Luke On Tech

Last time around, you received your new Mac and switched it on for the first time, and I left you on something of a cliffhanger where OS X had just started up properly and you were now ready to roll. Its time to talk about making your machine into a usable tool.

There are two things your need to know about before we proceed. The first is the Dock. You can see the Dock at the bottom of your screen (default) or elsewhere if you have moved it. What does the Dock do? If you are familiar with the Windows taskbar, then you’re about halfway there. The Dock shows the icons of the applications you have open (also note, that unlike Windows, we are talking about applications not windows) so you can click the icon to swap to that application. But it is also your quicklaunch menu as well. Quicklaunch is maybe something you aren’t familiar with on Windows – it isn’t enabled by default, but I’ve found it to be the single most valuable aspect of the Windows interface. Quicklaunch sits in your taskbar somewhere (I have mine set so that is occupies a second row on the taskbar, and the tasks go to the top row, but that is personal preference), and provides quick and easy access to the shortcuts you need to launch your most frequently used applications. The Dock on OS X provides the same thing, so what you are left with is a list of icons for applications you want quick access to, which also doubles as a list of which applications are currently running (by providing a small arrow underneath the applications). If an application isn’t in the Dock as a quicklaunch style item, it appears at the right hand side of the list while it is running and disappears when you close it. There are two ways (that I know of anyhow) to add items to your dock. The first is to grab the application’s icon from the Applications folder (more on this later) and drag it to the dock – rather than move it, OS X understands that you want to create a Dock shortcut to this item. The second way is if the application is running, click and drag the icon that is in the dock to a position further to the left. This seems to be a spirit crushingly boring paragraph, but familiarity with the Dock is really essential to getting comfortable with OS X.

Another thing that is essential to getting comfortable with OS X is understanding the way it handles programs. I won’t go into as much detail here since a lot of people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about PATH variables and whatnot. Put simply, if it is a program, it should live in the Applications folder. Think of this like Windows’ Program Files, only more sophisticated. OS X combines all the files for a program, and the executable for the program into one nice neat icon, which is generally what is stored in the Applications folder (sometimes it is stored in its own sub-folder, but I’m not a particular fan of that since it looks ugly). If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty you can right-click (or control click, or however else you bring up the context menu) and click for the package contents to see the files it contains, but for 99% of people, that isn’t necessary.

OK, so now you know where you want to put a shortcut application to programs (or folders even) that you use a lot. And you also know where OS X is keeping your programs. The first thing to do with your brand new Mac is to take a look at what programs have come preloaded. Its an unfortunate truth that even Apple preloads crap onto their systems before sending them to you. For instance, you will probably find that you have a trial version of MS Office. Now a trial version is little use to anyone, and now that there are decent Open Source alternatives, there is no reason to give MS the satisfaction of buying or even trying their product. So the first thing I’d suggest is removing that. Ah, but how do you uninstall things under OS X? Easy, just drag it into the trash bin that is shown in the dock. And poof, its gone. There are maybe a couple of other things you can afford to lose from your Applications folder, but if you aren’t sure about something, leave it alone. So continuing the theme, lets go install an Office substitute that is free. My choice here is called NeoOffice, which is an OS X version of the Open Office suite (there are technical reasons why it is called something different, but they aren’t massively important). You can get the latest NeoOffice from here. If you aren’t sure whether you want PPC or Intel, the chances are that if you bought your Mac during the last 6 months or so, you want Intel, so whenever you get that choice, go for the Intel. This is going to download a DMG file – a Disk Image. Once you have it down, double click it, and it will appear in your finder window as a new hard drive. Sometimes it might automatically bring up a window with instructions. What these will usually tell you to do is to grab the program file, and drag it into your Applications folder. Now unmount the DMG file from your system by clicking the eject button next to its name in the Finder, or dragging its icon on the desktop to the trashcan, which should also change to be the eject button. Once it is ejected, you can move the DMG file to the trash since you don’t need it anymore.  Now lets say you want to set NeoOffice up so you can launch it quickly. Go to your Applications folder, find the NeoOffice icon, and drag it to your Dock. Note that it didn’t move, but that icon is now in your Dock too. Clicking it launches NeoOffice, and then using the menubar at the top of your screen you can choose to start or open a new document.

You’ve just uninstalled a program, then downloaded and installed a new program, and set it up so you can access it from the Dock. You’ve taken your first steps on the road to becoming a Mac Power-User. Next time around I’ll be covering some tips and tricks you maybe didn’t know about OS X that will make Switching just that little bit easier.

OK campers, I know that a lot of you have been desperate for the next installment, but unfortunately finals at university conspired to delay it. I’m now done with finals, so here we go. So far this series, I’ve laid out some reasons you might want to get a Mac, and I’ve talked about how you might go about getting one from Mr Jobs. Now its time to talk about your first day as a Switcher.

That moment that your delivery guy shows up with a big box for you to sign for is special. Savour it. Take photos, perhaps even take a photo of the delivery guy holding the box (provided he looks like he won’t kick your ass for even suggesting it). Its an experience you want to savour because its probably going to mark a whole new chapter in your IT life. For the uninitiated, this kind of outpouring of emotion is commonly referred to as “Unboxing”, where you celebrate the receipt of the box, and the removal of the item from the box. This is not to be confused with Amazon’s Unbox service which is totally different. My MacBook unboxing experience is documented over on my Flickr page, and was a very exciting time for me.  It was also over very quickly.

The thing about the Mac that is refreshing when you get the box is that its simple. Heres a box, open the box, there is your machine, there is a power cable, here is a neat little box with DVDs and quickstart guides in it. Contrast this with what you get when you buy say a Dell or HP machine (the two suppliers I have first had experience of – I would assume that they are all as bad). There you get 15 different pieces of paper, you get CDs for AOL, Pipex, Tiscali and anyone else you can think of. The cables are bound together with those nasty wire twisty things (the poor man’s cable tie), whereas Apple send you neat little polythene bags of cables, one per cable. Its a much neater experience, and it is kind of how it should be – I just paid a lot of money for this device, I don’t want to be bombarded with crap as a result.

Obviously the first thing you do is plug in your machine, and turn it on. I had read elsewhere that there is a widget you ought to run first from one of the DVDs that is a dead-pixel checker (for the life of me I can’t remember its name). This is probably a good thing to do – there is nothing worse than a dead or stuck pixel on your screen – I have one on one of my other TFTs, and one on my DS, and both bug me. But I’m impatient, so I dived right into getting into OS X, and a month later, I still haven’t bothered running the check – although at this point, I know there aren’t any since I’ve used it for so much fullscreen video, I would have noticed. So with that either done, or ignored, you are presented with the OS X setup screen. If you’ve installed Windows previously, this is fairly familiar – it wants to know stuff like what country you are in, what keyboard layout you want to use and it tries to auto-detect  your network settings. Its fairly standard stuff, but the interface is the thing that should capture your attention at this point. Its really really clean. Its presented as a window style form at the top of the screen, square in shape. When you move to the next screen of the form though, you realise that it isn’t a square, its a cube – it rotates the cube to show the next set of options. It seems like a minor thing, but it blew me away – this is what a user interface should be like, its not just important to show the options and then switch them for the new ones, but how you switch them. Under Windows (under 99% of applications going really) the transition between screens like this is instantaneous, giving the illusion of actual interaction, whether that be turning a cube round to show a new face, or turning a “page”, or even sliding form out of the way to reveal the form below – this is an important thing that I didn’t even realise was missing from the user experience until I sat down with OS X – that being said though, this setup process is the only place I experienced it, although I’m sure it is being used elsewhere too. One other thing to note about the setup process that is pretty important is to make sure you are looking decent, hair brushed and whatnot, since if your Mac comes with an iSight camera, it is going to want to take your picture to associate with the user account that you will be creating (I had to leave the machine at this point to make myself a little bit more presentable).

This is a pretty swift process all in and it won’t be long before you are up and running on your new shiny OS X machine. Next time around I’ll be trying to remember my first steps on OS X to share with you, and picking up some important details that maybe you don’t know about.

I’m right in the middle of my finals for uni right now, which is meaning I’m quite pressed for time right now. This week’s Mac-centric post is going to centre on the Apple online Store – not the iTunes store, but the hardware store. I’ve had a really positive experience using it in the past, and I wanted to share some thoughts about the way it is laid out, how you can work out what it is you want, and how Apple could maybe improve it. I also wanted to highlight some of the problems I noticed whilst ordering my MacBook that could save you some time waiting for your order to arrive. So without further ado, here is the second of my “Switching to Mac” articles. Enjoy.

When it comes to ordering Macs, there is a pretty limited selection at first, which is good. Its not like many other companies, running multiple product lines without much explanation. For instance, I can go to look at the Sony Vaio website, and I have to choose between the “AR series”, the “C series”, the “BX series”, the “FE series”, the “G series”, the “N series”, the “UX series”, the “SZ series” and the “TX series”. Did you get that? Me neither. The taglines don’t help either: The TX Series is “A class of its own”, the C is “Inspired by life. Designed for you”. OK, it sounds good, but it isn’t the most informative. Contrast this with the Apple approach to marketing: Laptops: “Macbook (starting from £749)” or “MacBook Pro (starting from £1349)”. Desktops: “Mac Mini (from £399)”, “iMac (from £679)” or “Mac Pro (from £1699)”. Upfront, the names give you a rough idea of what you are looking at (except perhaps iMac), and you get to see a price point, so you know what sort of cost. For the average user, this seems ideal. They don’t necessarily know what they want, or understand all the jargon, but they have a rough idea of what they want to do with it, and how much they can afford. Then for each of the product lines, you get taken to a little page talking about that product and you can then pick and customise a model. Model choices come in essentially 3 flavours, there’s a basic one that costs least but is probably lacking one important thing for a power user, or is slightly under-spec. Then there is the decent version, that has a nice middle of the road price point and is highly functional. And finally, there is the premium version, with widgets you probably don’t need but might get tempted by if you have the cash to splash. Its all very simple, very intuitive. However, and here is where I’m going to prove that I haven’t gone all fanboy on you guys, that’s about where the good news ends. If you want to customise your machine, say put a bigger hard drive on it, forget about getting it within a week – the little widget tells you up front that it will be 3 days before they even ship your machine to you. OK, fine for something requiring extensive customisation, but I wanted to add a cable to my order, because my MacBook uses non-standard connectors to the monitor, and I needed a converter. And was told, in all seriousness that that would add an additional two days to the time to ship my order, just to put a cable into the box – in fact I don’t really know how they did it, the estimated delivery date with the cable was actually a week later than without, so its more like an additional 7 days they were allowing. That to me seems ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that I didn’t see an option to change my shipping method. That to me is unforgivable. I’ve been in situations where the standard shipping isn’t good enough – I need it right now, overnight it to me I don’t care how much it costs. Equally, there is often a need to get it on a Saturday and pay a premium for that, and that’s an option that is becoming more and more prevalent. But there was none of that, and that seems stupid since Apple is such a giant corporation – if they wanted to do it, they could easily. I suspect that some of the reason they don’t is that they figure that people who need that kind of immediacy will visit one of their retail stores – that’s fine and all, but currently the nearest Apple Store to me is something like 300 miles away (until the Glasgow store opens this summer). I guess I could always go to a reseller, but that’s not an ideal solution for anyone, since I still have to travel, and I assume Apple sell to resellers at a marked down price so that resellers can actually have a viable business.

Anyhow, I’ve been drooling and plotting my Mac purchase for quite a while, so I had worked out exactly what I wanted, but the layout of the whole experience made it pretty simplistic to navigate, find what I wanted without being particularly blinded by specifications, and then tweak it (or not) as required. In total, the experience really couldn’t be made any easier, although I still haven’t gotten over the insane delivery times quoted. That said, their estimate was bang on, and the courier arrived exactly with the time frame they suggested – although they gave themselves a three day window, so it isn’t that big an accomplishment. I ordered on Friday, and received the laptop on Wednesday – they didn’t actually process my order until lunchtime on Tuesday. I can’t help but think that there isn’t much reason why I couldn’t have received it Monday or even Saturday since they apparently did ship it overnight, but it was the day after they announced the Leopard delay, so I’m willing to concede that they were probably super-busy with people like me ordering as soon as they heard about the delay.

The online Apple Store is definitely well put together, and honestly, I would suggest that anyone wanting to get a Mac use it. You are going to get as good a deal as a local reseller will give you I’d guess, and at the end of the day, there is no real benefit to dealing locally with regard building a rapport or getting deals on servicing, except perhaps in fairly specific circumstances.