The story so far and 10 Mac OS X tips for new users.

Power Mac G5 and Apple display.

The world and his dog are buying Apple computers these days. Once upon a time they where the reserve of graphic designers, musicians and those who simply couldn't find niche scientific and educational software anywhere else.

With the evolution of the Mac operating system, from OS version 9 through to todays 'Tiger' version 10.4.5 the days of the Mac's image as an expensive artist's tool, rather than a home 'PC' have gone, and probably forever.

Of course Apple still make high end professional machines for everything from video editing to complex climate modeling, but it's the low end machines like the Mac Mini and the iMac which have brought the Mac back into the home office and even the living room.

This turn around in Apple's fortunes, from being almost bankrupt in the early 90's to one of todays most successful software and hardware companies, was given as close to a guarantee to continued good fortune as you can get in the IT business, towards the end of last year, when Apple announced a secretly long planned strategy to switch from using IBM's power hungry and slow Power PC microprocessors to the faster, less expensive next generation of Intel chips, a brand ubiquitous on machines predominantly designed to run Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Within days of the release of the first Mac's with an Intel inside, the race was on to see who could be the first to install Windows on one; and by Mar 16th 2006, Colin Nederkoorn did just that, bagging himself $13,000 in the process.

Not two weeks later and perhaps one of the biggest stories to come from Apple in a long time, at least one that is not directly related to a whole new product release, hit the headlines. BootCamp, a boot manager designed to do the job which Nederkoorn's "hack" had done; except complete with working drivers for Windows, so as to allow the use of USB, different monitor sizes and numerous other things which Nederkoorn's solution did not yet include.

The single biggest excuse most Windows users who would like to try a Mac give for not buying one is that they need to run various applications which aren't available for the Mac as part of their job or hobby or both. While for the most part it's simply not true to say there isn't as much choice in software for the Mac, the perception never-the-less persistently dogs the platform, thanks in some part to devious methods used by the beige box manufactures and partly thanks to plain and simple ignorance on the part of stack-'em-high sell 'em cheap computer superstore staff.

Now that it's not only possible to run Windows on a Mac, but it's something which is actively supported by Apple, the last barrier to buying hardware from Apple, for most people, is effectively gone for good; not least because, unless you are a really serious gamer, Apple now, rather ironically, make some of the fastest Windows home PC's money can buy; and without all those cheap looking and frankly pointless bits of "scary" day-glow plastic.

Here then is a run down of some things people who have simply never used a Mac before might like to take a look at, once they get over their initial tendency to boot directly into Windows.

• 10. One of the great things about Mac OS is what you might call uniform keystroke shortcuts, in other words almost all applications have identical keys for certain menu options and so on. For example Apple + ,(that's a comma) brings up the preferences panel for the frontmost application.
• 9. Apple + H hides the frontmost application, while Apple + Option + H hides all except the frontmost application.
• 8. Talking of Preferences, try bringing them up in the Finder. This is something of an over-looked feature of the Finder, in my opinion, which is odd considering how handy it can be. In Finder Prefs. you can set Label colours and names. Labels effectively bring an end to the days you (the new Mac user) might remember from Windows which made it virtually impossible to keep certain items you need to leave in a certain folder separate from items you've already processed or need to remember to do something to in the future, such as adding to a back-up batch or sending as an email. The great thing about labels is that the definition you set in the Finder Preferences window globally changes throughout all files which have that label applied to them. Then all you do to keep things even more neat is chooseSort by Label in the list view (Apple + 2 in any open Finder window).
• 7. You don't have to be particularly biased in favor of Windows to admit that it's old style, flat 2D interface makes navigating your way around, when you have three or four applications open, and each of them having seven or eight windows of their own open at once, not exactly an enjoyable experience. Exposé however makes all of that pecking around for the document you want to bring to the front a thing of the past. Hit F9, F10 or F11 at any time, no matter where you are in Mac OS X and instantly see all your none hidden windows.
• 6. Spotlight. Long before Google desktop and a myriad of other "find your own stuff" applications of that nature, Spotlight has been one of the most powerful features of Mac OS X since version 10.4 'Tiger' first hit the shops; but there are some things about it even pretty hardened Mac users don't know. As well as being accessible from the magnifying glass icon in the top right hand side of the toolbar you can also call Spotlight by hitting Apple + Spacebar, for the regular menu to appear and wait for you to begin typing, or you can hit Apple + Option + Spacebar to bring Spotlight up in a new window. Once Spotlight finds your search results it automatically sorts them in a uniquely accessabe way. Firstly all mention of your search criteria in your documents are listed, followed by Folder names, mentions in mail messages, then images, PDF documents, bookmarks and finally music and video media files. This means you can see all of your matches in one easy to scroll window. Look out for a cheap and nasty direct rip off of this functionality in Microsoft's up-coming but constantly delayed new version of Windows, Vista. (a sentence I could add to the end of every bullet point in this list incidentally)
• 5. Mac developers are notorious for their small memory footprint, yet utterly indispensable little freeware and shareware titles. The clammer for attention in this space among Windows developers makes it hard to tell the adware spam from the fun and functional. On the Mac side however you're spoiled for choice. Everything from tool-bar pop down menus which read your mind, sync your event calendars and check your email, to dashboard widgets that, at a glance, can bring you up-to-date with stock prices, currency exchange rates, your eBay tracked items and a whole sub-set of functional yet small and snappy "toys".
• 4. True plug and go devices. As far back as WIndows 95 Microsoft promised plug and play devices; scanners and printer, cameras and keyboards which, without any more configuration than simply plugging them in, simply worked out of the box. Of course the reality bared little resemblance to the ideal. While the nations of the world learned to live with blue screens and persistent "You have done something wrong" error messages, we on the Mac simply got on with our work. The list of mice, keyboards, cameras, scanners, printers, microphones and TV tuners that are Mac compatible is growing by the day and none of them require so much as re-start, thanks to the power of the underlying UNIX operating system.
• 3. iLife. Every application in the iLife suite is "aware" of the others. In iMovie for example you can drag and drop music you have composed in Garage Band into your soundtrack, together with photos from your iPhoto library and music from your iTunes library, all from within iMovie, without having to open iPhoto, iTunes, or Garage band. As if that weren't enough, once your little epic is edited and looking like you want it to look, you can insert it into a web-page without having to to think about writing a single line of HTML code.
• 2. iDVD. We've all got folders full of humorous little clips we've found dotted around the internet over the years. There's something keepable about watching someone fall off a bike that we just can't resist. How about home movies of the summer holidays or Christmas with the new born baby? How great would it be to keep all of these clips on a DVD that we can simply leave in the car so that whenever we're next over a friend's house we can simply show them, without having to worry about their Windows machine taking exception to some video playback codec being missing or incorrectly installed. iDVD delivers that reality and it couldn't be easier to use. You can literally insert a tape into your Video Camera, plug it into your Mac's firewire port, hit a button and go to bed; waking in the morning to a DVD with fully animated menus of all your unmissable moments.
• 1. UNIX. When all is said and done Mac OS X is, essentially, a really slick and functional interface sitting atop a very powerful operating system, UNIX. Getting down into the workings of any command prompt OS can be a daunting task for anyone who's never so much as used MS DOS before, but you'll soon find yourself trying things out in UNIX you never thought possible. Fink is an amazing project to bring open source applications, which normally wouldn't break out of their natural Linux environment, to the masses of Mac users. Fink is a package manger, rather like RedHat's, which locates the necessary component source code parts, which make up the application you want to compile and install for Mac, as well as assembling that code against Apple's developer tools so that cursors, windows, menus and buttons look as feel like any other regular Mac application.

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