I think you should also mention that Command-G is the common key combo for “find again”

Mac OS X does not defrag your hard drive at night. it does other clean-up tasks, but not defragging. files (up to 20 MB) are defragmented whenever they are written.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

You should’ve mentioned the use of the F9 keys for locating multiple items in an application when they are laying on top of each other on the screen. Also, the F11 key clears all windows to be able to view the desktop.

Great guide, I am considering an iMac, this is useful!

Cheers!

Great post. useful for my imac g5 20 and ibook 14.1

wish it came with my machines, and also memory upgrades.. i have 768 512m.. i think i need more memory…

http://benbarren.blogspot.com

Very useful, thanks :)

Don’t forget: command ` (the thing under the ~ tilde) is conventionally the key combo that rotates through open windows. And when doing Command tab to rotate open applications, comand ` rotates backwards, so if you rotate one too many times, you don’t have to rotate all the way around again.

In form fields, tab goes to the next form, and shift-tab goes back one. This is true even of forms in most applications.

Also, the user should know that option clicking the minimize window button minimizes all windows, and option clicking the close window button closes all open windows. Option clicking various things will usually bring up interesting options that most people never discover.

Good tips for people just starting to use macs, or even some who have been using them… Some of things are not very well known, and sure save me a lot of time.

Yet another thing: all sorts of interesting, important, but seldom used characters can be accessed by typing a character while holding down option, or shift and option at the same time. For example, British pound signs, yen signs, ligatures, accented letters used in European languages, arrows, mathematical symbols, a few greek letters, etc. The complete character listing can be found by showing the keyboard viewer from the international menu if it is enabled (as Key caps no longer exists). This can be done through system preferences.

Great info, thanks! I wish I had this when I bought an iBook a year ago, would have saved me a lot of time searching.

Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

i knew all of this but the defrag part. pretty interesting.

And the 11th thing: Install Quicksilver: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

Once you get used to this amazing application, you will wonder how you ever lived without it, and curse the gods whenever you work on a windows box…well, curse them more than you already did…

another good shortcut is command - ` which cycles through windows within an application.d

The defrag process doesn’t handle all the files.
Check this comment on Versiontracker - http://www.versiontracker.com/php/feedback/article.php?story=20050813035603132

And let’s not forget “Command-,” (comma)
to bring up any (most) application’s preferences

Good information for new Mac users Paul. I have a 12″ PowerBook and I love it.

Can you tell us about the delicious and digg banner at the bottom of your post?

Great post! I wish I’d found something like this when I got my Powerbook this summer, it would have helped a lot. The keyboard shotcut list is fantastic!

Aha! I ALWAYS wondered how to get to the Force Quit menu using the keyboard.. the keyboard shortcut icons are weird. There’s option, there’s CMD, but then there’s a weird one that looks like a power symbol.. so seems it’s the Escape key.. excellent!

Just a note that to eject a CD/DVD using Command-E, the disk must be selected on the desktop. Just type the first couple letters to select and hit Command-E. Bing bing. This also works with flash memory, external hard drives, etc. It won’t work with your boot drive, for obvious reasons.

You should also mention that the Home and End keys don’t work the way common sense says they should. To mimic a Linux (or windows) Home you have to press Option the left arrow key and End is the same, only with the right arrow key.

This is the only thing I don’t like about Macs.

One thing I see Windows converts and even longtime Mac users do all the time is click the red ‘x’ button and assume they’re quitting an application. That doesn’t quit an app, use command-q instead.

Command-shift-q — logout
Command-q — quit…how could you forget that one
holding shift while minimizing makes it go in slow-mo, not sure how useful it is…but its fun

and as for the defrag, IIRC, the filesystem is not prone to fragmentation like they are on the windows side, but 10.3 will defrag any file whose size is

On recent versions of OS X, Command-shift-H will bring you to your home folder and Command-shift-U will take you to utilities. Using command and the up/down arrow keys will move you up and down through the folder architecture.

Also, you’ll want to enable tabbed browsing in Safari.
Enable Tabbed Browsing

Command . (period) is universal for cancel. use it to cancel out of dialog boxes.

The thing I had a hard time when first learning OSX is magaging windows. Learn Command-Tab to cycle through apps, Command-` to cycle through windows of an open app, and use various expose functions as well.

Also, holding down shift while minimizing does it in slow-mo which is cool the first or second time you do it.

The one question I have … once you’ve minimized a window (Command-M), is there a way to bring it back with a keystroke? I’ve found minimizing to be pretty useless and just use hide (Command-H) since the window will pop back up by simply Command-Tab ‘ing it.

Defrag: You don’t have to change the oil in your car either…and while the consequences of not defragging are not as severe, continually slowing response will result, the auto defragging feature helps but little; this is a Windows administrators’ myth carried over to OS X. You not only need to defrag, but do a lot of other maintnenance as well….unless you are a very light user, or like to believe what is easy and convenient….

one thing thats -always- bothered me on OSX is how the Finder refuses to automatically adjust itself to fit as much information in the list view columns as possible.. on Windows, you can ‘ctrl-alt-numpad ‘ to make Explorer list/column views settle themselves into your real estate, but for the life of me i can’t work out how to make Finder do that .. guess i’ll have to resort to Applescript, but its such a frustratingly simple feature, if only Finder were F/OSS, i’d just make it behave that way normally ..

Also, on my new PowerBook I just discovered that “FN” and the “End” arrow key sends the cursor to the end of the line.

Paul, nice piece of work! But if you’re using a hot corner for Dashboard, why leave the icon in the Dock to take up valuable space?

rjcarr- I second your request, how do you “maximize” a window that has been minimized to the dock? Anyone know? On windows this would be “Windows_key Shift M” to maximimize all minimized windows, so I’m surprised Apple didn’t implement “Command Shift M” to maximize.

One thing you can do is hit “command q” which will make maximize the window and ask if you are sure you want to quit? (then just hit cancel, or command .)

http://paininthetech.com/basic_tips_for_new_mac_users

Neat article - this all would have been helpful when I switched a while ago, but the *most* helpful thing, as someone coming from windows, was learning that ctrl click was the same as right clicking in windows.

And then of course, there’s the “services” menu, which is very easy to overlook but is in fact very useful.

Good list, dugg.

To Jay, I believe what you’re looking for is what the green plus on the window title bar does. Contrary to Window’s maximize function, that green plus is an “Optimize” rather than a maximize. This is a difference from Windows that sometimes confuses people.

here’s a q: how can you tell how many windows an app as open? as far as i can tell, if safari has a few pop-up windows open in the background, you can’t tell from looking at the dock. i know you can click on “window” in the toolbar, and I know you can use expose, but is there a more direct method? thanks.

Useful post. My friends have been telling me to switch to a mac. I’ll keep this article in mind if I ever do.

cmd ` => for moving within windows in the same application
cmd downarrow => open folder or application

Thanks for the tips! I am a new mac mini owner, pc convert, and find this sort of thing very useful. Two things about my new mac that bugged me that I found some workaround on the web for:

The mouse pointer acceleration… no real way to turn it off. The best solution I found was some shareware called USB Overdrive. It lets you turn it off or scale it to any %.

The other was the start up sound an no apparent way to turn it off. Another piece of shareware to the rescue: Chime Stopper is one option, but I thought I remembered downloading something from mac directly for this… I’ll try to follow up with the actual title of what I am useing when I get home and have a look.

To Jay Vaugh: In finder, when items are “elipsied”, double click on the grabber under the scroll bar and the pane will resize to fit all the info. Is this what you are talking about?

To otanabata: yes, this bothers me too, but I’ve gotten used to the command left/right arrows.

to jason’s question:

“how can you tell how many windows an app has open?”

Right-click (or control-click if you don’t have a 2 button mouse) on the application in the dock. You will get a popup menu listing all of the windows that belong to that application.

Which brings up another point: like 256 MB is not enough RAM, 1 mouse button is not enough for all but the most novice users. Do yourself a favor and buy a USB 2-button scroll mouse. Just plug it and it will work. I use Microsoft’s wheel mouse optical USB.

regarding apple-tab and apple-` for cycling apps- windows does both of those, which is nice, but my happiest 10.4 moment came when I realized you can use the mouse as well. cmd-tab to bring it up with the left hand, and mouse over the icon to select it. saves going to the doc, or multi-tabbing through apps.

Great article! I’m currently doing some experimentation with X86 OSX before Apple releases the real X86 OSX. Once they do that I’m going to be buying a real Mac, so this article will definitely help me during my transition.

Ryan: I’m pretty sure that I’m more of a power-user than you and most people here, yet I use only one-button mouse and I’m perfectly happy with it. Sheesh.

Johnny Appleseed - I think he left it so that he could easily close the dashboard when he knows he won’t be using it so that it doesn’t take up memory.

Have been considering purchase of iMac. Have been looking for info such as this.
Thanks,
Ralph

Does anyone know how I can copy the full path of a folder. Would love that since I am programming and need this feature so that I can copy and paste into code or while debugging.
Thanks

rpk - One easy way is to drag a file into an open Terminal window - it will explode the full path of the file, and you can copy/paste it from there.

Thanks joe
But people are saying that i can get info and then copy the address, is this possible.
The ideal solution for me would be something like an address / location bar. Is this possible either through built in facilities or by way of a utility.
Thanks
rpk

rolled in from delicious…

great list…

Holding ctrl when clicking your one button mouse will brings up a contextual menu (aka right-click)

also..

holding alt when clicking a link will download that link

When you select removable media (CD/DVD, flash drive, iPod, etc) and begin to drag it, the trash changes into an eject icon to let you know that dragging it there won’t actually delete the media.

Some good tips. However, you might have also included the keyboard combination (I don’t remember what it is as I’m at working on a PC) that brings the focus to the menu bar in any application you’re working in. I recently switched to a Mac and have only found one thing I really hate and that’s the Mac world’s love of the mouse. In Windows, I can drive every application with only my keyboard. I never have to touch my mouse unless I want to.

For all new users… you can go to http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/
The explain very well everything about the Mac OS X (Tiger), I’m teaching my wife through those pages, and who wrote the lessons have good humor also :)

All the best for everybody and… “Do Tiger”

Thanks for the list. I’m a recent mac convert and I will be bookmarking this page. Expose seems really cool. I would also mention something about automator here.

Great guide! I’ve switch to mac one year ago and still love it and I’ve learned a lot of new things here! By the way, I found this site a month ago wich for a newbee like me was a great resource so I hope it will help others!

http://www.coolosxapps.net/

Don’t forget control f2 for menu and control f3 for dock access via keyboard! :)

Thanks for the F12 hint. I had been randomly activating the eject button when I had meant to show the Dashboard, which is F12 for me too. I’ve got my own key for eject on my keyboard, and I was always perplexed by the Dashboard Eject thing. For a while I thought it was a bug in Tiger…heh. Well that’s fixed up now.

It’s VERY important to create another ‘admin level’ account on your machine that you don’t use - keep it for emergencies where you need to access your machine or some pref gets corrupt in your login - yes it’s rare, but a real lifesaver.

Thats an awesome list. I was thinking about getting a mac mini, and this list will definately make things a lot easier to deal with!

rpk - you need to explore the ‘View’ menu in the Finder:

- open a Finder window
- under View > Customize Toolbar…
- the second item in the first row is a Path tool, drag it to the toolbar

Charles Wiles says:

Whilst this article contains some useful tips, it also contains several mistakes or misunderstandings which suggests it was written by someone who doesn’t fully understand OS X. I don’t like to be critical, but there seem to be a lot of recent or potential switchers reading this, and so I think it’s important that the author should correct his mistakes so as not to furnish people with erroneous information. Others have already pointed out the misleading information regarding disk defragmentation. Other things that struck me:

The upgrade from 256 MB tip is spot on. However, Apple haven’t sold a machine with less than 512 MB for quite a few months now (since the Mac mini was upgraded in the summer). The point here should be to get as much RAM as you can afford, especially on machines with slower disks (such as the Mac mini and iBook. and some PowerBooks).

You don’t “minimize applicationsâ€? you minimize application windows. The icons in the Dock (to the left of the thin line) are “application icons”; ie. they graphically represent a particular application–they haven’t been minimized. You didn’t point out that the little black triangle in a application icon indicates that that application is currently launched.

Also: “…the items to the right of the bar in the dock menu…â€? (the Dock isn’t a “menu”, it’s primarily an application launcher and switcher) “…are open finder windows or applications.â€? Sorry, but they aren’t. They are typically minimized windows, which might be from the Finder or any other launched application; they can also be files, folders, and even URLs that you’ve dragged there.

Software Update is important, but I’m not sure I’d recommend that everyone set it to download important updates in the background. Some updates can be 100MB or more, and for someone, especially a newbie, using a dial-up connection that may not be something they want to have initiated “in the background” without them realising what’s happening.

Your list of keyboard shortcuts is somewhat Finder-specific and also has some obvious omissions which others have pointed out (such as Cmd-Q to quit an application). Whilst some of them are generic and system-wide, several only work in the Finder and/or have other meanings in other apps. In particular, Cmd-E is more generally used to make the text currently selected the “Find target”. ie. if you type Cmd-F in most applications you get a Find panel into which you can type text to search for. Cmd-E will place any text you’ve selected (highlighted) there for you.

Thanks for clearing things up Charles. Can you tell I’m a recent switcher? I’ve been using OS 9 for quite some time though. ;-)

When using Command-Tab to cycle through open applications, you can press Q to quit a highlighted application, and H to hide a highlighted app.

Also, if you are jumping back and forth between two applications, you can just hit command tab real quick and it will return you to the previous application without having to wait for the icons to appear.

If you want to look at the “Get Information” window for a succession of items, hold down the option key while pressing Command-I, and then you can click on other icons and have the one Get Information window change to that of the selected icon without having to reopen it. (Great for changing a lot of icons).

You can slide any application (or document, if it would be useful to you) into the toolbar at the top of the Finder window and create an alias that is always available in the Finder (Slide it into the toolbar and wait a second or two. A gray box will appear around it. Release and you have an alias of that application that will appear in all Finder windows) . I have Acrobat and Photoshop, but sometimes I don’t want those big programs to open just to look at a .jpg or .pdf. So I have Preview’s icon in my finder toolbar so I can slide documents onto it and make sure they open in that program. This is exactly the same thing as sliding something into the dock, but with big screens it is often closer to go to the top of the finder window. I also have TextEdit there for similar reasons.

To get rid of an icon you’ve put in the Finder toolbar, command click on the icon and slide it away from the toolbar, and it will disappear in a poof when you release the mouse button. Or if you just want to change where it is in the Finder window, command-cllick on it and slide it left or right to place is somewhere else. Stuff will move out of the way for you.

If you use icon or list view in finder windows a lot (rather than columns), you can backtrack through the folders the item is nested in by holding down the command key and clicking on the window’s title. This will provide a popup of the file path that you can navigate.

You can quiet down system sounds, including the startup beep by holding down the option key and changing the volume in the menubar. This affects only system sounds, not iTunes or other program volume levels.

One of the above commenters wanted to be sure you’ve discovered tabbed browsing (literally the greatest things since sliced bread) and another mentioned how useful multibutton mice are. Most aftermarket mice these days have a scroll wheel, which often is a button as well. I use my scrollwheel button to do a Command-Click, which means I can use it to click on a link and it will open up in a new tab for me. This is much easier than manually Command-clicking.

One last great one. Cocoa applications support OS 10.4’s new Dictionary. By default, clicking on a word and then pressing Control-Command-D brings up the dictionary entry for that item. But if you go to your System Preferences window under the Apple menu and select “Keyboard & Mouse”, then scroll down to almost the bottom to “Look up in Dictionary” and change it to an unused F key (I selected F6), you can call up the Dictionary by just hitting one key. An added bonus, not otherwise available, is that you can then slide the mouse over other words and watch Dictionary define each one. This does not happen when you use Command-Control-D unless you keep the Control and Command keys held down. The F-key method is far far easier.

If you’re new to the Mac, you should know that not all applications support Dictionary lookup. The application has to be Cocoa compliant. TextEdit is. Appleworks is not (Inexplicably, its never been updated by Apple). Safari works. Firefox does not. So if the Dictionary thing doesn’t work is any given application, that is the reason. This also applies to the Services menu. If you’ve selected something and go to the Services menu and find everything is grayed out, the application is not Cocoa compliant.

The Dictionary hint came via a recent entry in a highly recommended site, macosxhints.com.

There used to be a print window in system 8. I’m now using os 10 and I don’t find that function any more. I found Grab, but it is cumbersome to use for it take a picture and then print the picture in colour. I just want a quick list print out of the directory content to a folder to accompany a CD going to someone. Does this exist? A friend mentioned that the option key and mouse click will access a submenu w/ this print window function,but this does not come up on my machine. thanks ahead for your time peter.

For people that have recently switched or are thinking about switching head to your local Apple Store for FREE getting started classes. Check your local store schedules here: http://www.apple.com/retail

.//chris

I have to strongly disagree with the opinion that HFS doesn’t fragment your filesystem. I also thought that the disks wouldn’t become fragmented in the same way as FAT or NTFS disks does. However, I’ve had my computer for like a year or so, I did a check with disk warrior, and it said that the disks were around 40-50% fragmented, I haven’t even had this much fragmentations on my NTFS disks when I was using windows. And I should also mention that the computer started going really slow.

It’s said that UFS causes less fragmentation than HFS , at least from what I’ve read on the internet. I haven’t looked any further on HFS allocation policies so I could support that statement though. I reinstalled my system, with two partitions one for the system, and one for the users folders, in that way you will be sure that files aren’t spread out on the whole disk. I installed the system on a UFS partition, this is not something i would recommend. I noticed that StuffIt expander wouldn’t install at all on a UFS partition, and sometimes I need it to unpack sit files (haven’t found any other app that does it). For that reason alone, I’m still running my system partition on HFS and Users partition on UFS.

Then what has the journaling to do with defragmentation? Isn’t that just a write-ahead log, that fixes inconsistencies in the filesystem directory. If the computer gets interrupted (powerfailure or something) during a write, then at next startup the computer just have to look at the write ahead log to see, if all writes has been performed correctly instead of checking the directory and all data.

Last thing is that UNIX has nothing to do with the way HFS works. It’s not UNIX itself that has allocation policies and such for files. If you were able to run HFS on windows, it would be the same advantages/disadvantaget as running it on a UNIX box.

I disagree with the fact that HFS have no defragmentation. I’ve had my computer for about a year. I checked the internal harddrive with disc warrior and there was about 40-50% defragmentation on it. I thought before that it was the case that HFS was a lot better with defragmentation that FAT and NTFS but now I’m not so sure.

UFS is said to be better there, I wouldn’t recommend using it on your systems partitions because some applications would not install on a UFS partition. For instance StuffIt Expander, which is useful sometimes. On a Users partition (where the home directories are) would be fine for UFS I think. Especially good to use it on a disk with heavy load.

I also have to ask what the journaling has to do with fragmentation? As far as I know journaling is basically just a write-ahead log that logs, every time the user is writing something to disk. If the computer is interrupted during this operation the OS could check the log, to see if there were any broken/incomplete writes. This makes it a lot easier to check the direcotry for inconsitencies.

What I also don’t understand is how UNIX would be better in the sense that it doesn’t fragment your disks as much. Isn’t that a job completely up to the filesystem used? Is FAT32 under linux better that the windows version just because it runs on a *NIX box?

Can someone please help me….
I am a first time user of Mac… I have an IMAC G5 …1.8 GHZ… MEMORY IS 256 MB.. I am trying real hard to learn all the cool tricks and so forth but my problem is that the spinning beach ball keeps coming up.. and I have to wait for ever for it to stop, I have been told I need more memory, I thought I had enough.
Is there anything I can do to stop the beach ball besides buying more memory or is that my only option…. I confess that I am very computer illiterate.
Any help is appreciated

Deb V: Upgrading to anything higher than your current 256MB of RAM is the only reliable way out. Take it to an Apple store and have them upgrade you, unless you know a friend good with computers that can do it for you with cheaper RAM. However, this will void warranty most likely. Until then, you can get by by only have the most vital applications open, no Mail open in the background when you are not using it, few widgets if any.. things like that.

Mac OS X also features proxy icons which can be useful for moving files. In your title bar (which contains the ’stoplight’ close, minimize and zoom buttons in applications such as the Finder, Photoshop, Word, etc. you will see an icon next to the title of the document or folder name.

Click and hold for a second or two and you can then drag that icon as if you were moving the file in the Finder itself. So if you are working in Photoshop and need to move or make a copy of an existing document to your Desktop, simply click and hold on the icon of your document in the title bar in Photoshop (note: the document must be saved with a filename first) and drag it to your desktop.

For the true geeks you can drag it to a hot-corner you have set for Expose and quickly move it anywhere in your file system or even to another supported Application or to a Desktop Printer for easy printing. This is one of those tricks I find really handy and most people don’t even know it exists. Enjoy!

I strongly disagree on the ‘no need to defrag’ myth. Drive10 has a defrag option and it doesn’t quite do nothing! When I had a powerbook I could feel it get slower and slower over time. Therefore I booted from a CD from time to time and defragged the harddrive with Drive 10.

When that had finished the powerbook was flying again!

Even my Dual G5 isn’t as fast anymore as when I first got it (6 months ago). I guess it’s time to do the Drive 10 trick again…

As someone seriously considering adding a PowerBook to my life this simple guide was a great read and thank you for putting it together!

When navigating the finder with cmd-up arrow or cmd-down arrow, adding option (i.e cmd-option-down) will close the current folder as well as opening the folder/file.

$1700.00 and they don’t give you enough memory. It’s a joke. I regret buying a Mac every day.

Apple’s learned their lesson. The new Mac Mini’s and iMac G5’s come with 512MB standard.

Peter: To do screenshots you don’t need to use Grab. Simply press Cmd Shift 4.. that’ll give you a way to do screengrabs of a selection of the screen. It then saves the grab to the desktop as a PNG file you can open in any app. Cmd Shift 3, 2, and 1 have different functions, but have never used them.. I am sure one does the whole screen though.

while making a screenshot using the options in comment#75. holding down ctrl at the same time will put the screen(grab) into the clipboard instead of writing to a file.

Peter,

re: problem with getting the directory list:

Open the window that contains the filenames, and select all (from Edit menu or Command-A) and then Copy (Command-C).

Go to the e-mail or word processor or app where you want the info and Paste (Command-P)

That’s it in my experience.

Screen Grabs:
cmd-shift-3 takes image of entire screen in current state

cmd-shift-4 shows cross-hairs to allow the user to drag & select a section of the screen before capturing an image.

cmd-shift-4 THEN spacebar turns the cross-hairs into a camera that will highlight a single window (or an icon, or the empty desktop, or the empty dock) and only take an image of that item.
[pressing the spacebar will turn the camera back into cross-hairs to allow to the user to drag & select again, should you change you mind]

By default (in Tiger) these images are saved as PNG to the desktop. If you want to save to the clipboard, hold down control while doing any of the keyboard shortcuts mentioned above then you can directly paste into another application.

Using Apple’s OS X DVD Player will disable the screen shot functions (legal reasons, I guess) but if you use VLC or MPlayer you can grab screen shots as normal.

I don’t know how this tip didn’t make the list:

Don’t use Norton. It will cause problems in OS X.

It isn’t immediately obvious how to control which application is the default to open a type of file–for instance, open all PDFs with Adobe Reader rather than Preview, or all movie files with MPlayer rather than Quicktime. There isn’t a control panel in the system prefs, and when you add an application such as Adobe Reader, the Mac application (Preview) will be the default. You can right-click (or control-click) the file, and select “open with” from the drop down menu that appears, but this gets VERY tiresome if you are opening files frequently with a non-default application!
The trick is to select the file and get info (command-I). When the info window opens, near the bottom it will say “open with” and have a dropdown menu with likely choices. Just below that, it will say “Use this application to open all documents like this”, with a “change all” button, which will change the default for all files of that type.

Nice quickstart. There is much discussion on defragging OS X on the Net which is misinformed, or contracdictory. I’ve troubleshooted Macs for years, and there is a lot of good tips that i could impart here but there is no time or space. You can download a demo version of my Mac OS X troubleshooting book (fix a troubed mac) which covers a lot of things you need to know including backingup, defragging, resolving startup problems and how to network your mac. You might find it useful

http://fixa.troubledmac.com

dirtymouse

hi .. no, the ‘grabber’ doesn’t work for me - or at least, if i double-click it, nothing happens. on windows you can press ctrl-alt-numpad+ and the window will resize itself to fit in all the details .. try as i might, i can’t work out how to do this in finder …

One more thing about Command + . (period) is that if you press it a couple of times when your mac hangs, it will cancel the current operation that caused it to hang and bring you back to normal faster.

I’ve been turning my brain upside down until I came across this site by googling it, but yes. I’m here and hopefully you guys can shed some light into my silly little problem. I’ve been a mac user for quite awhile now (use mac @ work), and recently, the computers @ work was upgraded to OSX from OS9. It’s been great so far, but repeating Peter’s earlier question up the thread, which, I think hasn’t really been answered so far: where the “print Window” command dissapeared into?
Back in OS9, it’s very easy to print the directory index as you go to File>Print window and voila. You can print a list of what’s in the folder. Very handy when sending CDs to printers and you just want to print a list of what’s in the disk. I can’t find it in OSX, though. My question is: where do they put that handy little thing in OSX? Is it gone now, as in there’s no same or similar, easy way of printing the directory, without going roundabout way of select all and copy paste to text pad? If you guys can help, that would great. Many thanx.

Easy:
on Linux, you can simply open a terminal, select the folder and (made easy):
$ ls > listing
$ lpr listing

done.. probably very similar to mac (as they are both unixes) I suggest iTerm as a terminal

Come to think of it… that might not have been as easy as you would have liked it… Mac n00bs.. hiding even the easiest of commands behind some lame one click command. OK so mice are you specialities! yet you STILL only control one finger.

Another good shortcut: Cmd+space
It opens the Spotlight bar so you can do you search.

Thank you very much this very informative article.

you should have mentioned not using safari at all and sticking to firefox ;)

For those who miss printing windows and screenshots won’t do there is a freeware/shareware app called, cleverly enough, “Print Window”

http://www.searchwaresolutions.com/products/printwindow/

freeware version has all the old features and more of os 9, shareware version adds more neat stuff

Hi,

is there a way, to activate different buttons in a dialog (like in Windows, you use TAB to activate the next Button)

thanks pmd

My thanks to everyone participating on this website.

I’m contemplating the purchase of an Apple Book Pro (not certain the name is correct) and though I watched a display, I’ve learned more here than anywhere else.

Following this website will certainly be brnficial.

I luv my mac and i found an idoet who has 10 problems w/ mac apps. he didnt read the manual. i just by reading the manual proved him wrong and this does as well. my mini mac is amazinng i hate the dells @ my school they’re so slow and hard 2 find wut u want fire.sourceforge.net is a great im app. i got rid of all my other im apps all ur ims r on 1 buddy list(yahoo aim msn) if u dont use ichat av, this will replace it. oh and i forgot u really know ur macs well done. mighty mouse 1 click control clicking is how u make it a 2 button and clicking on the scroll ball open up ur dashboard.

Thanks for your great website. This is really a great resource for people switching from XP or Vista over to OS X.

There is one keyboard shortcut that I miss on a Mac, and I am curious if you know how to do it. On a PC, CTRL-Del will delete the entire word to the right of the cursor. On a couple of occasions, in Entourage, I’ve learned the hard way that CMD-Delete deletes the message that you’re currently working on!! It doesn’t send it to the trash, it just vaporizes it!! I know that Opt-Delete will delete a word to the left of the cursor, I’d just like to know–specifically for Entourage–what the key combo is to delete the word to the right of the cursor.

Keep up the great work. This is a terrific site!

So, really… Mac’s are NOT that different from Windows really, they just look better, easier to use (personally) faster, more efficiant with Multi Tasking. Etc. I admit Windows does have it’s upside’s, but no-where asmuch as a Mac!
Good work.
Thanks.
Kirk.

Paul, thank you for this little tutorial. The last time I used an Apple computer was in the fourth and fifth grade during the early to mid eighties. So it is safe to say that this is my first Mac. I’m a hardcore pc user but this thing is just amazing. Your “10 things to know” came in really handy and it answered a couple “mind bottling”(Will Ferell, B.O.G.) questions. I’ve been a fan of your blog for a while and I’m glad you can help. Thanks.

I recently switched from PC to a mac mini, but I rather regret it now. I was very disappointed to find out, for example, there is no microphone; so now I have to buy one. (I consider this quite a major drawback, lacking a feature so necessary, yet there was no mention of this in your list or in any mac documentation - I had to eventually figure it out for myself after wasting loads of time trying to figure out why Skype wouldn’t work for me.) So I find myself resentful of not being informed of this beforehand.

Furthermore, after being assured that Mac-MS compatibility was no longer a problem, I learned (after my purchase) that I would need to buy extra software, not cheap, to allow running PC programs. Now I understand I can upgrade to Leopard and install Windows on my mac mini. Hopefully in the end, I can fix these issues, but I’m not convinced the switch to Mac was worth it.

Darren: I don’t know if you know this, but before you buy a computer, you can read the specifications beforehand and see exactly what it is you are getting. I read all the fineprint before I get a new computer. It wouldn’t make sense to me, otherwise.

If you just bought a Mac-Mini, sight unseen, and did not know it did not have the hardware you would need, then this is entirely your responsibility. There *is* hardware in the Mac range which has a microphone, and you can definitely add one, easily enough, to a Mac Mini.

In fact, it shouldn’t cost you more than $10 to solve your problem and make up for your lack of specs, but please: there are good enough reasons to get a really good one, if you really need pro audio recording facilities, from someone other than Apple.

You might prefer to think of the lack of a mic on a cheap Mac mini as a feature, not a detriment. Some really nice USB mics out there, which you can move away from your computer and close to your face, can very easily be plugged in and work, seamlessly, with your Mac Mini ..

I bought a mac last Friday, and found this site through google. I’m having you nominated for sainthood.

Good job, I’m sure it helps new Mac users. Although many features and shortcuts that make a Mac enjoyable and functional are missing. Macs can do anything a PC can do, yet faster and cleaner. Also, no worry of infections. Firewall, the best feature: stealth mode, block traffic, log traffic. Apple script and Automator to create workflows. Macs rule.

I just made the final move from XP to Mac, and I couldnt be happier. One great tool I found was O2M (www.littlemachines.com) that converts Outlook folders into something that either Mac Mail or Entourage can read. For a PST file of about 10Gb, it took me about 3 hours to fully convert and import into Entourage. This should help some of you thinking of making the best IT move you’ll make in your life.

good luck,

geoff.

This is going to help out a lot, Thanx !!