Making the switch to a Mac is really a great however daunting thing. I know it certainly was for us, so my reason for this post is to help lessen that blow of post purchase dissonance and reassure you that yes, you have in fact made a great decision even if that new world you are looking at on the screen is scary you will soon grow to love it!

The Dock

Apple really have excelled at making an incredibly user friendly operating system and it may take a couple of weeks to a month to get the hang of it but hang in there it’s worth it. The biggest thing that hits you when you start up your new mac is the ‘dock’.

Essentially this is one of the main places where you’re applications or programs live, each symbol in the dock represents a program. Now working the dock really is simple. To load a program simply click on its image, only one click is needed. You may notice this icon bounce once or twice while the program loads, after loading is complete your program will open and you will notice a little round white glow appear under the program in the dock. This glow means that a program is running.

By right clicking on one of these icons you will get a list of other options, for example on your mail icon you might get options like get mail or compose new message. You can change what is displayed in your dock, for example I like to have only my most regularly used programs in the dock, if there is something there you don’t like simply click and drag it off the dock. This will take the icon off the dock but don’t worry you haven’t deleted it, if you need to get it back simply find the program in your finder (more about this later) and drag the appropriate application back onto the dock.

There are a number of cool features you may like as well such as being able to magnify the icons when you roll your mouse over them, as well as increasing or decreasing the size of the dock by cliking the little dotted line (located in the picture above five icons in from the right), you can hide it as well when not being used and it will pop back up when you put your cursor at the bottom of the screen. The dock allows for a very user friendly workspace.

The other quick thing that I would mention about the dock is the trash can and it has a couple of functions. This performs the funtion of the recycle bin in windows. The main use for the trash can is to delete files – you do this by clicking and dragging files into the trash. However the trash can has another main use, and this is to eject items, for example CD’s from the CD drive or USB Keys. There will be an image of either a white folder (representing storage) or a CD on the desktop and to eject them properly click and drag the appropriate one onto the trash, this then ejects it from the system.

Title Bar

The title bar runs accross the very top of the screen, this is one of the things that really got me when first using a mac. Where in a windows environment all of your menus are located at the top of the active window on a mac your menu’s are all located within this bar running accross the top of the screen. There usually are not any options available in the active windows.

The apple logo in the left hand side is always there, never moves, this gives you access to info about your system, software updates as well as all of your commands such as restart, log off, shut down etc. Next to that is usually the name of the program that is currently active on the screen with the other applicable menus running next to it. These menus change depending on which program is currently active on your screen. In this picture you can see I had Safari active at the time but if I clicked on an iTunes window the name and menu’s would change to iTunes applicable menu’s.

Over the left hand side are other icons and information such as time and date, the volume, the airport (wifi) status and here the stronger the signal the more little rounded bars you get, there’s also information about what time machine is doing as well as other logos that may get on there from programs you install on your system. You can click on all of these as well and they give you links to settings and options for each application.

Finder

The finder is you Mac alternative to Explorer in Windows. This is where you will navigate to locate and manage files and folders on your computer. Down the right hand side you will see different locations at the top are the hard drive folders, under that you will see network shared drives or computers, under places you will see all of your local files and folders, Documents; Movies; Music; Pictures are quick links to the respective data in your login.

There is a number of ways to display your files and folders in the finder, the method displayed in the pictures shows a list of files and folders and as you open a folder it opens it’s contents in the list to the right and so on, once you arrive at your designated file the box to the right of the file will display info about it, press space bar and you get a ‘quick view’ of what you are looking for.

You can also navigate in the traditional sense of seeing a big folder you click on it and it opens the containing files. Another way I like to look at folder and files is buy using cover flow, this provides you with a graphic view of what files are in a folder so you can see what is in the picture or word document and flick through them as you would with a book or filing cabinet. The finder has many more features but it would take forever to cover them all.

Spotlight

Do you hate digging through all of your files and folders trying to find what you’re looking for? Well spotlight is the answer for you. Spotlight is a very powerful way of searching the contents of your computer, you start typing the name of what you are looking for and spotlight will find files, applications, music, basically anything on your computer that matches what you are searching for. Simply click on the desired result in the list and hey presto it opens it up.

I find spotlight a great way to search for and open applications that I don’t use frequently enough to have on the dock, simply type the first few letters and bang there it is. Spotlight is also duplicated throughout a lot of apples programs so anywhere you see a little magnifying glass or long oval shaped field you can do a search.

I find this really powerful, it is really quick to load your results and does so while you are typing, it constantly indexes what is on your computer so it will be ready when you need to search. This has been executed in a much better way than what Windows offers. No more lost files ever again!

Expose

This is one of my most favourite things in Apples operating system OS X, Expose! All too often I find my desktop getting incredibly cluttered with open windows. Now in Windows your solution to this is by clicking the appropriate window in the taskbar, but not on a Mac. Now activating Expose can differ between computers, some older macs you would click the F9 Key, new mac keyboards have it on the F3 key represented by a little icon above it, or you can also program your mouse to use a certain click to activate it (my favourite way of using expose). Essentially what it does is graphically move each and every window onto the screen at once, shrinking the window size a little but giving you a view of what is going on in that window at that point in time, and yes video continues to play while you are in expose.

Once you have activated expose, you move your cursor to the window you would like to get into, it changes to a light blue color all over and you can then select that windows by clicking. The window you have clicked will be brought to the very front of all windows. Neat hey!

The Apple Keyboard

The keyboard is the final thing I will talk about in this post, now you may think a keyboard is a keyboard. But not on a mac! Now of course they still perform all the same function as any other keyboard but theres a few differences.

The first that you may notice is the Command Key, this acts like your control key on a windows computer. For functions like Cntrl + S for save on windows you would use command + s on a mac. There are tons of other uses for the command key but this is the main one. You may notice in the menu’s on a Mac that next to certain commands there are funny little expressions these are basically keyboard shortcuts, there are heaps of them but if there are functions that you repeatedly perform then you may like to remember the keyboard shortcuts.

One of the other big differences here is that there is a return key in place of the Enter key. Return was basically used in the early days of the mac as a way to ‘return’ to the beginning on the next line as in a word processor. Now it performs much the same function as the enter key.

Another thing that may puzzle you is that there are two delete keys on the mac keyboard. The delete key where a backspace key would usually be is just that, a backward delete. So in a word processor or when entering other text it deletes characters in a backwards manner. The other delete key, where a ‘delete’ key is normally on a windows keyboard. Is a forwards delete, so deletes from the right side of your cursor. Now this key doesn’t perform the function of deleting a file like it does on windows. To delete a file you will need to click and drag it to the trash can in the dock.

Another quirky thing about macs is the eject key. Now all modern macs execpt for the high end MacPro have slot loading disk drives, so there isn’t a tray that comes out. So in order to get the disk out simply press and hold the eject key for a second or two and the computer will eject the disk for you. Alternatively you can click and drag the disk’s image on your desktop to the trash to achieve the same result.

I hope this little guide is of use to you and gets you on your way to becoming a fluent Mac user, and most importantly of all enjoy your new purchase!!!