Leaving the Collective

Carol Cooke at Technogeekery for librarian has where she asks for advice about making the switch. As a recent convert myself, I will start by saying HURRAY! In the month since I have switched from PC to Mac I’ve never been happier. All my original fears turned out to be unfounded. I was afraid I couldn’t get into the file servers at work and get my documents (no problem). I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to administer my work machine from home. Downloaded the Mac version of Remote Desktop and I was in business. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to share files and printer with my PC using husband. No issues there. I was afraid my digital camera and other USB devices might not work the way I wanted them to. I plugged in the camera and it worked instantly.

Having had my fears alleviated, I started to discover some very cool things about Macs. One is they come with a screen capture tool better than print screen built in. Two, iPhoto is just the best thing since sliced bread. I’m working on a photo album of my trip to California for Internet Librarian as well as a cool slideshow of the same trip. Three, the built-in Apache web server rocks and getting PHP installed was easy. Four, I can SSH into any Linux/Unix server I want easily. Five, there is lots of helpful freeware out there (Fugu for STFP, TextWangler to edit text files in all formats, XSLtest to test XSL stylesheets).

Have I convinced you to switch yet?
If you are looking for Mac resources I have a bunch of things that I found helpful FURLed.

• Mac Software
• Mac Unix Stuff
• Mac Stuff

Carol also asks about keyboard shortcuts and right mouse button. There are comparable keyboard shortcuts to the PC on the Mac. For example, Ctrl X for cutting is Apple X on the Mac. In terms of right clicking, just buy yourself a two button mouse it work exactly as you would expect it to.