My own Mac tips

A lot of my friends and colleagues are moving to Mac, and have asked me to share some of my own tips and preferences. This is not meant to be a comprehensive "how to switch" guide and I am not an expert. Feel free to comment if you have made different choices or better advice!

The best way to approach the Mac in my opinion is to forget almost everything you know about Windows and instead meet the Mac as if it were your first computer. Instead of wondering "how to do a specific Windows-thing on a Mac think "how to I do this?". If you can't figure something out, it's very likely that you actually do not have to do it at all! Macs are generally easier and simpler. For instance, I've never had to install any kind of device driver. Even installing applications is such a simple process that it confused me at first. Just drag and drop the application icon (which in reality hides a full package of files) into the Applications (Programmer) folder and voila! Uninstall? Just drag the App to the trash.

Some key differences
Getting used to only one Delete key took a few minutes. The Cmd key on the Mac does what the Ctrl key did in Windows and the Ctrl key on the Mac seems to be a second Alt or Option key and not used as often as the Cmd or Alt-Option keys in most programs. Ctrl-click produces a right-click on a mouse, often bringing up a contextual menu. On my Danish keyboard, the @ sign is placed awkwardly, requiring an annoying combination of Alt and the apostrophy key way off to the right, next to the Enter key. I still haven't gotten used to that.

Some software preferences
Anti-virus software: I don't use it and can't see why I should. I don't want to load my machine with unnecessary software.

Office for Mac: I have Office 2004 installed but use it as little as possible. The 2008 upgrade is sitting on my desk, but I haven't felt the need to install it yet.

• Word: I use Word to read other people's Word docs. I use Google Docs, TextEdit (like Notepad), a variety of HTML editors, and Pages (part of iWorks). Pages is kind of a Word-Microsoft Publisher hybrid that I use for documents where appearance is important.
• Excel: Not often, since I rarely use spreadsheets at all. Instead I use Numbers (part of iWorks) - or for simple calculations, I just type directly into Spotlight.
• Powerpoint: Not at all. I use the far superior Keynote (part of iWorks) to create and view other's presentations. I export them as Powerpoint files when I need them to be compatible.
• Entourage: I uninstalled it. See below.

Email: I use Mac Mail. When I switched originally, I used Thunderbird as an intermediary to convert from Outlook on Windows to Mac Mail. There might be a much better way to do that today. I really loathe Entourage ("Outlook on the Mac"). I also use GMail.

Calendar: iCal is one of my favorite things about the Mac. I maintain separate calendars for various things: Home, Work, etc. I subscribe to a number of public calendars and like being able to toggle the various ones on and off. I can publish selected calendars so others can see or share them. and the printed calendars are really pretty.

Finder vs Explorer: Sometimes I still miss Windows' Explorer and think Finder is pretty annoying at times. I use Quicksilver, freeware, to launch applications and still have a lot to learn to really get the hang of it. Launchbar is another choice, but it costs money and isn't as powerful. I used it for awhile because it was easy to understand. Finder does have some great features like the ability to drag a folder into the sidebar for easy access (similar to Favorites) and particularly with Cover flow, it's very pretty.

Which browser?
As a web developer, I use almost all of them. But for my personal use, I prefer Safari. Surfing the net with Safari is like looking at the world through really good sunglasses. Everything is just a lot prettier. On a Windows machine, I use Firefox, and I still use Firefox on the Mac, because it is light years ahead of Internet Explorer. But on the Mac, it doesn't seem to me to be better than Safari, if as good. Every now and then you might meet a website that looks terrible under Safari, but that is becoming very very rare. I recommend using Safari but installing Firefox as a backup browser.

Third party software
One of the best parts of the Mac universe is the great software written, sometimes exclusively, for the Mac. On the website I Use This, you can see what I - and others - use and it's a good idea to register (free) and keep your own list, which you do by simply clicking on the "I use this" button next to the software you use. Not only does it give you a nice little inventory that you can review every so often, or if you ever need to quickly find all your programs again, but it works in connection with the excellent app called AppFresh that runs through all your installed software to see if there are new versions available and updates them automatically. A one-click update! It's a great place to browse for software.

Generally, you'll find that Mac seems to adhere to a "Small is beautiful" philosophy. Rather than huge apps bloated with features, Mac developers tend to offer great one-trick ponies - small apps that do one thing, often a very simple thing, really well.

Some final tips:
You might not be aware that you can create a .pdf of anything you can print. Simply "print" your document and then select "Save to pdf" instead of printing to a printer. So please stop sending your Word docs as email attachments, especially to another Mac user!

Screen printing: want to grab something off the screen? Learn the keyboard shortcuts Shift-Cmd-3 and Shift-Cmd-4 to grab the whole screen or a part of it to a file on the Desktop. Add the Alt/Option key to the mix: i.e. Shift-Alt-Cmd-3 to save to the clipboard, making it even easier to paste into an email or whatever.