OK, so it’s not my mac, but I guess I’m gonna be the one using it the most. Work just bought a Mac mini, and it is so quiet! And of course, it runs MacOSX, that sexy smart OS.
After some initial oversights (Didn’t have any USB keyboards), I got it up and going with my existing CRT monitor, mouse and keyboard. First things I learnt: Home and End go to the top and bottom of your document, not the start and end of the current line. Just to clarify:
| Windows | MacOSX | |
|---|---|---|
| Start of line | Home | Command + Left Arrow |
| End of line | End | Command + Right Arrow |
| Start of document | Ctrl + Home | Home |
| End of document | Ctrl + End | End |
| Start of (previous) word | Ctrl + Left Arrow | Option + Left Arrow |
| End of (next) word | Ctrl + Right Arrow | Option + Right Arrow |
But I should get used to all that. I guess I wish I had a real Mac keyboard, but I did find DoubleCommand, which I have yet to try, but looks promising.
I did however, try Quicksilver! I really like this tool — it lets you do things you might do quite often all from the keyboard, things like start applications, upload files. If I was going to replace my Windows box with the Mac as my desktop machine, I’m sure Quicksilver would definetely become handy 🙂 It’s like a command prompt on de-obfuscation pills!
The main reason we have the Mac is for testing websites in Safari and IE5Mac. Safari is quite good, but as many of my web designing and developing friends out there will likely know, the bane of our existances is Internet Explorer, and IE5Mac triplely so. So I stand to learn a lot about the inadequacies of crappy browsers… as if IE6Win wasn’t enough… 😛
Webfroot is looking smart in Safari — the one-liner doesn’t render correctly, but hey, can’t win them all. Haven’t tried looking at inner.geek yet… will do that tomorrow.
Getting to know the ins and outs of a highly polished, well thought out operating system is an exciting prospect. I’ve tried several KDE and Gnome installations over the years, and they don’t have squat on MacOSX.
If I wasn’t saving to go to WE05, I’d be all like saving hard core for a Mac… I have been dreaming of a Mactop to call my own for a while now…
Can anyone out there recommend good freeware apps a Windows Poweruser “switching” to OSX should look at?
Hi Brett,
Here’s what I use:
Jellyfissh for ssh: http://www.arenasoftware.com/grepsoft/
Quicksilver (you alreay found that one!)
What else…
KeyCue is good for learning what hotkeys are available: http://www.macility.com/products/keycue/
Longhand is a GREAT calculator: http://longhand.pansophists.net/
Some of these are demoware, some are free…
Welcome, and enjoy!
Those were all good apps! Thanks unbrand!
KeyCue is actually really good — One would think something like that would come standard!