Windows & Buttons

One of the most noticeable differences between the MS's Windows and MacOSX is the windows management. At first sight they look pretty similar: they have a title bar, they have three buttons and some resize utility: but let's find out the details:

a) CLOSE/MINIMIZE

• The red button allows to CLOSE the window (but not quit the program).
• The yellow button allows to MINIMIZE the window to the dock.
• The green button allows to OPTIMIZE the window (the exact meaning of it is still not so clear, but we can say that the window will be big enough to show its actual content)

Note: there is (still) no direct way to make the window full-screen, even if some application do that by clicking on the green button.

b) RESIZE

• The only way to resize the windows is to use the bottom-right corner where the small "dragger" is present. There is no way to resize it elsewhere (i.e. on the borders like in PCs).

c) MOVE

• You can move a window by clicking on (and holding) the window's upper and lower grey bar and drag it around the screen as you like.

d) MODE

• It is neither useful nor used, but is still present and mainly used to change the apperance of the install folders in the dmg files. By toggling it you can pass between the normal finder view (complete with the toolbar and the left-sourcelist) and the simplified one
  

Un&Zipping files

Everyone knows Winzip and it is sure that it works pretty well on a PC. The downside is that you have to buy it(even if some very competitive alternatives can be found freely on the net i.e opensource). On your new Mac you don't have to bother: some one has already done the job for you:

• You can already open & uncompress zipped files OOTB (out of the box=without installing anything else) by double clicking on them.
  

• You can create zip files by RIGHT-CLICKING on a file/folder and selecting "Create Archive"(Tiger) or "Compress item"(Leopard).

pretty cool, uh ?

Be careful ! Copying files...

Some of you have already experienced the unexpected joy of having almost-surely lost a couple of hours during some file rearrangement. I'm sure (because I have to admint that I did!) that you hated during a tiny moment the Mac OS's Finder.

Here's a tip that could have saved you some time. During file/folder rearrangement, you might see this warning window appearing: This happens when your are trying to move/copy a folder (new) to a location where another folder (old) with the same name already exist (and might also contain files).

If you clik on REPLACE: the folder "old" will be deleted (not even stored in the trash!) and completely replace with the new one. This means that the files inside the folder "old" will be lost! This is not happening on PC's where the content of the two folder is merged, and if two files have the same name a replace message will pop up to ask confirmation (in this case also the specific file is lost!).

Copying, Moving, Shortcutting files.

Some of you have maybe already experienced the differences between your PC and Mac. regarding the file management tool. It is normally embedded in your OS: you have Explorer in windows or Finder in Mac OS X. But let's go more in detail on some points, because when you manage your files you can so different things:

A) COPY your files to another location:

Explorer: by holding the CRTL key (or right clicking and selecting copy)

Finder: by holding the ALT key (or automatically copied when coping to another disk)

B) MOVE your files to another location:

This is done by default when displacing one file across one same disk and no special shortcut is used.

C) create SHORTCUTS of file somewhere:

Explorer: by holding the ALT key (or right clicking and selecting create shortcut)

Finder: by holding the ALT+COMMAND key.

Got the differences? ... so you can now enjoy to use again your good old habits without being annoyed by these smallish differences.

Quick WHAT?

Quicksilver off course! This is the must-have application: Every time I go to someone else's mac I try to start quicksilver, and if I dont see the nice grey bezel appearing on the screen I feel pretty lost.

Basically Quicksilver is a "Launcher": just hit CTRL+ SPACE (you can then change this key's combination), this small interface pops up, then start typing what you want: applications, folders, documents, bookmarks, contacts, scripts, ... select it with the arrows and hit ENTER and BUM! you have what you want. (first typing selcts the object: left pane, and if you hit TAB you can type-in the action)

And it's FREE (and even Opensource) ! There are a lot of things that you can do with that nice little piece of software, but I won't explain them all in this post, so keep posted and come back to see some new Quicksilver hints.

Screen shots !

How many times in window you had wanted to grab a picture of something that's on your screen or just small portion of it, right ? and you maybe even got to have it on your clipboard, but then ? Paste it to Winword, ... sad. Just try out these combinations of keys and you'll find how is simple with your new mac:

For example, when you hit the SHIFT+COMMAND+4 keys you'll see appear a small cross-pointer (that even tells the pixel position and sizes of the portion grabbed). Just grab the wanted portion of your screen, or else hit SPACE and you can select directly a whole window. Admire then the resulted *png file on your desktop.

If you still are not happy with the file format (even if you could open it in preview.app and resave it in an other format) you can grab a copy of OnyX and change the default format.

Shortcut's, the life is too short!

You're probably not a "keyboard geek" as MS is not exactly the best shorctutter. Now you can express youself and take advantage of the power of the keyboard's shorcuts. Here are just the most common ones

COMMAND + W = close window
COMMAND + Q = Quit application
COMMAND + S = save file
COMMAND + N = new window
COMMAND + T = new tab (in web browsers)
COMMAND + L = select address bar in browsers
COMMAND + SHIFT + N = create a new folder

Moreover, if it's still not enough, you can create combinatons of keys to create specific user-defined triggers by going into the "System preferences>Keyboard &Mouse>Keyboard shortcuts"
and then define some system-wide or application specific shortcuts (ex: COMMAND+F in quicktime to go in full screen if not already supported).

TIP: when creating shortcut just type in the exact menu item name and then the keys combination, and that's all:

int the field just type "Always on Top" and choose COMMAND+CTRL+T

Application Switcher

In order to switch between already opened application just hit Command/Apple + TAB. This is the Windows equivalent for ALT + TAB. Bu there is a couple of other tricks available:

... after having pressed COMMAND + TAB and you hold COMMAND pressed:

- Use the keyboard arrows to move to the right OR to the left.
- Directly use the mouse to select an app.
- drag&dropper a file onto the application icon to open it.

Keyboard keys on Mac

You've certainly noticed that the keyboard does not exacly look the same (except for the international differences) and you are struggling to find your old good @, €, [] amongst others. here some quick tips:

LEGEND:

This is the APPLE /COMMAND key (note: in the older keyboards this key had also an apple logo) and replaces as well the WINDOWS key as sometimes the CRTL key:

• COMMAND +X = cut
• COMMAND +C = copy
• COMMAND +V =paste
• COMMAND +Q =quit application
• COMMAND +W=close window (but not app)
• COMMAND +A =select all
• COMMAND +S =save

This is the ALT / OPTION key and has similar behaviour as the ALT(ALT-GR) key on PCs: it can be also used toghether with other keys (tipically COMMAND)

• ALT+G = @
• ALT+E= €
• ALT+5=[
• ALT+6=]
• ALT+7=|
• ALT+N=~

This is the CONTROL (CTRL) key and is not so used on the mac platform, but recently a little bit more, when using a Windows install via Bootcamp or Parallels/VMware.


Here are some interesting links:

Special characters

Shortcuts (apple.com)

UPDATE: Friend and also blogger Enrique pointed me out that your can access all those special characters maps by selecting the "Keyboard Viewer". You can either fire it up by checkboxing the corresponding item in "Input menu" from "International" in System Preferences (and then access it from the menu bar) or typing "Key" if you have Quicksilver with the correct plugin & script installed.

Ok, let's start !

This is just the first moment that you have decided to buy a mac. Finally. This happened to me not such a long time ago, on the January the 13th 2005 (only three years !!). I decided to buy a Macmini for my living room, as mediacenter. It has pretty well done its job so far (it's still an old G4 guy) and has become more the housecenter. So here you are: your are still used to the "old good" Windows machine, but you decided to get rid of this habit and want to get to know better and better your new companion. Welcome to the real world.