Macintosh How To

Switching to OS X from a PC is a big change, It’s a big enough change going from OS9 to OS X. So here are a some of my random thoughts on the transition.

With OSX apple has re-worked everything from the ground up, so there are a lot of old “features” lacking. For example, lots of features of the good old appleworks did not make it to iwork.

I think it’s not that Apple decided to take the features out of appleworks, but they have just written iwork from scratch and are slowly getting round to putting them in.Lots of times I think to myself ‘why does this not do this’ but then apple bring it out.
For example, Mail merge and formulas in spreadsheets just got added with the iwork 2006 release. We still don’t have a thesaurus, and there is no way to print a booklet from iworks yet.

There will be lots of things after having a PC with office and publisher where you will think “How can I do this?”, but you can’t. So mentally it’s better to think, “this is new, let’s learn from scratch” rather than thinking of “changing” from PC to mac.

Try to resist the disappointment of lack of features, and enjoy the simplicity and integration OS X offers.

Despite the similarities between OSX and XP/ME etc, they are quite different.

Even I took while a while to get used to iwork when I already had a mac.

Avoid the temptation of computer people to put things in your own choice of directories. OSX likes you to leave things where it puts them. Eg if you put all your photos in iphoto, they will be available to iwork, idvd, imovie etc. If you decide to put your photos in your own spot, they won’t. It’s very integrated, but likes you to put photos in iphoto, music in itunes folder, addresses in address book, calendar in ical etc. It’s best to just jump in boots and all and to it the OS X way.

Don’t be tempted to use office for email and a PIM like I did it for 6 months, you lose the simplicity of the OS X integration if you do this. Certainly don’t do things like partition a part of hard drive for all your data.

Basically don’t fight against OSX, run with it. Enjoy what it can do, try not to be frustrated by what it can’t do.