Saturday, July 25, 2009

Sliding Home

All my stuff is ensconced in the Mac – nothing lost. The Mac is talking nicely to the printer and poorly to the scanner (Paperport, the software for the Xerox 510 scanner, doesn’t work with Macs, for now I’m using a cheap and clunky program for scanning). All of the data is backed up on the computer, an external drive and the server. Startup and shutdown are much faster.

I’m slowly learning how Mac does Windows things. I’m a mouse kind of guy; I think I need to become more of a key command kind of guy on the Mac. I’m not yet friends with Finder and Spotlight.

Since I’m now bi-OS with the Windows laptop at home, my learning curve is slowed – when I get to work I look for the time in the lower right hand corner of the screen, when I get home I look for it in the upper right hand corner. Looking at a new Email at the office, there’s no paperclip to indicate an attachment – that difference I really don’t like; though, I do like the quick look feature.

Back to making a living and pontificating on matters I’m not qualified to pont upon.

3 comments:

Hedy said...

Hi Dave - I was crabby for about two weeks when I switched from a PC to a Mac. That was four years ago. You'll find, as time goes by, the Mac is a much smarter system to use. Once you're past the learning curve, if you find something that's difficult to use it's more likely because you're doing it wrong than anything else. There's a smart/efficient way to do practically everything on a Mac. Which mail program are you using? Mail? Or Entourage (MSFT version of Outlook for Mac). Not a huge fan of Entourage but I need it for work. If you're using Mail, right-click on the banner above your messages - From, Subject, etc. It should give you the option to show attachments. BTW, Right Click on a Mac = 'Control' + click. This is probably the only clunky thing about using a Mac without a right-click-ready mouse. Good luck.

Dave said...

Hedy,

Thanks for the tip on attachments. I'm not mad at the Mac, how could I be after what MS has done to me.

I do have a double click mouse. After I published I went to the office this morning and played for a while.

I found some stuff on the Mail program that I want and put it at the top (sorry, I don't know what the top is called). I'll try whatever the banner is to show the attachments.

fermicat said...

PDM would want me to point out that it was Apple that invented the "windows" type of operating system, not Microsoft. Anything you were doing with the PC, you can do on the Mac (and they did it first, most likely). I don't always know the best way to do things on a Mac, but I agree with Hedy -- there is usually an efficient way to do it and I am just ignorant about the particulars, or am trying to do it the way I would on a PC.