OT: PC to Mac, Transitioning Help Please

[Atomhot]

Some advice:

If you haven't already, buy the apple care for your machine - It's the best $180 of sanity you can buy. Applecare extends your 90 day coverage to three years - beyond the hardware coverage it includes excellent telephone support for converts, newbies, and hardcore geeks.

The first time you power on the machine, you'll be asked to create an account. By default this is an administrator account - so use an atypical name like a pet's and a good password. Only use this account to install software and run system updates. Resist the temptation to do anything in an administration account like web surfing, itunes, etc

When you create an account you're asked for a Long and Short name - the latter is very difficult to change so choose them wisely.

Since it's your first mac, you should consider re-installing right off the bat just for the experience. Would really suck needing to pop your OS install cherry the evening before a deadline but after Applecare support hours ended. It's also a good time to pare down the install by a few gigs ( that little customize button on the lower left of the final install screen ) - Leave the foreign fonts in, but do you really need all the language translation packs and print drivers etc?

Enable the software firewall, turn off the airport and/or bluetooth if you're not using them regularly

To keep yourself sane, separate work stuff from personal/leisure stuff - create regular accounts for each person using the computer for leisure and additional 'work' accounts for each person that needs one. Above all, create a separate account for your finances and filevault it.

Enable fast user switching to have multiple logged in accounts at once - just understand all the disks are visible to everyone etc

Spotlight is a pain is a pain in the a$$. Near useless as best I can tell, but does a good job of sucking up disk i/o by constantly searching for new files and generating content indexes etc. I'd suggest disabling it and sacking all the indexes it has created. read the man page first but 'mdutil -a -i off' and 'mdutil -a -E' is what you want ( yes, terminal app will be your friend )

Just like your PC, set a hot corner to start your screen saver and enable password on wake in the security panel. Never leave your screen unlocked – especially an account with admin privileges. You'd be surprised what a cat/child/roommate/lover can accomplish while you're taking a leak.

As for fat32/ntfs/hfs+… journaled HFS+ is a good choice for your external drives ( i'd leave the journal off on disks used for video editing ). You're asking for a world of hurt if you select a Case-sensitive HFS+ format it's a legacy mac thing that still fouls up some of older OS X apps

You can un-mount a disk ( internal, external, flash drive ) by dragging it to the trash and it won't delete the disk either

Every month or two you should run disk first aid on ALL your HFS disks - it's important so put it on the calendar and do it regularly. If you accidentally disconnect a disk in use, lose power, etc - connect the disk(s) and run it then and there.

disk first aid will correct most issues before things get too out of hand. open disk utility ( /Applications/Utilities ), select your disk volume, click the disk first aid tab, click verify disk.

virtual memory is nice, but slow especially if its on the same disk you're doing all your work on. 4G of ram should be plenty for most multitaskers, but if things appear sluggish you should take a look @ activity monitor ( /Applications/Utilities ) before instinctively upping the memory.

If disk i/o is your problem, move your photoshop scratch space to another disk instead of the internal disk.

If memory is really the problem - adding a 4GB kit to you mac will run ~ $120. If you need more, the price of 8GB kits are ~ $360 - in this case you'd probably be much better off procuring a 4GB ram kit, a nice sata FW800 enclosure ( < $120 ), and a cheap OCZ 30GB SSD ( $100 ). use the SSD for swap and Photoshop scratch space - no need to buy the high end SSDs as even the cheapest SSDs will max out the Firewire capabilities. ( yes, real world FW800 is much faster than USB 2 on the mac )


backups:

Time machine is pretty damn nice, but its also fairly dumb. If someone starts editing video in their account, and you didn't explicitly exclude those particular directories/disks, your time machine free space will shrink quickly… I'd suggest keeping large files off your internal drive if at all possible and limit Time machine to the internal drive only.

If you move a files around, Time machine considers them new files. Simple reorganizations will consume more backup time and disk space.

Time machine does not verify backups - you need to spot check files ( content, permissions, attributes, and ACLS ). hard disks are consumables - they have intermittent failures as do usb cables, memory, bridge boards.

Time machine slows down considerably as the number of files increases - You should consider storing your 100k RAW files on an external disk and manual backing them up to a separate disk.

Time machine is one basket - It has to be larger than the sum of all the eggs/drives/data you intend to back up. Because of this limit, I use time machine for my internal disk only. I keep all my big files on external usb drives and manually backup them up to a white box fileserver using rsync.

Time machine doesn't handle multiple destinations elegantly - you need to manually switch the destination drive in the preference panel instead of it auto-detecting disk A is connected vs disk B. You do plan on rotating between at least two backup disks right?

Keep the clutter off the Time Machine disks. The only other files I place on the Time Machine drives are compressed disk images of my installers and a simple text file with my serial numbers. Use disk utility ( /Applications/Utilities ) to create images of cd/dvds



software:

Disk Warrior and data rescue are pretty much the go to tools when things go titsup on a disk. if disk first aid fails, these will more than likely fix the problem short of a bad block on the disk.

Data Guardian is an encrypted password wallet that works rather well on OS X - helps generate 'secure' passwords ( wish it would do the same for usernames )

Thunderbird is an excellent alternative to apple iMail

stuffit expander - pretty much a requirement with macs and the internet

internet life is good with Safari, but install Opera and Firefox anyway - after you install the latter two freebies open safari prefs and pick which of the three you want as the default. Many of the IE only sites ( like online banking ) will work well with Opera.

unfortunately, Flash on the mac stores cookies by user regardless of browser - so this is another reason to have separate user account for your finance stuff

Virtualbox is great, give it a shot before Parallels etc - the virtual disks are huge and change often. Consider excluding them from time machine backup and backing them up manually. If you want to share the virtual disks between users, save them somewhere in /Users/Shared/…

littlesnitch is also a nice too but has to be set up per user account - I don't like programs dialing home with who knows what information or usage stats.

Filebuddy rocks - finding files ( especially duplicates ) is a snap

Synchronize Pro X has a nice gui, but the command line version of rsync works just as well and it's included in OSX.

GraphicConverter is the Swiss army knife of image 'can openers' - before you open jpegs with it be sure to change the thumbnails options to temporary or else it will automatically generate and re-save the file with an embedded thumbnail.

VLC is the Swiss army knife of video players…

Adium is a better than apple iChat but lacks video/audio support

Chicken of the VNC is a free VNC client if you need one

[crosbyharbison]

I've never had more than one account, spotlight works fine for me, I have plenty of disk space I don't see the point in wasting my time reinstalling to save 5 gigs, terminal is not 'your friend' especially if you just switched to mac; plenty of things to mess up, i personally hate hot corners and instead trust the people I live with, I don't think adium is better than ichat, I don't use time machine I just clone my external backups, I think apple mail is fine, I avoid suffit and instead usehttp://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html, for browsing I use chrome, and finally unless your stealing software littlesnitch is useless.





That being said: vlc is awesome, scratch disk settings are a great idea, more memory is always good advice.

[neuroanatomist]

Like crosbyharrison, I have just one account. I see no need for an admin account, since you need to enter your admin password to run any installer or software update in any event. Note that you don't need to 'install' (in the PC sense) all software - most off-the-internet applications come as .dmg files (disk images), from which you just drag the app to your Applications folder. I'll add a second account once my daughter gets old enough to use the computer, so I can enable parental controls there.


Do choose your 'shortname' carefully when setting up your account. It's not something you'll use, per se, but you'll see it as the name on your Home folder.


Personally, I did customize the install to save a bit of HDD space (omitting non-relevant printers saves several GB, and since I personally will never use GarageBand, omitting that saved several more).


Agree that Terminal is not your friend, unless you're familiar with using a command line interface in Unix (which is the basis of Mac OS X). As a casual user, you should never have a need to tinker in the Terminal. One simple example from the 'don't try this at home' file - the Terminal command "sudo rm -rf /" will erase your HDD. Not very friendly at all. []


Apple Mail is excellent (in OS 10.6, it can directly access MS Exchange accounts).


Spotlight will use compute cycles initially, especially if you migrate files from a PC. After the first few hours of indexing, it's quite innocuous, and useful for finding files.


Adium is only 'better' than iChat if you need to use chat servers which iChat doesn't support. iChat supports AIM, MobileMe, Jabber, and GoogleTalk. If you need to IM with someone using MSN or Yahoo, Adium is a great choice (supports just about every IM platform out there), but no AV support.


I'd stay away from FileVault - encrypting your entire user folder as one large sparse disk image is not the best idea Apple came up with (a power failure during an HDD write can damage the file being written, and if that file is really your entire user folder...). Instead, for your financial information, etc., simply use Disk Utility to create a secure (encrypted) disk image. UNcheck the box to store the password in the Keychain when you create it (and don't forget the password!!). I keep my taxes, lists of CC numbers, etc., on an AES-256 encrypted image, which is 'theoretically' unbreakable.


Really, on the hardware side, the whole thing is basically plug-and-play.


On the software/shareware side, look at:

• Flip4Mac and Perian - allow other media types to play natively in your web browser (.avi, etc.)
• MPEG Streamclip - an excellent (and free) video format converter (but Canon cameras already shoot video in the Mac-native Quicktime format)
• SuperDuper (or the free Carbon Copy Cloner) - makes bootable backup clones (or, just use Time Machine!)

Also, I use a couple of menu bar add-ons:

• WeatherDock - weather.com conditions/forecast in your menu bar
• iStat Menus - RAM usage and CPU activity in your menu bar

Mark, you also asked about iWork. I have it, and I have MS Office for Mac. Pages and Numbers are just 'ok' - they do fine for standard word processing and'light'spreadsheets. Definitely a Mac OS user interface. Numbers' charting capabilities are a bit weak (but very pretty!). In terms of interoperability with MS Office, while it's true that you can open and re-save or export as MS Office files, there are frequently unexpected formatting changes, etc. It's not a perfect setup, ok for casual use (sending letters back and forth with a Word user for editing), but not optimal for laying out something like a newsletter in a cross-platform setting. Keynote, though, is a thing of beauty. Still not functionally mixable with PowerPoint for working on the same file, though. However, when I give seminars/presentations that I made in Keynote, the audience is always impressed - the slide transitions and builds are eye-popping but in a tasteful way. But, when I'm working on typical documents for work (where Windows is the norm), I use MS Office on my Mac to edit/create those files. So, on the whole, iWork is ok, but IMO if you're used to MS Office and use it frequently, get MS Office for Mac.


One final recommendation - if you have questions as you go through the switching process and beyond, a great place to go for answers is the Apple Discussions forum. There are subsections for the iMac, general Mac OS X questions, and many Apple applications.


Have fun!!


--John

[Mark Elberson]

Mark, you also asked about iWork...

Thanks John. I don't really use Office that frequently in my personal life. I do however like to be able to open a doc or xls file if I receive one in an email. Maybe OpenOffice.org would be a good enough supplement to iWork?

[neuroanatomist]

Maybe OpenOffice.org would be a good enough supplement to iWork?

If you just want to open and read the occasional .doc or .xls file you get via email, iWork will be fine. In fact (unless you've already ordered it preinstalled), you might not even need iWork if you'll only open the occasional file.


One note on OpenOffice - running it requires installation of X11 (one of the custom installation options, primarily intended for software developers or others who need to run X-Windows based apps). For a different freeware alternative, you might look at NeoOffice - that's based on OpenOffice, but is a Mac-native app (since OpenOffice is open-source, the folks at NeoOffice took the source code and ported it to Mac OS X).

[Mark Elberson]

How about a Microsoft Money replacement for Mac? I have become dependent on Money to manage my bills, budget and most imortantly my cash flow. I don't utilize more than 10% what money offers. Essentially all I need is an electronic checkbook that tracks my budget and can give me a rolling cash flow analysis. I don't track my investments or tax info with MS Money. Will iBank fit the bill?

[cfnz]

How about a Microsoft Money replacement for Mac?

After much searching I've been using iCompta for a while now. It's free for the current version (v4 will be charged for) and suits me fine for basic cash flow monitoring, it's not perfect but I don't argue when it's free. I haven't been able to find a Mac equivalent of Microsoft Money. I tried iBank but can't remember much about it.



I also favour OpenOffice over iWork, for me the weak link in iWork is Numbers, after years of using Excel I find it overly simplistic at this stage.



In general terms there were three things that bothered me when I switched to Mac three years ago.

1. The startup noise. I dislike computer sound effects and this one cannot be disabled without a third party solution.
   
2. Mouse movement sensitivity (acceleration curve). Different (more sensitive) to Windows and I found it hard to adapt to while still using Windows every day at work.
3. Files left behind after trashing programs. Dragging a program to the trash doesn't always remove everything from your HDD, once you know when things are (e.g. ~/library/preferences) you can remove them manually. I also use a preference pane tool called AppTrap (there are others).

[peety3]

I've never had more than one account, spotlight works fine for me, I have plenty of disk space I don't see the point in wasting my time reinstalling to save 5 gigs, terminal is not 'your friend' especially if you just switched to mac; plenty of things to mess up, i personally hate hot corners and instead trust the people I live with, I don't think adium is better than ichat, I don't use time machine I just clone my external backups, I think apple mail is fine, I avoid suffit and instead usehttp://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html, for browsing I use chrome, and finally unless your stealing software littlesnitch is useless.

Dude, breathe, and use a few periods.


From the perspective of helping a new user get started, TimeMachine is the way to go. It does backups, and that's the important part: getting the backups done. I use the backup functionality to take snapshots while I work, then archive my jobs to another drive. I can delete the job folder, and either retrieve it from backup or download it from archive.


Hot corners are useful, regardless of who you do or don't trust. They're not just for locking your screen - they can be useful for delaying the screen saver while staring at something, etc.

[Mark Elberson]

Any problems exporting a Photshop action from a PC to a Mac?

[Mark Elberson]

Some advice:

You just scared the crap out of me!!!