Windows to Mac Migration Guide/Advice?

Harpa wonders: "Having spent more years than I care to count living and working with various Windows machines, I'm about to get my first Apple (an iBook). While eagerly waiting for the machine to be shipped, I'm starting to realize that changes I'm going to have to deal with may involve more than getting used to one less mouse button!I'm wondering if any Slashdot folk can help. What does an old-time Windows user have to learn/unlearn? To what extent can my Apple live happily with my existing PC's, my printer, my network? Everything I've found so far seems to be either geared for people who've never used a computer before or for existing Mac users. Is there any info available that supports us 'converts'?"

Comments

Try Apple's Switch Page

[finnatic]

http://www.apple.com/switch/ talks about switching from Mac to PC, and includes answers to FAQ's on pages like: http://www.apple.com/switch/questions/ and http://www.apple.com/switch/questions/index2.shtml

Just about any USB mouse will work on a Mac, so if you have an existing USB multi button mouse on a PC, try it and you may find it works fine (and the Mac will allow to set the right button to do contextual menus etc).

Re:Try Apple's Switch Page

[hype7]

The web is definitely your friend when it comes to switching. The parent links will help.

MacNN Forums
xlr8yourmac.com's forums
MacFixIt Forums
MacWorld Forums

That should be a good start. You'll find that the Mac community is more than willing to go out of its way to help you, especially if you're a new convert. Just tell people you've switched from Windows, you'll get all the help you'll ever need.

Apple have support forums too, they're worth a look, especially to track bugs - people normally go whinge over there.

Finally, as someone mentioned, VersionTracker and MacUpdate are the places to search for software. Even if you don't know the name of the software, type in what kind of thing you're looking for (eg MP3) and you're bound to find something of use.

Good luck, and most of all, have fun :)

-- james

Missing Manual...

[coldwd]

I'd say pick up a copy of David Pogue's excellent Missing Manual: Panther Edition. Amazon has it for about $20, and I'm sure you could find it cheaper. Pogue has special sections in just about every chapter for people like yourself who are coming over from the windows world. Even after you've gotten used to OS X, the book is a very handy reference.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy and intuitive everything is on the Mac Platform. When I switched (about a year ago now). I'd say within a week I'd totally forgotten all of my windows ways and was happily hitting up the Apple key to get at the context menus.

Congratulations on your iBook purchase, you'll be one of us "holier than thou" Mac snobs that you've always hated in no time!

Re:Google

[Anonymous Coward]

it's easy enough to get used too. i took the plunge and bought an iBook about two months ago, and it's been smooth sailing so far.
dragging and dropping on the mac is cool - unlike windows, where for most everything but icons you have to copy paste, on the mac, you can actualy click and drag - and it works! the applications are mostly all integrated, and i've found myself doing things that would never work on windows.
another thing - the command key (the curly button with an apple on it) does most of the same functions as the ctrl butten on a pc keyboard - the ctrl button on the mac keyboard is what you use for right clicking. i'm sure it has some other purpose too, but oh well.

good luck!

It is a fairly easy transition.

[drdink]

Your network should just work. OS X out of the box is set to use DHCP. It is easy to configure the networking parameters if necessary, and it supports network profiles so you can have different settings for home, work, and at the lanparty or whatever. Through Samba, it supports Windows file sharing. There is a "Network" pane in Finder that lets you browse your network similar to Network Neighborhood. You can also mount NFS, SMB, FTP, and other wacky filesystems. It is as easy as going to Go->Connect to Server... in Finder (or Cmd-K).
Is your printer USB? Does it work with CUPS? If OS X doesn't directly support your printer, slam it into one of your Windows machines and use networked printing. OS X can do it via CUPS' IPP, LPD, etc.
I would suggest grabbing a Microsoft Intellmouse Optical with scroll wheel, though. I can't stand the Apple mouse.
You might want to throw iTunes on all your Windows machines and take advantage of Rendezvous, so you can play all your music on all your machines.
I would also suggest getting Microsoft Office 2004 for OS X if you do any work that involves word processing, slideshows, spreadsheeting and charting, etc. It is a very slick package and I like it much better than Office for Windows. Oddly enough, the features in the OS X version are slightly different.
Some third-party software you might consider getting (check for it on VersionTracker.com):
* OSXvnc - So you can connect to your Mac remotely. Might not be as important on a laptop.
* Quicksilver: A really nice application launcher that lets you just hit Cmd-Space and start typing the name of any app, contact, photo, etc on your system to open it.
* SSHKeychain: Never enter a SSH passphrase again
* Remote Desktop Connection (http://www.microsoft.com/mac): Good for connecting to your XP machines from your Mac.
* Roxio Toast Titanium: Decent CD/DVD burning software
* If you like multiple desktops, get Desktop Manager
* Chicken of the VNC: A VNC client
* Camino: If you don't like Safari for some reason, this is Mozilla with a pretty Aqua UI

I went from being an Apple hater from the pre-OS X days to now loving my Apple PowerMac G5. Recently, I even got sucked in enough to buy an iPod, Apple Cinema Display, etc. I hope you enjoy your purchase.

Re:It is a fairly easy transition.

[raga]

Drdink's list of apps is a good start. I have a list of OS X software I made for two of my "switcher" friends, and now that you are in the same boat, here it is.

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

Re:Learning/Unlearning goes both ways!

[mh101]

Found one! :) It's at http://www.oxygen-inc.com/premium/InsaniSoft/iEx.h tm. Not quite as cool as Expose, since it only shows thumbnails and not resized windows that are still being updated, only smaller... but it's a start, and it's free!

Not a significant task

[grolaw]

The other replies refer you to the Apple Switch site and it is valuable. The Versiontracker site and the versiontracker suite are well worth the annual fee. You will have Apple's automatic software update for OS and Apple Apps and then you have the versiontracker product that supports BOTH Apple and third-party apps. It's invaluable.

I really find the OSXlist a great resource.

If you have Micro$oft data, bite the bullet and buy their office suite (if you can claim student or educator status, the price for three installs is below $200.00) and you have transparent exchange between platforms.

As for the problems that will crop up, the best utilities are Techtool Pro 4, xupport and Diskwarrior.

Networking, printing and email are a snap. If your printer isn't supported in native OSX 10.3.5 then look into the free CUPS and GIMP print apps. I can print to anything but a daisywheel....

I like Logitech trackballs over 3 button / scroll-wheel rodents - but I own and use all. A Right-Click is CTRL-Click on the single button rodent.

Finally, get a copy of the keyboard shortcuts (Xupport has a list) and learn them. The productivity increase is at least 10:1 when you learn the shortcuts.

Enjoy!

Biggest thing that threw me for a loop.

[Alcimedes]

How to uninstall a program.

I looked everywhere. No friggin uninstallers for practically anything. There was the occasional one from the odd app., but most programs had nothing.

Then I asked someone. You throw the Application icon away. That's it. The vast majority of the apps. files are stored within a package which appears as the app. icon. aside from a few preference files, there's nothing else left.

No hidden DLL's, no registry to clean. It was freaky.

Re:Biggest thing that threw me for a loop.

[womby]

DLLs on the Mac live inside the Application, the application icon on a mac is in fact a folder that when double clicked launches the real application contained within.

This .app folder is called a bundle dir and should contain everything the app needs to run, the system handles shared DLLs in an interesting way, every app includes the DLLs inside its bundle but if multiple apps use the same DLLs the OS will use the one already resident in memory. Early on this caused a significant performance hit when launching apps and now the system will run a Pre-Binding process that will search all bundles for there DLLs and keep them in a central lookup cache.

There are also frameworks, which are essentially collections of DLLs in there own bundle dir, these are like the DLLs in the windows system dir and can be used by any app, it is quite rare for 3rd parties to install frameworks as the standard DLL handling covers most of the benefits that a 3rd part would gain.

Probably more information than you required to answer your question.

Some tips

[UnknowingFool]

1. Menu Bar presence. It almost never goes away. Unlike Windows minimizing a window does not minimize the application. The application's menu bar almost always stays up at the top.

2. You will learn keystrokes. The GUI is clean and simple but to do things really quick you learn keystrokes.

3. Less icons. I think is due to the nature of executables but there are fewer icons. In Windows almost every file is an icon (unless hidden). In Mac, the only icons that you see with applications are the ones you need to click on to execute.

4. Adopt Unix user conventions. OS X is based on Unix. You need to have a root (admin) account and an everyday use account. If you need to do anything that requires admin privileges (installing software), OS X will ask you for your admin password seamlessly.

5. Be hands off when installing hardware. The operating system will recognize and install without much intervention. Although Windows has gotten better about this, I feel it asks me too many questions about what it needs to do. If it doesn't recognize it, check on whether it is properly installed.

6. If you really want to tinker, learn Unix and open a terminal window.

Make a "Start" menu

[PygmySurfer]

One of the things I haven't seen here that I like to do is drag the Applications folder to the right-hand side of the Dock (Between the Trash and the bar that separates open apps from the other dock items). Once you've done that, Ctrl-Click (or Right-click) on the Applications icon in the dock, and you'll get a nice pop-up menu of all the Applications available on your system. You can repeat this with any folder, so you can easily get to the contents, without having to drill-down through Finder windows.

Mouse Expose'

[Blankzoid]

One tip I have not seen here is this: Assuming that you go with an aftermarket mouse. And assuming that this mouse has the clickable wheel. I suggest you configure said clickable wheel to execute the F9 function of expose' (all windows). This has resulted in a HUGE increase in productivity for me. It makes the already wonderful Expose' twice as natural and speedy. I can find any of a dozens windows in less than a second. If you go with a mouse with even more buttons, the F11 feature is nice to have at your fingertips also.

Re:simple

[Hes Nikke]

quobobo said To be fair, he's getting an iBook, not a Mac desktop. I use a Logitech 6-button mouse with my Powerbook whenever it's at a desk, but it's simply not an option on the road.

but what *is* an option is SideTrack.

i have that 6 button mouse built into my iBook thankyouverrymuch! (click, tap, +4 corner taps)

the only time i use the external mouse is when i'm using the 'book in bed, and using the track pad means contorting my arm (which hearts just thinking about it!)

To quobobo: what up? i haven't seen you around the 'net lately... shoot me an email!

Re:simple

[nine-times]

I agree getting a multi-button mouse is a good idea. However, if you don't, or if you're using a laptop and don't want to carry a mouse around with you, get used to keyboard shortcuts.

On windows, I've been more of a "right-click, copy, right-click, paste" sort of guy, whereas, on the mac, with no right click, I go for the command-c, command-v stuff.

I know, it sounds trivial, but there are a lot of useful key-combos on a mac. For all the complaints of a one-button mouse, I find with the key-combos, the lack of extra buttons doesn't slow me down. In fact, one benefit is that the key-combos are much more consistant in OS X than windows. Command-Q always quits. Always. Every program. Command-S always saves. Windows has this sort of thing, but there are quite a bit of programs that don't cohere to the convention in Windows.

Otherwise, this is the advice I can think to muster (yes, I'm thread-hijacking):

• OS X and Windows have a lot of the same applications. MS Office, Macromedia/Adobe suites, stuff like that. So, if you used these apps, get the OSX version of the same apps, and you'll feel at home. In many cases, there's little difference.
• Watch out for resource forks. If you aren't familiar with resource forks, it's some extra metadata that tells the OS what kind of file it is and how to deal with it. If you want to use unix commands, be careful when moving, copying, or compressing files, because you can lose the resource fork, which makes the file useless unless you can repair the resource fork. It's a pain. There are ways around this, but you may have to do some research and experiment (Helios Xtar comes to mind for tar).
• Some good sites for technical info: Mike's Mac OS X...Tips (home of Carbon Copy Cloner) and mac OS X hints (really helpful)
• A lot of things are similar. When you'd normally go looking for Winzip, use Stuffit. When looking for Firefox, adjust, and realize you want Camino. Explorer and Finder work similarly. If you're looking for Outlook, the Mail, Addressbook, iCal combo will probably meet your needs. The Control Panel in Windows is "System Preferences". It's not going to be hard to figure out, and the Mac alternatives are usually going to be at least as good as Windows.
• The dock may take some getting used to. Closing a window does not mean you've exited the application. If you want to know if an application is running, look at the dock. If the icon for the application has a little black triangle underneath it, it's running. To quit an application, make sure you have it running as the top-most application (it's name will be on the top bar, right next to the Apple icon) and press command-Q. (there are a couple of other ways to do this, but like I said, get used to keyboard shortcuts)
• Don't spend very long trying to quit out of that little blue smiley face at the end of your dock. That's the finder. It's always running.
• The "command" key is the one that has an apple on it (next to "alt" and the spacebar).
• When you look in menus for keyboard shortcuts, you'll see funny symbols. What I mean is, if you click on "File", one of the options will be "Save" and next to "Save" will be a funny clover-leaf symbol, and then an "S". This means "command S"The little clover-leaf is the command key. (usually, the command key has both a clover-leaf-looking symbol and the Apple logo on the keyboard, so this one shouldn't be too hard). An up arrow isn't up, it's shift. The third symbol, which I can't even figure out how to explain what it looks like, that means "alt".
• All data goes in your home folder. Your program preferences are in the Library folder, which goes in your home folder. It's kinda unix-like, easy to deal with, a lot better than Windows.
• In fact, as a user, you can pretty much ignore the Library and System Fold

Re:Unlearning

[i wanted another nam]

You know those times in XP when your computer just spontaneously restarts out of nowhere right in the middle of that lovely document you were composing?

You can disable that. Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced > "Settings" under "Startup and Recovery"; Uncheck "Automatically Restart"

Of course, nobody knows about it because it takes a fuckin' 400-page novel to describe how to do it.