2 months on, the lesser mentioned OSX good bits

[OwlsAndApples]

I have had my iMac 17" (my first mac ) for about 2 months now, and i'm just going to mention a few things which have really made my life easier/happier which don't get talked about as often. Hopefully some potential switchers may find these interesting:

- Installing/Uninstalling apps, for the most part it's a drag and drop process, no more control panel add/remove...
- EDIT: Expose, all you do is show the mighty mouse some love and all your windows part in a Moses-like fashion.
- GuitarChords widget, being a guitarist who uses garageband a lot, this widget in an invaluable tool...just click the '@ on a spring' on the dock to have a browse.
- Dictionary, great built-in tool.
- During some installations when it says 'optimising computer', just cool
- Use iSquint to convert vids for your iPod in one step.

And a few lessons I've learned which may help:

- command+click your spotlight results to open in finder
- Right clicking on a mighty mouse - just go to System Preferences to set it up
- click and hold dock icons for some quick options, i.e. emptying the trash
- deleting locked items - hold down the option key when emptying the trash
- some apps may require X11, just whip out the MacOSX disk that came with your mac.

I know that to nearly everyone on this forum these will sound really simplistic, but hopefully someone can get some use from them!

EDIT: Thanks Razorhog for the correction!

OwlsAndApples

 

[Razorhog]

Great post! I've had my iMac for almost 2 weeks and I'm really enjoying getting to know Mac OS X. Here's a cool little thing I discovered:
When you open a program, the icon appears on the dock. If you want that icon to stay in the dock permanently, just right click and choose "keep in dock".

Entourage, all you do is show the mighty mouse some love and all your windows part in a Moses-like fashion.

I think you mean Expose

 

[amiga]

Hey guys,

good to hear your enjoying the experience

 

[Island Dog]

Sometimes it's the little things that count. I have had my Mac for about a year and there is still things I am discovering.

 

[dmw007]

Glad to hear that you are enjoying and learning more and more about Mac OS X as times goes on. Even the simple things about Mac OS just add up to make it such a great operating system.

 

[Mundy]

I'm a professional writer who, in the course of doing research for a book, will save thousands of documents onto my computer. During the course of my writing, I will have to reference these documents fairly often. OS X makes the documents and embedded text easy to find.

Spotlight saves me an incredible amount of time. For the type of writing I do, I'd have to say that the productivity gains over Windows XP are in the vicinity of 200%.

My other favorite built-in OS X feature goes hand-in-hand with Spotlight: Being able to print any document to a PDF. In a single week, I might save hundreds of documents off the Internet. Being able to print them into a PDF file that can then be indexed by Spotlight is just too cool. Again, the productivity increase is huge.

I recently overheard a writer complaining to a friend that he was having a problem with Office X for Mac. The friend advised him to get a PC with Windows XP, since "Macs don't do anything right."

I didn't quite call him a fool, but I'm sure he felt like it when I was done with him.

P.S. If you're a creative writer, you shouldn't be using Microsoft Word anyway. Check out Ulysses or CopyWrite.