The other day I posted an article that three months after switching from Windows to Mac that I had a pretty good set of applications that I was using on a daily basis. I wrapped it up with a couple of things that I was still firing up Windows for and at the top of my list was finding a Mac based replacement for Microsoft Visio.   I had so many people recommend OmniGraffle 5 from The Omni Group that it quickly became something I wanted to check out. I've been a pretty heavy user of Visio … [Read more...]

Last night I was going through my older files looking for a document from long, long ago. Back in the day when disk space was at a premium I used to ZIP up my files on a pretty regular basis. On the Windows platform I evolved through a great many different utilities, from Arc through PKZip, WinZip and finally WinRAR.   While I like that OS X allows me to open most ZIP files without any additional software, I don't like the fact that it simply expands the ZIP file. There are times I … [Read more...]

Granted, it's a beautiful little 13 year old girl of a monster but a monster none the less. It's funny how my youngest child is so into computers. She's completely confident with them, immediately jumping in when my wife has a problem on her XP based laptop and helping trouble shoot any issues. She, like my other kids, can touch type easily and blazes through tasks on the computer like it's an extension of herself.   My youngest was the one that desperately wanted an iPod Touch for … [Read more...]

One of the goals I have with this blog is to give you some perspective on how my experience with a Mac changes over time. Today it's been exactly 3 months since I bought the MacBook and over that time I've played with what seems like hundreds of applications, though only a few of them have actually stuck. I did the same thing after I had the MacBook for 3 weeks and it's changed a bit since then. So here is a list of the applications I use heavily on my Macs. Note that since I have a Mac Pro … [Read more...]

In the nearly three months I've been blogging about switching to Mac I've had countless times that readers have made comments about my posts, recommending specific techniques, tricks or applications that have helped me improve my Mac experience. Yesterday it was n45800's turn as he pointed me in the direction of a list of the default key bindings for OS X. This little gem was exactly what I needed to get past some of the keyboard issues I've been trying to adjust to.   As a touch typist … [Read more...]

In the week since I got my Mac Pro I have made a conscious effort to transfer everything that I knew I would need over from my Windows XP machine. I've even powered off the Windows XP machine - something I rarely do with a computer - because I wanted to make sure I didn't try to use it as a crutch. My goal was to see if I could really switch to Mac completely and one week in that has been the case, though there has been some compromise.   I use VMware Fusion to run Windows XP in a virtual … [Read more...]

Up to this point in time I've kind of avoided the Dashboard on my Mac. Having had bad memories of the Active Desktop in previous versions of Windows I've just avoided the genre. I played around with Mac's Dashboard a little last night and found it to be pretty cool though, making me rethink whether or not this is something I want to make part of my daily routine.   The number of widgets available from Apple for the Mac Dashboard is simply staggering. Since the widgets can be built really … [Read more...]