Well I am a fan and have been for about 7 years now. For some fans of the Mac I'm a newbie. For others I'm an old timer. Either way the conversion was a process. I first dipped my toes in the water by buying my family an iMac. It was a white LCD one with a PowerPC CPU. It was a little taboo because I worked for Intel at the time. So buying a Mac with a competitor's CPU was something that I did in secret. But I did it because I was tired of maintaining a PC for my family. One of my children would come to me on a regular basis and say "Dad, the computer is slow." I would then run all the software updates, do virus scans, figure out what they had installed and so on. I have 2 brothers that are Mac fans from the first Macintosh days. They told me to try a Mac.
My family Mac did solve my problems with my family computer. I turned on parental controls and my admin tasks became 10% of what they were before. Kids stopped complaining about the slow PC. Happy day.
A few years later (some 5 years ago) I started working on a Mac for my job. That first month was a transition. I had several "Huh?" moments. But for the most part it was just different. As time has passed, I have grown to really love it. I can work on Windows but I prefer a Mac. I'm just as productive if not more so and I find that I spend far last time as a system admin. I'm typing this post on my current Mac which is my 3rd one. It is running the same image that I started with 7 years ago. It has been through several OS upgrades but it is still based on that original image. No re-imaging of the hard drive yearly so I can re-install Windows from scratch to clear out the cruft. Just upgrading OSX as new versions have come through and using my Time Machine backup to my new computer when I've upgraded hardware.
So with that lengthy intro, the purpose of this blog is to share some of the Tips and Tricks that I have found to help me in my daily use of Mac OSX. I hope you find something useful along the way.
So tip number one (#MacOSXTip 1), command-space:
Spotlight is your friend! Spotlight is that little magnifying glass in the upper right corner. It helps you do things. It can find documents, messages, contacts, applications and everything else on your computer. I use is it as an Application launcher, a calculator, a dictionary, an address book, and much more.
To quickly access it you can click the icon or do like I do type [command]-[space] on your keyboard. Then start typing what you want (3+3, cachinnate, John Doe,...) When you see the entry you want you can highlight it to get a definition of a word or contact details from your address book. Or just hit return to launch the application.
Want to start Safari? Type [command]-[space] on your Keyboard and start typing "Safari" when it is automatically highlighted hit [return] on your keyboard and Safari is launched.
You can do math, (3592+1023)/5
Find email or an IM message.
Change your settings on your Mouse
