Mac Tricks and Tips and Apps that are Real Good and Stuff

Dru recently won a shiny new Mac. Now he's wondering about tips and tricks and what he should do with it. I was going to add my advice as a comment to his LJ, but then I realized, hey -- this comment is getting so long, it's totally turning into a free blog post! Ahem.

Dru complains about the menu at the top. I hear you man, it took me about two weeks to train myself to look there, and not at the window itself. Also, closing windows (often) does not close the app. Strange but true.

Tip #1: Yes, you can use a two-button mouse with a Mac. This very minute I am using the Microsoft Wireless Lasermouse 6000, with two buttons, two side buttons, and a clickable scroll wheel. Say what you will about Microsoft, they make some fine peripherals. And no, I haven't been struck by lightning.

Tip #2: You can convert every file you open in a mac to PDF for free, via the Print menu.

Good mac resources: a bit hard to find, as most mac forums out there are too fanboyish. (Something's wrong with your Mac? No, something's wrong with you!) The only forum I know of with any sense of perspective is Ars Technica's Mac forum. There are a number of big-name Mac blogs out there but most of the ones I've tried subscribing to are vastly overrated. The only other Mac web resource I like is the Macrumors Buyers Guide, which gives you some idea of when the next hardware update is coming, based on historical data.

Software apps. For geeks, the three big ones would be MacPorts (UNIX package manager), XCode (Mac dev environment), and Quicksilver (app launcher plus so much more). Dru is already aware of these, so I'll move on to my favorite software, almost all of which is Mac-only.

Angband: free rogue-like game, incredibly addictive. Not Mac-only, though.
Connoisseur: holds your recipes! How awesome is that! Isn't that why every household was going to rush out and get a personal computer, back in 1980?
Delicious Library: holds your book collection. An attractive app, but not terribly useful. It is good if you loan out a lot of books, otherwise it has no real function other than to reduce your OCD.
Keychain: comes with the OS, holds your keys and passwords. Most people don't even know it exists -- I didn't figure it out until a couple years into owning a Mac. I like it just fine, but since Dru is a security professional, there are a number of powerful third party apps.
Mail: The default Apple Mail has some drawbacks, but one big bonus is that it works with Spotlight, Apple's search framework. ~~DANGER WILL ROBINSON: Mail uses a proprietary format for email, so you might be locked in (compared to say Thunderbird which uses mbox).~~ Actually, it's a sort of bastardized Maildir, so it's pretty straightforward to convert. Thanks, Sam Kingston!
NetNewsWire: excellent free RSS reader.
OmniFocus: a very powerful GTD app.
OmniGraffle Pro: for diagrams. Like Visio but in my opinion much nicer to use.
OmniOutliner Pro: an outlining program. There are a lot of good outliners available for the Mac, but this one is my personal favorite. Though I use it less now, because of OmniFocus.
Plaxo: Plaxo is not Mac-only. And a lot of people hate Plaxo because way back in the day they were pretty spammy. However, Plaxo syncs my address book and calendar between my work and home machine, which is just too danged useful to give up. I should note that, Plaxo has borked my calendar and addressbook twice in the past, but it's been good for the last few months. To be perfectly honest, it's a love/hate relationship.
SuperDuper: Great app for cloning and backups. Leopard now has Time Machine, which obviates some of the need for SuperDuper. But Time Machine can't do everything SuperDuper can, like making a bootable clone.
Spaceward Ho!: excellent old-school space conquest game, with hilarious cowboy sound effects.
TextMate: a GUI text editor that happens to be elegant and yet highly customizable and UNIX friendly at the same time.
Transmit: a very good GUI FTP client.
TurboTax: well, this is available for Windows too, but in any case, it's indispensable. See, for nearly a decade, I did my taxes all by hand, just like my father before me. But every year they got more complicated. I'm actually pretty good at elementary school math, but checking and double-checking all my tax forms was just getting tedious. Finally, I said to myself, "Man! It would really be great if someone would invent some kind of machine that was, like, really, really good at doing arithmetic and looking things up in tables. That would be just swell!" So. TurboTax. A good idea. And works great on the Mac.

Comments

Great! Things to digest and ruminate over… or is that ruminate and digest over?

I’ll have to weigh the pro/cons for Keychain, since I use Keepass in much the same way… maybe there are mac things Keychain does better.

TextMate over emacs or vim?

I really need to delve through the list of ports in MacPorts. I was expecting… something different.

Super Duper sounds useful, especially as protection from norking my install the first time through.

The magic tax accountant does my taxes… something to do with the byzantine code for farmland.

I’m due for a new mouse, but one of the issues I always run into is I have shortish fingers, and mice these days are designed for the same guys as the original xbox controllers.

Thanks for the tips, Evan! I’m sure I’ll be pestering you :)

Posted by Dru on Apr. 17, 2008 at 9:17 PM [#]
Yeah — vi if I’m at the command line and making quick changes, TextMate otherwise.

I wish I could give you more advice on Keychain — it seems “good enough” to me, but I haven’t even tried a 3rd party version. I’m just glad to have something, because now I can have as many passwords as I need, instead of two or three. :)

MacPorts — is it just the lack of sheer # of ports, or something else?

The other thing I like about the Lasermouse is that it’s comfortable, definitely better than the kinda cheap mouse I have at work. I don’t know that I have shortish fingers, but at the very least, rest assured I don’t exactly have “Shaq” hands.

Posted by Evan on Apr. 17, 2008 at 11:31 PM [#]
Apple Mail does some strange things with IMAP accounts, but POP accounts and local folders use maildir format (albeit with some XML tacked on to the end of the message, which is fairly easily stripped).

Posted by Sam Kington on Apr. 18, 2008 at 8:12 AM [#]
Sam — Ah, that’s interesting. So Apple’s “.emlx” format is maildir, with some XML cruft tacked on.

Just for fun I took a look at the osxmail2maildir conversion script. I don’t read Ruby very well, but as far as I can tell you are quite right. :) It also looks like there is some munging of filenames and directory structure? Anyway, thanks for the info, and I’ll correct the note above.

Posted by Evan on Apr. 18, 2008 at 8:31 AM [#]
I’m leaving the mail.app alone and will keep with Tbird for now.

It’s the data exchange and conversion that has be milling around. Do I get an external Fat32 respository, or just push/pull things off the PC via ssh/scp?

All in all, I’m trying to leave things standard as much as possible, eschewing my younger self’s instinct to club the OS into my expectations. though the home and end key thing may get a tweak.

Posted by Dru on Apr. 18, 2008 at 8:57 AM [#]
That’s probably a good way to go — if you have a tool already available on your old system, stick with it for now.

What kinds of data do you have on your PC, what do you want to pull over? I use ssh/scp, but really only to go between my Mac and FreeBSD & RHEL boxes.

Posted by Evan on Apr. 18, 2008 at 9:14 AM [#]
12 years of emails, images, general docs, writing, settings and other transition worth cruft. of course I can probably phase out the settings for the 1st gen Palms, and DOS era programs.

Posted by Dru on Apr. 18, 2008 at 9:54 AM [#]
I think you’d be okay with scp just to get everything over. Emails — easy if you’re sticking with Thunderbird. Images and documents — easy too, unless you have some very weird file formats. This is a good opportunity to do some file reorganization too.

It’s the app settings that are a pain in the butt. Don’t know what you want to do about those. Some things like shell preferences, Firefox, and Thunderbird you can port right over — but for most other things you will have to start from scratch.

Posted by Evan on Apr. 19, 2008 at 3:56 PM [#]
I think I’ll try the “dual life” of the data for a little while. Move it, use it in both, and then destroy the original or clone after a specific timeframe.

Settings these days I view as 90-10 rule items. If I can’t get 90% of my work done without mangling the app into shape, something is wrong with the app. For the remaining 10% I don’t mind beating down new path.

PJ has offered to walk me through more of the why/hows face to face as well, so that will be cool. So far so, good, but I need to bump into more corners.

Posted by Dru on Apr. 22, 2008 at 10:23 AM [#]
Cool. Let me know if you need anything else!

Posted by Evan on Apr. 22, 2008 at 9:48 PM [#]
I love it when you two geek out.

Posted by Lucy on Apr. 22, 2008 at 10:08 PM [#]
/bows

It’s What We Do.

Posted by Evan on Apr. 22, 2008 at 10:16 PM [#]

Mac Tricks and Tips and Apps that are Real Good and Stuff

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