Welcome to Macintosh

Or: So you've just bought a Mac. Now what?

As many of my friends switch to using Macs, I've found myself answering similar questions, and offering the same tips. So, here they are, all set down in glorious technoHTML.

News sites

There are a lot of Mac-related news sites out there. I use MacNN primarily. For the more cutting-edge rumours about hardware which is about to replace your shiny new mac, try ThinkSecret, AppleInsider or MacOSRumours

Fun Stuff

There is a lot of fun stuff out there, but here are some links to get you started - that I think any new Mac user should at least try once.

• Konfabulator - A framework for cluttering your desktop with a plethora of 'Widgets', such as CPU meters, battery meters, displays of weather in your chosen town(s), and many many more.
• Fluid - a rather CPU-intensive fluid dynamics screensaver. Very pretty, though, and if you have an iSight or other video input, this can be mapped onto the reflective surface of the fluid.
• NetNewsWire - A must-have if you follow various news sites which have an RSS feed (including MacNN, news.bbc, livejournal and various other blogs).
• ThermographX - displays current readings and history graphs for whatever temperature sensors your Mac is fitted with. Current Powerbooks have 3; Powermac G5s have many.
• XJournal - LiveJournal users will want to take a look at XJournal, my LiveJournal client of choice for the Mac, though there are others.
• Macs can do speaker-independent voice recognition out of the box. This isn't very widely-known, nor does it perform brilliantly. However, should you wish to play, turn it on in the Speech pane of System Preferences. Try asking your Mac 'Tell me a joke'...
• This brings me onto the next item. If you're a tinkerer, go and find out about Applescript. Although the language itself is rather close to English for a lot of peoples' tastes, it is very powerful, and many OSX Apps support it, providing appropriate hooks for them to be controlled by Applescript. If you're a Perl person, take a look at Mac::Glue, which ties Perl into Applescript.

Sound

First of all, note that iTunes now rips CDs to Apple's AAC format by default. For those that don't want this, it is changeable under Preferences.

It is also possible to get iTunes to play OGG Vorbis files. The Quicktime component necessary for this is available here.

Tips for unix geeks.

An entire book has been written on this subject - OS X for Unix Geeks - but here are a few tips to start you off.

The first place you will want to head for is the Terminal. This can be found in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.

The behaviour of page up/page down may confuse you - basically, these keys apply to the terminal's scroll buffer, and this cannot be changed. escape-p/escape-n or alt-p/alt-n may be of use (depending on how you have set things up in Terminal Menu -> Window Settings -> Keyboard

Fink deserves a mention, especially for those who are likely to want to download a variety of command-line tools such as wget and lynx.

If Fink scares you, an alternative is macosx.forked.net

Note that Software Update can be invoked from the command line as well, by typing 'softwareupdate' - handy for machines you're administering remotely.

Enabling the Safari debug menu can be handy. Get a Terminal window, and type the following: 'defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1'. To reverse this, do the same with a 0.

It is worth noting that the 'administrator' users in OS X are equivalent to sudo, and any administrator can use sudo on the command line.

A laudable security decision by Apple was to leave all services off by default. If you need to ssh into your Mac, you will first need to go to System Preferences, then to the Sharing panel. Turning on 'Remote Login' will start sshd. A caveat here is that the shell will not be that defined in the Preferences menu item in Terminal. If you want to set your login shell, you will need to delve into NetInfo (/Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager). Here you can set the shell by going to users->yourusername and change the 'shell' property.