Expedia Mac Getting Started


"Right, getting started.

= Settings =
Trackpad Settings: Turn on tap to click and two finger secondary tap

Keyboard Settings: under the keyboard shortcuts prefs, you need to set
'Full Keyboard Access' to 'All Controls' otherwise as Neil mentioned,
you'll get totally frustrated by being unable to tab to the OK and
Cancel buttons.

I also set 'Use F1, F2 etc as standard function keys' which means you
have to hit 'fn' to get the special functions like next track, volume
/ down, etc.  Otherwise apps like intellij that make a lot of use of
the function keys will drive you crazy.

Dock: Put your dock on the left, you have a lot more horizontal screen
space to waste than vertical, and remove all the apps from it.  With
Quicksilver there is no reason to use the dock to launch apps, so you
can just let it have the ones that are running.

= Quicksilver =
Ignore Neil, get quicksilver, use it for everything.  After you get
used to just using it to launch apps, start playing around with the
plugins.
 http://www.blacktree.com/


= Backups =
Definitely use either time machine or super duper.  I can't stand time
machine, but Rob swears by it, so it's sort of a personal choice of
the type of backup you want to do.   Time Machine has the advantage of
being built into the system so as Rob pointed out there, is literally
no setup, just plug in a drive, and remember to plug it in
occasionally. Time Machine does sort of continual snapshots of your
system so you can not just recover from a drive failure, but look back
and recover older versions of files and things.

For me, the downsides are that you need a drive that's a lot bigger
than the drive you are backing up, and you're never really sure if
that file you wanted to delete actually got deleted or not.

Super Duper is just a fancy disk cloner.  All it does is on schedule
create an exact bootable duplicate of the drive on your machine.  So,
no temporal backups, but all the things I care about the history of
are in source control anyway, and what I care about most is time to
recover.  With a super duper backup, you just put the backup drive
into your computer, buy a new backup drive and keep working.

Other useful applications:
If you like gmail's interface more than Mail.App, MailPlane is a
really nice app, it's just a wrapper for gmail that gives drag and
drop, and the ability to use the gmail web interface wherever the
system would normally pop open the mail app.

-Lkb"

"I subscribe to this feed: http://www.macosxhints.com/  It's handy to
just read all the posts every day as part of my regular RSS reading.
It has basic stuff and advanced stuff all mixed together.  I usually
scan the headlines and read maybe 10% of the posts.

Lorin runs a small mailing list called mac10.  He can probably invite
you or add you.  Everyone on it is really nice and very knowledgeable.
 I ask really dumb questions all the time.  Usually it's just Rob
responding "You're doing it wrong, do it this way..."

One of the hardest thing for most people is the modifier keys that OSX
uses (ctrl-c/ctrl-v etc).  Launch System Preferences/Keyboard/Modifier
Keys to adjust to something that works for you.  Also look at the
mouse/trackpad preferences.  The new MBPs have the best trackpad I've
ever used, but it's kind of dumbed down by default.  Find 15 mins and
figure it out.  Things like "two fingers right clicks" and
pinch-and-zoom and inertial scrolling are simply astounding.  Spend
the time to learn the input devices.  They are the best, but they take
a bit of time to get used to.

Also, for some reason, by default, tabbing to checkboxes in forms is
turned off by default.  There's a pref for that too.

Finder (explorer.exe) pretty much sucks.  Some people like
Quicksilver, which is pretty amazing.  I just live with Finder
sucking, though.  It's pretty easy to avoid using it altogether.

You can also get MS Office for $10 bucks if you have a jpm email
address, I'll forward you the thread from work.

Textmate is the best text editor for OSX.  It has many resharper-like
features, it understands many languages, and it has many "bundles"
that do handy things.

Time Machine and Spotlight are great, you should figure out how to use
them.  "command-space" launches spotlight by default, acting sort of
like the start menu in Win7.

Bash, vi, emacs, ant, javac, gcc, perl, python, ruby, apache, etc are
all installed by default.  You need to download XCode on your own.
(Don't use whatever's on the dvd, get the latest.)

Lorin uses Chrome, Rob uses Safari, and I use Firefox.  We each think
we are using the fastest browser available.  And we are each probably
correct.

Some people love iLife, and some people despise iLife.  Don't feel bad
if you disagree with anyone over this, it's normal.

Hm, I think that all off the top of my head.  Once you're on mac10,
you should ask "I am a computer expert, but a mac retard.  How can I
fix that?"  I'm sure you'll get interesting responses.

-n"