pc2mac.org - Switching from a PC to a Mac

I recently ran into a problem with my iTunes where every time I would start it, almost immediately it would freeze: that is, I could see all my music, it was trying to download new podcasts, and the spinning rainbow wheel came up and wouldn’t go away. Going to Force Quit showed iTunes not responding. After [...]

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iMovie comes with all Macs as part of the iLife package. One of the advantages of the Mac is the high quality applications that come with it. iMovie is a very slick, easy to use, way of assembling movies from video clips. I don’t do much video editing but I checked out the program to see [...]

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UsingMac has a page of 101 tips that include some that are very useful. For example: Control-F2 is Jump to MenuBar. After typing this you can use the arrow keys to move the selected item in the menu bar (and submenus). Hit enter to execute the command. This enables you to execute menu commands using just [...]

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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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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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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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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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Associating a program with a file type is important because that is the default program used to open the file when you double click on it in both Windows and the Mac OS. Most files/documents have default associations but sometimes you will want to change them (e.g. because you don’t use the default program to read [...]

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While an object (file, directory, disk image, etc.) is selected (most often in the Finder) and you hit Command-I you get an information window for that file. However, here’s a really cool modification: if you hit Command-Option-I the info window floats on your screen and isn’t fixed to the chosen object. Now every time you [...]

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