Crown wrote:'It's sexy, it's cute, it's popular to boot!'
... Fill in the rest.
Anyway, got a MacBook today, mainly due to Praxis's mad pimping skills in the thread Stravo started, and I like it (so far), but I seem to hate Safari. Firefox runs on this right?
lol, I haven't pimped in a few weeks! Apple just released a new iMac and I didn't even start a thread on it
Welcome to the Mac world!
Yeah, feel free to dump Safari. I've been using the Safari 3 Beta and there's certain things about it that impress me; it loads pages far faster than FireFox, for example, and in Safari 3 (not the preinstalled version) the method of searching through text VASTLY beats FireFox. Also, Safari has Tab browsing that you can enable in preferences.
But I still use FireFox because I like a consistent interface across platforms and I can't live without Adblock and Greasemonkey scripts.
Also, what are the 'must have apps'? And this iChat thing ... it says I need a .Mac account, can it be used with other chating programs? And where the hell is my 'Delete' key?!?!?!
iChat defaults to .Mac, but there's a drop down box; just switch it to AIM. iChat is basically just AIM.
If you want others...there is MSN Messenger for Mac, but it sucks. Adium is a good chat app that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc, etc.
For the delete key...er...yeah. They've got them on the full size keyboards, but not on the laptops. If you hold Fn, the Backspace/Delete key becomes the regular Delete.
Anyway, Mac officianados watch this space, as the last Mac I had, was an Apple Macintosh Classic II!
I'll be asking a
lot of these type of one sentence question/answer questions, and I'll try to keep bumping this thread, to try and not clog the forum up, so if it reappears after a while, please check in to see what my latest newbie-Mac question is!
No problem
There is a couple-week learning curve, just ask your questions here.
I'll cover some applications you may care for below:
One of the strangest things you will encounter is that most freeware Mac apps are distributed in disk images (.dmg); when you double click the image, it mounts as a drive, then you drag and drop the application into your Applications folder (or run an installer if applicable) and unmount the disk image. It's probably the most confusing thing to newbies.
You'll want to download Flip4Mac; it's a 3rd party freeware app that actually comes RECOMMENDED by Microsoft. It's basically a plugin that allows QuickTime to play Windows Media Video.
There's also a Windows Media Player for Mac, but it's crap, it's still not universal so it's ridiculously slow (and it was slow even on a native PowerPC machine), and it's no longer supported by Microsoft (they recommend Flip4Mac), but it's worth downloading in case you run in to anything Flip4Mac has trouble playing.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend Handbrake. It's a freeware app that can rip any DVD, copy-protected or not, straight to MPEG-4 that'll play on iTunes, an iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, PSP, XBox 360, or PS3. I usually choose a Bitrate of 1500; that's about all you've got to fill in. It can rip and convert a 2 hour movie in 30 minutes
(alternatively, use MacTheRipper if you want to clone DVDs).
CyberDuck is a good FTP client.
Parallels is freaking awesome if you want a VM to run Linux or Windows in while still running Mac apps.
Macs can do stuff like mount disk images and unzip tarballs, zips, isos, etc natively, so don't worry about that. The DivX plugin for QuickTime might come in handy. Use Azureus/Vuze if you need a bittorrent client.
So you got the MacBook today, so it came with iLife 08, right? Apple's got iMovie 06 available for a free download on their website. Play around with both of them; the new iMovie, I personally prefer, as it's a LOT faster and easier to make videos with, but the old iMovie had more editing features, so there's a lot of complaints on forums by the hardcore editors. You can have both versions on the computer, so there's no reason not to download unless you'll never edit any serious video.
