Mac Starter Kit

Recently a couple of my friends got macs and have been asking me for tips. Another one is getting his soon and will undoubtedly also be calling me. I’ve had mine since January (actually six months this week) and I’m very happy with it. I also had some guidance from friends who’ve been around the block Mac-wise and were willing to offer some tips. I’m going to break this post down into four sections- the Dock, Finder, Apps, and Widgets.

The Dock– Like the Windows Start Bar, it’s where there most important stuff will go. As well as all of your running programs being there, you can keep program icons there for quick and easy access. To do that just open up your Applications folder and drag the apps you want onto the dock. I have ten there at all times, the big ones being Firefox, iTunes, Adium, Finder, and Quicksilver. You can also hide your dock by clicking on the Apple icon in the top left, and going to Dock>Turn Hiding On. Then it will only appear when you mouse over the bottom part of your screen. I did this for more screen real estate.

Finder– The file system of sorts for your Mac. From Finder you’ll be able to access all of the files on your computer. One thing to note is you start in your user folder (username that is, mine is joe). Directly from there, you can get to Applications, Music, Pictures, Movies, Documents and a bunch of other things. You can also customize the “Places” section of Finder to include the folders you frequent most. Just drag that folder and drop it under “Places.” Mine contains Desktop, joe, Documents, Applications, iTunes Music, Widgets, and Fonts. The last three I added myself because I found myself copy and pasting or dragging and dropping to those folders the most.

Apps– The biggest question I get is, “What Apps should I download?” It really depends on what you’re into, but a few (either built-in or free) that I have found useful are:

• Adium– This multi-protocol IM client lets you connect to all of your screen names in one app. I can use it for AIM, Yahoo!, GTalk, and rumor has it Facebook support is coming. The only thing native IM client iChat has on it is support for video chat.
• Quick Sliver– This robust little app is the quick-launcher to end all quick-launchers. Run the program, which will run in the background, press control+spacebar and type in the name of the App you want to run, document you want to open, or even song you want to play in iTunes. Lifehacker is also quite the fan.
• Transmission– For all your Bit Torrent needs.
• Dictionary- a built-in app that will search for definitions, synonyms and Wikipedia for whatever word you put in.
• Preview- a built-in app that natively converts to PDF, and reads PDFs and all sorts of other image files. Much faster than Adobe Reader.

Widgets– The final feature I want to talk about is the Widgets. On newer Macs, by default press F4 and you will be presented with your ‘Dashboard,’ with all of your widgets. Ones like weather, calc, etc. come pre-installed, but there are literally hundreds of widgets out there to download for free. The only one I really recommend is Maintidget, which will run clean up and maintenance scripts on your Mac weekly. I am personally a fan or the PHP, Movies, and Lyrics widgets.

Besides my short rambling, Lifehacker writes quite frequently on how to make your mac-using life easier, including a guide to switching. MacUpdate is also a great site for free Mac software.