, when I click up “clean up” in the download manager, it doesn’t delete things off my desktop- just out of the download manager. That pisses me off, although I am not sure why.
And is there any way to move the dashboard and make it smaller? I really wouldn’t mind if it were just incorporated into the top part of the screen or made smaller and pushed off to the left or right.
Bombadil
Inside each Mac is engraved the Latin inscription, “Borges sumus. Resistere inutile est.”
Llelldorin
Firefox: Choose Preferences from the Firefox menu. Click “Main” at the top of the window that appears. Next to “Save files to” click the Choose button. Select some other folder for downloads.
The procedure is usually similar (but different in all specfics) in any other browser.
Llelldorin
(It doesn’t make Firefox behave differently, but it does keep your Desktop from getting untidy.)
Jimmmmm
Dashboard: put cursor on the small rule separating app icons from networks/drives icons. Size it however you wish, and feel free to move it to any side of the desktop. (I keep it on the left, because, of course, I hate America and freedom…)
Sorry about that “you’re an iDiot crack yesterday, JC. Just having a bit of iFun.
Good luck from a platform-agnostic.
Jake
You iDork, no wonder you couldn’t get iTunes to iWork. Just go to the on-line store already. It takes a while to load (or it did last year). There is an entire support hive you can access as well. You won’t need an iTunes card until you want to buy something.
Chris
If you mean the dock, there’s a preference pane that allow you to put it on the left or right if you want (mine’s on the right, because I hate America). There’s also a preference in Safari (if that’s what you’re using) to put the downloads anywhere you want, e.g. Documents->Downloads.
whippoorwill
Can we have our Britney thread now, please?
Jon H
Don’t look now, but everybody’s getting off scott-free for Haditha.
Billy K
[shakes head in disbelief]
You’re doing it wrong, John. Bill Gates is no longer the antichrist. That was years ago. It’s Steve Ballmer now.
But yeah, RE: Dock, move your curse-or to the little break on the left side, then click and scale. You can’t move the dock it to the top, but you can move it to the left or right. Open System Preferences, click on Dock and go nuts. (You can also adjust the size and other stuff here).
OK, now let me ask you a question. How many fingers do you see?
The Other Steve
LOL!
El Cruzado
Leopard does a couple things to help fix the download clutter (mostly adding an officially sanctioned downloads folder. That with stacks pretty much fixes the issue).
Also, not sure what your problems with iTunes are.
Punchy
Christ, Cole, we get it. You bought a Mac. You suck with Macs. Were the other 87 threads not good enough to get this point across?
RareSanity
Why do you hate America?
Although most posts here are informative and/or ironic. These Mac posts have been the most entertaining I have read here yet (in my 6 whole months of reading). I will actually be sad when John gets the hang of it and there are no more Mac posts.
Punchy…relax, there have been other threads interleaved with the Mac thread–Be well-rounded. :-)
John Cole
At least we nailed that bastard larry Craig. He got away with some toe-tapping, and I WOULD HAVE BEEN PISSED.
John Cole
In case you didn;t notice, each time I post one of these- here comes the surprise- I get an answer and I fix the problem. Which means I move onto somethign else. Eventually, there won’t be any problems.
Until I get home from work and have forgotten how to use Windows. And then the SHIT REALLY HITS THE FAN.
Billy K
Wait…so you’re using a Mac at work, and a PC at home!? You’re REALLY doing it wrong…
John Cole
Windows laptop at work, mac for video/audio editing at work.
PC at home for babbling on the blog, playing warcraft, and downloading pR0n.
RSA
If you’re asking whether the dashboard can be configured so that it doesn’t take over the entire screen, dimming all the other application windows in the background, I don’t think that it’s possible. It would be a nice option, though.
Encolpius
What are the problems with iTunes again? You shouldn’t need an iTunes store account to do anything.
All you need is an active internet connection to get CD track names if you have that option turned on in the iTunes preferences.
wasabi gasp
That’s adorable.
Billy K
Fearless prediction: By this time next year you’ll be working on switching to all Mac (except maybe keeping a PC box for playing lousy MMORPGs).
He meant the Dock.
S
MAC is a cosmetic line. Mac is a cult or the alien in a 1988 ET knockoff created to sell Reeses Pieces.
Encolpius
“Fearless prediction: By this time next year you’ll be working on switching to all Mac (except maybe keeping a PC box for playing lousy MMORPGs).”
You can play WoW on a Mac.
Krista
That’s not so adorable.
scav
Nah, you get geek points for being tri-lingual or better. Cranky whining for amber screen command line stuff while cursing the overhead of having a desktop at all is the ticket, provided you are seamlessly switching from control to puppy paw keys all the while ….
Alan
If you hover then click and hold your mouse pointer over the faint vertical separator next to the trash basket you can move the mouse to size the Dock. If you right click, you can select “Dock preferences” where you can edit its placement. The Dock preferences can also be found by clicking the blue apple and selecting System preferences then “Dock.”
RSA
Geek points are doubled when accompanied by arrogance; need to work on that. . .
Jon H
So John did you get your complimentary “Welcome To The Mac Cult” passes to the Playboy Mansion yet?
Oh, crap, that’s supposed to be a secret.
Punchy
Sarcasm doesn’t translate well on a blog post. I’m just pissed cuz Tim 86’d the beer blogging and I haven’t seen John’s shaved cat since….uh…./cant stop laughing.
John Cole
I can already see the appeal of the computer. It is easy, for the most part 9what makes it difficult is my familiarity with windows). There aren’t any scary manuals. I had to plug two things in to make it work. Things work, the sound is good and the video is amazing. The fact that any time you have a question, you have a cult answering en masse is just an extra bonus. I was talking on the phone to one of our graphic designers in another department about some work we were finishing up, and 20 minutes later I got an email from a person had been sitting in the graphic designer’s office who had overheard I was learning to use a mac, and who was offering to come over and help me figure things out. That doesn’t happen in the PC community. You go to forums for help and generally get ignored or rickrolled.
Within 48 hours, I completely understand why people love Macs.
Now, the proof is whether it does what I want it to when it gets down to the AV work.
CalD
Try NeoOffice (the Mac OS X port of Sun’s StarOffice/OpenOffice suite). I’ve been really happy with OpenOffice for Windows on my home machine. Opens MS Word and Excel Doc’s just fine so far and the price (free) is definitely right. Think of it, if NeoOffice works for you, you can banish Bill Gates from your Mac forever. And don’t let anyone fool you, Microsoft is still as evil as ever. One look at Vista should be all it takes to remove all doubt of that.
Encolpius
For $79, you can get Apple’s iWork ’07 suite. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, all compatible with their Office counterparts.
guav
This can be changed in the Safari preferences (or the preferences of whatever browser you are using).
I am not sure why either—”clean up” in the download manager is not supposed to delete files from your computer. And I imagine if it did, you’d end up deleting a bunch of downloaded files you DIDN’T want to delete. Not sure why you’ve ever want the download manager to do something like that. Any files on your desktop that you don’t want, just drag ’em to the trash and empty the trash.
I believe you mean the dock. In System Preferences, you can control where the dock is anchored, what size it is, how much the icons enlarge when you move your mouse over them, and you can even make it hide itself until you hover the mouse over the side of the screen you’ve anchored it to, at which point it springs out.
Encolpius
I believe this teminal command will move the Dock to the top of your screen, but I’m at work on a PC and can’t test it:
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation -string top
Encolpius
You can move it to the right using this command:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end
If you totally muck it up, you can delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
Log out, and then back in and it’ll be back to it’s defaults.
Randolph Fritz
You don’t need the iTunes store for iTunes to play mp3s. Have you added your mp3 files to iTunes’s index? You can do this in two ways: leave them where they are, or let iTunes move them to its own directory. If you uncheck the “Copy Files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library” option on the advanced preferences; it will leave them in place. Either way, using “Import” will add the files to the directory, and I expect they will play then.
Jon H
“defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end”
If you’ve put your dock on the left, then pinning it to the end like this actually pins the trash can to the bottom left corner of the screen, with the top free to move.
I have my dock on the left, pinned to the start:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start
so that the Finder icon is always right under the menu bar.
I find the Dock to work best on the left – it’s a more efficient use of scarce vertical screen real estate. If I put it on the right, I find it gets in the way of using scrollbars and the resize corner, because those end up under the Dock.
Space Captain
Blow iTunes away, then go out to http://www.mediamonkey.com/ and download Media Monkey. It’s free and you can do everything you would do with iTunes without any of the crappy interface problems.
Unless of course you believe that paying .99 / tune is a good deal
Encolpius
Alas, Media Monkey is only available for Windows, but I’d be the first in line if it were available for Mac since iTunes has some serious performance issues with large libraries.
Billy K
Silly ex-Wingnut! There’s a reason 90% of the A/V and design people in the world use it for just such a porpoise. Of course it delivers!
There’s a nice open-source mp3 player called Cog available for cheap as free if you’re not into teh iTunez.
Billy K
Freakin’ Cog link didn’t make it into post.
http://cogx.org/
The Other Steve
That’s because there are way too many windows users, and most of them are idiots who don’t listen.
I saw this evolution with Linux close up. Back in the early days on comp.os.linux.misc there was maybe 100 messages a day, and many of them were easily answerable. But as it progressed and there were a thousand new messages a day, it was too much to deal with. People just stopped reading and responding, so you were left with a bunch of n00bs answering the questions of n00bs.
That’s how you get situations where someone asks “I’m trying to implement LDAP in a 20,000 user environment. It worked fine in our initial testing, but once we rolled it out to 1,000 users we started experiencing deadlocks.”
To which you will receive an answer…
“It works fine in my basement, I don’t know what you are talking about. Quit bashing Linux!”
Finding help in the PC community is actually easier. you use google. Someone somewhere has mentioned the problem on their blog and how they solved it.
craigie
Sadly, that’s hilarious.
bago
Silly boy. Don’t you know that you conform to Mac, unless you live in soviet russia.
But seriously, apps developed on a Mac primarily (hello adobe flash) piss me the hell off. Keyboard shortcuts? Nah. Mac users use the mouse. Right click? Nah, mac users only have one button. Scroll wheel? WTF am that?
And as a coder Flash pisses me the hell off for all kinds of reasons. Such as a non-repositioning modal window for the find function. Or you know a relatively random window styleing, where some windows are child windows, some are parent windows without explorer taskbar handles, and some are just modal motherfucxers. Some have the UI theme applied, and some revert to standard behavior. And a single click to revert a window to shaded mode instead of, say, the doubleclick standard? Really freaking annoying! Especially when trying to move the window a small distance.
It’s like there’s a spectrum.
Mac – there is only the one true way to access a function.
Windows – Use gui, shortcut keys, or command line (only with powershell) to access function.
Linux – Write your own frickin function hook n00b! (After you compile your kernel you get to use the windowing system of your choice!)
Micro OS – It’s not like we have enough ram to support any other hooks.
It’s at this point you loop around the spectrum, minus the level of animations that accompany each UI input.
Randolph Fritz
These days you can buy very nice multi-button mouse from Apple, and power users have been able to install their own (using the built-in Apple drivers) for years.
The current finder has keyboard shortcuts for perhaps 80% of its menu operations.
There is much less animation (and much less use of icons as verbs) in Mac OS than Windows these days.
I mean, hunh?
gypsy howell
If it hasn’t been addressed earlier, forget what Encolpius says, & do this to move your dock:
Open System Preferences pane (on the dock – square whitish icon with gray apple)
Click DOCK icon on the top row & then select which screen position you want it on (left, right, bottom)
I find having it on the left is most convenient, but then I’m a lefty, so YMMV.
You can also set the size, magnification and bouncing effects in that window as well.
RSA
I still read a few Usenet newsgroups regularly, but I’ve lately gravitated toward blogs because of the lower concentration of assholes. (That probably sounds incredible, I know; or maybe my presence in one realm or the other is a contributing factor).
On the Mac OS there’s an application called Terminal that gives you a Unix shell. I expect that it’s comparable with powershell.
zik
“But seriously, apps developed on a Mac primarily (hello adobe flash) piss me the hell off. Keyboard shortcuts? Nah. Mac users use the mouse. Right click? Nah, mac users only have one button. Scroll wheel? WTF am that?”
What? I work on a mac every day in flash and photoshop, all the keyboard shortcuts work just like on PC and I am not even going to get into the whole mouse nonsense again.
LarryB
Umberto Eco wrote this piece years ago, but I still get a kick out of how brilliantly he captures the religious nature of the Mac/PC divide:
arnott
Photoshop ? have you tried gimp for mac or windows ?
http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/
http://www.gimp.org/windows/
wasabi gasp
Good call. That’ll certainly ease the swallowing of Photoshop’s price.
RSA
For baby Photoshop users like me, who need only a tiny fraction of its functionality, there’s also Seashore.
Chris
What kind of AV work? I’m suprised it took you this long.
I’ve worked in film and tv for years, from when digital editing was first introduced. Mac was always the preferred platform, more stable and better math processors until they fell out with AVID over hardware and Apple just went after them with Final Cut. I remember when AVID sold Discovery Channel a boatload of screaming PC based systems a few years ago, I still knew they would suck, freeze, crash – and they did.
It started as such a racket, i must have been working on 80k workstation in the 90s. Now, with a sub-grand raid array and a power mac, you can edit and output hi def, total set up under 10 k. Off-lining on a notebook if needed.
Final Cut is eating into AVID, and Logic is great pro-tools equivilent on the music side. Really no reason to do multimedia on a PC.
I also agree, there ‘s no way you’ll be sticking with that PC at home, especially for Pron –
where you are opening up yourself to a system check by a 21 year old Romanian evil genius hackbot coming in that door opened by Tera Patrick.
As for gaming, choice is more limited but the big games like Call of Duty tend to get over to OXX
Chris
What kind of AV work? I’m suprised it took you this long.
I’ve worked in film and tv for years, from when digital editing was first introduced. Mac was always the preferred platform, more stable and better math processors until they fell out with AVID over hardware and Apple just went after them with Final Cut. I remember when AVID sold Discovery Channel a boatload of screaming PC based systems a few years ago, I still knew they would suck, freeze, crash – and they did.
It started as such a racket, i must have been working on 80k workstation in the 90s. Now, with a sub-grand raid array and a power mac, you can edit and output hi def, total set up under 10 k. Off-lining on a notebook if needed.
Final Cut is eating into AVID, and Logic is great pro-tools equivilent on the music side. Really no reason to do multimedia on a PC.
I also agree, there ‘s no way you’ll be sticking with that PC at home, especially for Pron –
where you are opening up yourself to a system check by a 21 year old Romanian evil genius hackbot coming in that door opened by Tera Patrick.
As for gaming, choice is more limited but the big games like Call of Duty tend to get over to OXX
Susan Kitchens
About Downloading and “Clean Up”
I suggest you make a folder on your desktop, call it Downloads. Then, in your browser preferences for where to download stuff, select that download folder. It all goes in there, straight away, no need to clean up.
“Clean up,” in the case you mentioned, is a matter of tidying icons into perfect align-with-grid positions, not (sigh) mind reading and knowing which of the downloaded items is treasure and which is trash and appropriately disposing only the trashworthy ones. (Geez, mon! it’s only a computer!)
nadezhda
I, too, am a relatively new Mac convert. I’ve found that a number of John’s issues can be solved by digging fairly deeply into System Preferences (drop-down menu under Apple Icon or in Finder, Applications/System Preferences).
I switch back and forth between a MacBook (with Microsoft wireless keyboard when at home) and PCs, so I’ve set up the Mac command keys to work like the PC keyboard (e.g. CTRL key=Apple command function). That allows me to rely simply on muscle memory to use common shortcuts like CTRL-X and CTRL-V. I have a two-button mouse with scroll wheel set up to work on the Mac just like the PC mouse (e.g. right click for context menus). If you have a laptop, the Mac Trackpad can also be set to produce right-click-like action.
Investing a bit of time in getting the keyboard and mouse to work the same on the Mac and PC will eliminate much of the aggravation in transitioning between the two systems. I rarely have to remind myself which system I’m working on.
The Dashboard (widgets such as weather, clock, calculator) doesn’t have to be displayed. You can hide it and then use Exposé to bring up the Dashboard by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen you specify. Exposé screen corners can also be set, frex, to display the desktop, or to show all open windows minimized, or to display selected Dashboard widgets you use all the time, centered in the screen. Again, System Preferences is the place to look for the Dashboard and Exposé settings.
Just to clarify, since there seems to be some confusion in this thread — the Dock isn’t the Dashboard. The Dock is where you can put icons for regularly used apps, plus it displays active apps that aren’t permanently set for the dock. To keep an icon (app) permanently displayed in the Dock, right-click the icon of an open app and select keep in Dock. The right click gives you other options for managing the app (frex open on login). I keep my Dock always displayed on the right side of the screen, with the icons quite small. But there are lots of display options for the Dock, including hide. Again, go to System Preferences or the drop-down menu under the Apple Icon.
Most individual apps also give you many options for customizing display, shortcuts, default directories, etc. Each app has its own Preferences menu in the main drop-down menu for the app.
Surabaya Stew
Ah, another convert! Welcome to the club Mr. Cole.
Emms
My personal preference for the dock (see system preferences: doc under the apple menu) is for maximum magnification and at the bottom check on the box “automatically hide and show the dock”. give you a little more real estate and less distraction and the animation is cool. The applications that want attention have to jump up into view from hidden like little jack russell terriers.