News & Views

About one month after sinking my teeth into my first Apple, metaphorically speaking, I decided to write about my experiences. Why could a newbie's point of view be interesting to you? Aside from my dazzling writing (wink), this is an account from the perspective of someone with twenty years of experience as a Windows user. Does Windows beat the Mac in any way? Read on. Some of the tips that I discovered and described here could also benefit your computing experience.

I decided to switch to the Mac after viruses, adware, spyware, and other malware wrecked my computer. Mac was the obvious alternative to Windows. As easy as it was for me to buy and operate my new iBook G4, it would have been nice if the salesperson had told me that Apple will release the next version of its operating system in less than one month's time. I still might have decided to buy an iBook with Panther to use immediately instead of waiting for Tiger, but it would have been useful to have this information before I made my purchase.

To learn about my iBook and its operating system I read the manuals that came with it, but they left most of my questions unanswered. I then attended training events such as the "Switch at Six Workshop" at the Apple Store. Then I joined the North Coast Mac Users Group, which was the nearest group to me. I read its most recent newsletter and joined its mailing list. Finally, I read "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual" by David Pogue. He is the author of many books and is a technology columnist for the New York Times. His book gave me useful information that I did not have before I read it there. For example, how to place an eject button at the top of my screen. That button came in handy for me.

His book also discusses the UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X. I remember hearing about the Internet in the early 1990s but I was concerned that I would have to learn UNIX to use it. Soon after that, Netscape Navigator appeared and we were able to use a browser to surf the Internet with ease. Twelve years later we have made so much progress that I own Mac OS X and I am again faced with the prospect of learning UNIX in order to be able to make better use of my Mac. I realize that learning UNIX is not a necessity, but with Mac OS X it could turn out to be helpful.

One benefit of belonging to NCMUG is this users group's Members Helping Members Program. I was troubled by error messages in Excel for things that I did not view as errors, such as my purposely entering a date like 5/1/05 as text. In answer to my question, a member told me how to make the change that I wanted by using the Preferences portion of the drop down menu. I found that Preferences for both Excel and Word had many additional ways that I could customize each of these programs to make them easier for me to work with. I also changed my computer's System Preferences to eliminate annoyances. For example, my computer screen used to go dark after three minutes of inactivity, such as when I was reading an article online. I eliminated this problem by making an adjustment to System Preferences. In addition to recommending that new users customize their preferences, I recommend that you customize Excel toolbars, and especially customize the commands. I added a button for "clear contents" and another button for "delete rows" by customizing those commands. This allows me to do tasks with a single click that used to take several clicks, saving me a lot of time on many Excel worksheets. I found out how to do this by doing a search for "Add to toolbar" in Help for Excel.

Both Mac OS X and Microsoft Office should have informed users of how to customize their products. The first time that this software is used on a new computer, there should be a message saying: "Here are the default settings that we chose to make, and you can accept them or you can change any of these defaults to settings that would make your computing experience more enjoyable for you."

It did not take me long to find 12 ways that AOL for the Mac was worse than AOL for Windows. These problems include the increased number of clicks that it takes to reach saved messages, messages that I identify as spam require more clicks to delete on AOL for the Mac than on Windows, and Mac users are shown the weather forecast for the current day on our Welcome Screens, but Windows users are shown three day weather forecasts. I know of no good reason for not sharing with us the same three days of weather forecasts that are available for Windows users. With all of these problems, why do I stay with America Online? AOL allows seven screen names for each account, enables excellent tracking of stock portfolios, provides charts of stocks' performance over many different periods, and includes some unique content. I sent my complete list of problems to AOL so they could use it to improve AOL for the Mac in the future.

Windows users do not have to be concerned with permissions and fonts in the way that Mac users do. Permissions is a bug that Apple needs to fix. Permissions should never be an issue for an owner of a computer that no one else is ever supposed to access. It would also be nice if Apple gave its users the capability of resizing photos and documents in the way that Windows users can.

More software is available for Windows than for the Mac. Whenever I moved from one computer to another, I always lost use of some software that would no longer run on the new operating system.

And Windows allows you to delete some cookies and keep others. With a Mac, I do not know what cookies are on my computer.

The stability of the Mac is what attracted me to it in the first place, but the iLife suite of programs is what makes me happiest about owning a Mac. iPhoto makes management of photos easy. The Mac makes duplicating photos easy. iTunes increases my enjoyment of music. Apple's online music store has a tremendous variety of music available at the affordable price of 99 cents per song. I recommend that you always preview a song (by double-clicking it) before you buy it. Otherwise you could end up with a different version of a song than you wanted to buy. Always remember to sign out before leaving the online store. When you listen to iTunes, click on Visualizer and turn the Visualizer on. What you see on the screen will be as beautiful as what you hear.
Copyright (c) 2005 Ron Feiertag. This article originally appeared in the North Coast Mac Users Group newsletter, June 2005.

This article may be used by any Mac MUG provided credit is given to the North Coast Mac Users Group and to the writer.