New to Mac? Like-for-like applications and tips for switchers.

I recently wrote an article for newsvine on Apple's story so far; their journey towards greater market share. The article also touched upon some tips on using Mac OS X that recent switchers found helpful.

So, in follow-up to that, I thought it might be similarly useful to expand upon that original article with a look at Mac equivalents, like-for-like where appropriate, and compare the Windows way to the Mac way, as well as highlight some useful third party titles, which add to the Mac experience, from both the open source and shareware / freeware community.

The problem, if you can call it that, with OS X is that it is so flexible and easy to work with that sometimes, if you're used to the "Do it Mircosoft's way or don't do it at all" method in which Windows works, finding your way around OS X can, ironically, be quite awkward at first.

I remember a friend of mine who had never used a Mac before, but who purchased one on my advice thorough sheer frustration at the endless spyware, worms and security problems with his Windows machine, frantically calling me up one day because he couldn't find the control panel that removes and installs icons to and from the dock; and what a revelation it was to him that it was actually just as simple as dragging and dropping. Wake up internet 2.0, my tech blog, has some video clip examples of this.

Installing and removing programs.

If there is a better example on the differences between Windows and Mac than how both systems handle the installation and removal of software, I've yet to read it. Some things in the installing of any software are, by the nature of what you're doing, processes which are similar on both platforms to a certain extent, in that certain types of installers must have permission to write to the system folder, which only the user can allow or disallow.

In the case of Mac OS this occasionally requires the input of the administrator password, the pass which you must enter to gain sudo root access to the UNIX underpinnings; something which really couldn't be made any easier to do by OS X simply popping up a window whenever this is required. Similarly with Windows the user must be logged into an account which has administrative privileges, but rather inconveniently it doesn't allow temporary admin access for the installation of applications to ordinary users.

The rigmarole of installing programs on Windows is made all the more laborious by everything from installers that insist on restarting, before they even begin, to captions which "forget" that the user needs to click on an "OK" button which is obscured by a horrible splash screen, which itself insist on being "always-on-top" in full screen. Examples of this sort of uglyness, from the top of my head, baring in mind I no longer use Windows on anything more than a once-per-week for less than an hour basis, would be Direct X, Photoshop and (blush) Quicktime, but I'm certain there are hundreds if not thousands more.

When it comes to software removal the Windows way is pretty much the install process in reverse. Click here, allow this, allow that and then, you guessed it, the dreaded restart. Yes, I want to restart my computer just to remove a calculator. Not that doing an uninstall has any effect on the myriad of malicious spyware which, rather cruelly, come with an uninstaller which doesn't actually work but invariably simply further embeds it's hateful self deeper into the registry.

On the Mac, to remove an application, you put it in the trash. And that's it; although you can scrape back the unused disc space which a removed application's redundant system files take up by using a third party uninstaller, such as the excellent app zapper.

Video editing.

While iMovie is pretty much the definitive easy to use video editor, and it comes with every new Mac as part of the iLife suite, there are some types of editing it's easier to use other applications for. After all, you don't always necessarily want to insert cross-fade edits and text captions or apply filter effects and transitions to a video. Most of the time in fact, especially when it comes to clips you download from the internet, you simply want to convert them into a file format which will play on another device, such as a play station portable, or you want to write the file onto a disc which plays in a consumer, set-top DVD player.

TV Tuner and home theater.

Windows Media PC's are an attractive option to anyone wanting to set-up a home theater system, for watching DVDs and using as a personal video recorder. The expensive ones work well, the cheeper ones I've seen can be frustrating, particularly when they drop frames and crash half way through a minority interest program you recorded weeks ago and have no way of finding on bit-torrent through sheer lack of popularity (I speak as a Jazz music and nature documentary fan surrounded by bit-torrenters who think 'Lost' and 'Desperate housewives' are witty and compelling drama).

Elgato EyeTV to the rescue. The little USB device, infra red remote control and fully functional recording and editing software combination which turns your Mac into a media center. EyeTV is Mac only and it makes the Windows equivalents, like WinTV for example, look like a 5 year old operating system in a cheap plastic box with tacky green, go faster fluorescent lights in the case.

The software works like a dream, when waking your Mac from standby, if a program you have scheduled from the program guide is due to start. The guide is automatically downloaded from the digital terrestrial transponder in your FreeView (UK) area.

You can also add a program to your recording schedule from anywhere in the world via tvtv.co.uk, so being on the other side of the world is no excuse for missing The Simpsons.

You can see screen grabs of the Elgato software in action on my blog.

Music recording and audio editing.

Once the domain almost exclusively of the Macintosh, the Windows PC has certainly done some impressive catching-up, when it comes to professional recording, MIDI sequencing and audio editing applications, in recent years. But few would argue that the cream of the crop in this area are three applications which really work best in their spiritual home, on the Mac.

All three of these high to mid-price titles weigh in at a running cost far in excess of anything the passive hobbyist, who perhaps wants to tinker with MIDI and occasionally record their garage band or re-mix a dance track, can realistically afford. Thank the maker then, the open source community, once again, comes to the rescue.

It's also worth pointing out that Garage Band is also not only included free with every new Mac, but is itself an excellent audio recording and editing tool, which can host third party audio units and VST plug-ins and includes enhanced PodCasting tools for exporting to iWeb, iLife's web site design and publishing software.

Workflow tips and Finder tricks.

It's been hinted that Apple's Steve Jobs is no fan of the current so-called nested folders way of organizing files, and that not so long in the future, Mac OS will do away with the current method which all three of the major operating systems use. Smart folders are a rather simple, but effective example of how this radicle re-think in the way we view the information on our computers will change, if this goes ahead.

I honestly struggle to imagine how I managed my business without the added efficiency which automator has brought to my average working day. I've constantly got folders full of photographs which need processing landing on my desktop, coming in from collegues on the office LAN, which I similarly have access to at home. With automator I can sort the images into different folders, based upon the date they where taken, the orientation of the frame, the photographer who took them, in fact anything which distinguishes the file in some way from the hundreds of other files waiting to be attended to can be used to automatically affect a whole range of sorting and processing actions, including batch copying, rotation and resizing, auto-light balancing, tiff to jpeg conversion and effects filtering, when used in conjunction with Graphic Converter.

You can also drag and drop these selections onto an application icon and with one click cut and paste any text and / or image. I use this all the time for keeping important information from emails in a stickies notepad, where I can glance at them quickly without having to create a new word or notepad document, just to remember a phone number or some other information which will no longer be as important in a week or a month's time. Best of all, if copying from a web page, the integrity of the format of the text and any HTML, like tables, is maintained. It's literally like clipping out an article from the page in a magazine. Wake up internet 2.0, my tech blog, has some video clip examples of this.

Browsers & email.

I always find it rather ironic that Microsoft Internet Explorer was, in the days of Apple Mac OS System 8 and 9, a much better browser than it's Windows equivalent. These days, however, Apple have a browser of their own, Safari.

Similarly, once upon a time, Outlook and Eudora where the only email clients in town on the last of the "classic", pre-OS X Mac systems; where Apple now have their own Mail, to which only really weird people still use the many close, but no cigar alternatives, most notably Mozilla's Thunderbird.

Safari, as with all OS X applications, supports built-in spell checking, making it a breeze to write everything from short comments in chat forums to entire blog entries and articles like this one, without having to leave the browser window to make sure your work is legible.

As simple to use as right-clicking on any highlighted word, the in-line dictionary is probably the greatest unsung hero, among the many labour saving devices, in the modern Mac OS. Firefox unfortunately doesn't support in-line spell checking because it's windowing system uses java script, something Mozilla developers have been promising something would be done about for quiet some time now, with not so much as an unstable public beta to show for it. For this reason alone the majority of Mac users have stuck with Safari as their default browser, but when in-line spelling is resolved in Firefox it'll be interesting to see how many permanently switch.

Safari is a great browser with all the functionality of tabs, button bookmarks for opening multiple links at once, Apple + I to send a whole page as an HTML email, middle scroll wheel clicking to open links in a new tab as well as being an acceptable RSS reader; but it lacks anything comparable to Firefox's extensions, which have made that browser the success it is on all three major platforms.

Blogging.

RapidWeaver is a sophisticated web site creation tool which pre-dates Apple's iWeb. It's strength is it's ease of use and it is a particularly good blogging tool. You can write and article, attach an iTunes friendly podcast to it and post everything necessary for a well formed XML, which in turn your readers and listeners will use to subscribe to your site and podcast, with no need to so much as write a line of HTML, let alone worry about understanding how it all works.

On the Windows side a great application called ecto, which is also available for Mac, is probably the best example of a quick and easy blogging tool as you could wish for.

To each his own.

I hope, in conclusion, that I have touched upon some things you, the new Mac user, who perhaps still floats in and out of using Windows, found out about software and features you didn't already know of, and that this was of some use.

I could have written on and on about various audio, photo and video editing tips, that being my area of expertise as it where. I'll be writing more on photography and image editing in a separate article coming soon.

In contrast I found out something myself in the course of putting this article together that I need to learn a lot more about blogging software and email clients. I learned, ultimately what we could all do with being reminded of now and then, that there is always something to learn about computers. I'm just thankful I no longer need to learn anything to do with Windows, since I've managed over the course of the last 3 or 4 years to whittle my use of it down to literally once or twice a week for less than an hour, when I go through my various articles and contributions to other sites, as well as my own blogs, and make sure any HTML I've written is looking well in IE 6 and Firefox for Windows. After-all, we wouldn't want to go around extolling the virtues of the Mac way of doing things and have that message obscured in some way by a silly mistake, so feel free to contact me or comment here if you've noticed anything I should correct.

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