Leopard and Snow Leopard have the ability to edit pdf files, move pages around, and even merge pdf documents together. In OS X combining pdf documents is now easy and you don’t need a third party program to do it! Here is how to join two or more pdf files together into one.

1. Open the first pdf file in Preview.

2. Now select ‘Sidebar’ from the ‘View’ menu – this will make a thumbnail sidebar appear.

3. You can now drag the second pdf file into this sidebar window, and it will be added to your pdf document as an additional page.

NOTE: In Snow Leopard you need to drag the new pdf ON TOP OF the existing pdf’s thumbnails ( a little red box shows you that you are doing this).

This signals that you want to add it to the document. You can then move it to where you like.

If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page it will appear as a red line instead of a box and the file will be added as a link, but not merged within the pdf document.

You can now save it!

• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ’skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat – it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order – like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ’soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.

This produces a neat little A5 booklet from 4 A4 pages or it can even do an A6 booklet as follows:

You can download this neat little application from here.

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.