pc2mac.org - Switching from a PC to a Mac

Applescript is very powerful but very poorly documented (from what I’ve found so far). Here is the Apple Developer AppleScript Language Guide. Almost everything in this post isn’t found in the guide, though. I saw a very good, recent blog post and it does something similar to what I want to automate: backing up my [...]

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In Windows you can create a shortcut which points to a file, folder, or application and place that on your desktop or anywhere to make access to the original more convenient. On the Mac the same functionality is found in aliases. To create an alias in the Finder, select any file, folder, or application and then [...]

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Photo Booth comes with you Mac and it is an application for taking pictures with the built-in isight camera. It is both simple and offers a wide range of interesting variations. There is nothing comparable that comes with Windows but if you bought an addon webcam it probably came with something similar although likely not [...]

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In Windows, you type the 3 fingered salute (Alt-Control-Delete) or you can select Task Manager from the menu if you click right in the task bar and it will bring up the Task Manager. You use this application to kill misbehaving programs and to see system status. On the Mac, you can kill misbehaving program with [...]

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is a great source for Apple-related news. Pretty much anything relating to the company and its products will be posted as soon as the news is available. It is quite an active blog with many stories each day.  Some of the stories can go into a lot of detail. Link to the [...]

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Leopard comes with a built-in firewall. This is the same as Windows. Also the same is that outgoing packets are not stopped by the firewall which means that if your computer gets infected then that malware is allowed to reach out to other machines on any port it wants. Hopefully that won’t happen. To configure the [...]

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In Windows to remove an application one goes to the Control Panel and selects Add/Remove programs. Hopefully the program you want to remove is there. If it is, then you click on the Remove button and hope for the best. Even then, any data stored with the application will usually not be removed (because it [...]

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Full credit to Dan Rodney for a great list of Mac keyboard shortcuts. He starts off the list with the Mac symbols used to represent some of the keys. As an added bonus, his site also has a page on Mac tips and tricks and one of the tricks shows how to create a keyboard [...]

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If an application/program is frozen or using up all of your CPU cycles you need to get rid of it. Of course, you prefer not to do this because any unsaved documents in the application will lose their latest changes but sometimes there is no choice. In Windows you do this by bringing up the Task [...]

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First let’s make sure we understand the difference between text editing (just text with no formatting) and word processing (with font, style, and a million types of formatting control to make your document look nice). I have to say that it is one of my pet peeves when someone emails me a Word document that [...]

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