(Well, what better episode to run a brief tutorial for first-time Mac users?)You just opened your box and set up your Mac and now you wonder "Now what?" You need help. First thing you should do is join your local Mac Users Group, where for a small yearly membership you have access to free and low-priced classes to get you going, a community of other Mac users who can answer your questions and show you tricks. In Portland, that's PMUG, it costs $42 per year, and you can find out more just by calling (503) 228-1779 or visiting their web site. We just finished another successful MacCamp getaway weekend, and I got much-needed kickoff instruction in InDesign, being a longtime PageMaker holdout. There are 11 user groups scattered throughout Oregon.Need a book? Look for Robin Williams. She has written Mac how-to books for years now, and they are consistently the best for new users to find useful hints and tips. See previous Macking columns for other recommendations.See that thing at the bottom of your screen? It's the Dock, which Apple has created to be a launcher and switcher utility that you can use to open programs and temporarily store open windows. Put any window temporarily in the Dock by clicking on the amber button in the upper left corner of the window. Click on the icon in the Dock to zoom it back out. Want to remove any icon in the dock? Just grab it and immediately drag upward and release; it will vanish with a Poof. Want it back? Open your Applications folder and find the item you just removed and drag it back to the dock. Change the order of items in the dock by grabbing one and dragging sideways.To get it out of the way so you can use the bottom inch of your screen, go to the Apple menu, drop down to the Dock item and across to "Turn Hiding On." That moves the dock below the bottom of the screen. To bring it back, move the mouse to the bottom. When you touch that last pixel, the Dock pops back up.The Apple menu has changed. Now you consistently find the most important items there: Restart, Shut Down, System Preferences, Force Quit and Recent Items. You can also Log Out here, which is as effective as a restart when you want to reload your programs or make adjustments to some of your settings, but saves time. For security purposes, you can set your Mac to require a login with password every time you restart.Preferences? Most of the time they used to live in the Edit menu, but now each program has an option for setting them in the application's own menu, to the immediate right of the Apple menu. You will also find this is the place to Quit, Hide Application (make it invisible while keeping it open) and Show All invisible applications. You can make a single invisible application reappear by simply clicking on its icon in the Dock. But those of you getting the new operating system Panther will have an even more elegant solution for dealing with programs and their windows.Panther (OSX 10.3)
I showed up Friday the 23rd for the rollout and got my copy. Since I had read many nightmare stories from the earliest adopters on Macintouch and MacFixIt, I obeyed the instructions and did a full backup of my drive (using Carbon Copy Cloner, free, and Retrospect Desktop, $89, on a different drive.) The backup of my 26 gigs of stuff took a couple of hours.Then I disabled ALL of my Login Items so nothing would start automatically after the reboot into 10.3. The warning to do this came from an eBook I bought for $5 from TidBITS called "Take Control of Upgrading to Panther.pdf" and it was money well spent. I recommend you get this yourself. It helped me, and I'm supposed to be the expert!Well, most everything works. I hit Version Tracker to see if any of my little 3rd-party apps had to be upgraded, and disabled those that I didn't have. The only problem I am having is that my Extend-it VGA to ADC converter somehow offsets the image on my 17" Studio Display by an inch to the right. Apple has no clue, and Gefen, who makes the converter, is researching it. If they can't fix, this will be a serious nuisance and may motivate me to upgrade to the 15" PowerBook, which has a proper DVI output and should not have this problem. (The new 12" PowerBook also has the DVI port.)Gefen finally got ahold of Panther and discovered that the problem is repeatable, but only on the 17" display. Attempts to fix are now percolating through the system, between Apple and Gefen. Jobs Knows when it will be fixed. Ah, the joys of being an early adopter.Panther also made my Bluetooth disappear; the system thinks I have no Bluetooth hardware in the computer. While on the phone with Apple trying to figure out what caused it, another reboot spontaneously brought it back.The biggest worry, however, is its relationship to external FireWire drives, some of which can be corrupted if plugged in during a reboot or the original installation of Panther. Macintouch has been tracking this problem, with fixes and solutions coming from all the drive makers. Those fixes started coming out within days of the problem's discovery, and Apple issued a 10.3.1 update shortly afterwards. But get to the Macintouch site and read up before YOU do the Panther upgrade.The one feature that is worth the price of upgrade, the deal-maker for me, is called Exposé. This new feature takes all my open windows and reduces them to small ones laid out on my desktop so I can easily pick a different one and zoom back in to it. It only works on the primary display, the one with the menubar, but it is sure useful. It works even better if you have a small display and lots of windows. Extra cool is the way it works with Codetek Virtual Desktop: It leaves blank spaces on the desktop representing where windows are placed on other desktops. Hover over a blank area and it shows the name of the missing window; click on it and it switches desktops and brings the window to the front.Another nice feature of Panther is the local iDisk image on my desktop. For those who have a dot-mac account, the iDisk is an external storage space of 100 megs where I can back up files on Apple's servers. Simply putting a file into this disk image immediately copies it to my iDisk. Of course you need a broadband account to take full advantage of this, but for those with dialup there is still limited functionality - it works the same but just takes longer.Overall, Panther just feels faster. It will take me a while to get used to the differences.PocketMacking the PocketPC
Most Mackers prefer the Mac-friendly Palm line of PDAs to the Microsoft-OS versions of PocketPC. But there are many features in PocketPCs that are not available in Palm or are better than their Palm equivalents. Until now you could not really use them with Macs.A company called Information Appliance Associates has just released version 3.0 of a program called PocketMac. If you can believe the press release (sometimes a dangerous assumption), this release now lets you sync over Bluetooth, USB and AirPort, install PocketPC software directly from your Mac, support contact, calendar and tasks by syncing with Entourage, iCal, Now Contact or OSX Address Book, and AppleMail.You can install a theme that transforms the PocketPC from a Wince PDA to a Mac PDA. It changes the look and feel of the PocketPC software to use Mac buttons and desktops. No more emulation of that ugly Windows interface.It can piggyback on your Mac's Internet connection and browse web pages directly while connected to your Mac. It syncs automatically on plugin without having to tell it to. Finally, it supports iTunes and the PocketPC MP3 player.More information about PocketMac 3.0 can be found here.More Spammer Trouble
Randy Cassingham writes in his newsletter "This Is True":I can remember when I first wrote my "Spam Primer" in 1996. When it was originally published in TRUE (it's now on its own site), a lot of people argued with me, saying spam wasn't a bad thing at all and I was overreacting. I'm a long-term thinker, and I knew the implications were absolutely terrible, and that I wasn't overreacting one bit: it would affect us all in very negative ways. I was wrong -- I *way* UNDERestimated spam's negative impact: it's destroying the Net's very usefulness for a lot of us. A lot of what spammers do should be considered a felony. They should be in prison, serving VERY long terms. This weekend's spammer, for instance, was not only STEALING the server resources *I* pay for, but was using one of MY addresses to send his garbage. Identity theft, fraud, theft of services. Spam's not bad? It's a CRIME. Well, it's hardly one really, but it should be. Anyone want to argue with that?Any of you with a web site, heads up: one of the programs used to mail the results of a web form, which many sites use to keep their e-mail address off the site to keep the address away from spammers, has been compromised ...by spammers. The program, "cgiemail", is used on a LOT of sites, and it's completely vulnerable. If you're using it, you need to get rid of it ASAP! We spent the weekend blocking out a spamming slimeball who was using my server to send out his fraudulent pitches. Grr! So if you tried to update your Premium address and got a weird error, or tried to send in an errata report, or ask for info on putting ads in TRUE, etc., and got an unexpected result, that's why. My friend (and Premium subscriber) Leo of AskLeo spent HIS weekend writing me a program to replace cgiemail, and making sure it worked on all my site's forms.___end quote___ I have been facetiously calling in this column for someone to start murdering spammers as the only way to really put a dent into the problem (and I say facetiously because it's illegal for anyone who doesn't work for the government's spook agencies to actually request a hit on someone) but this makes the point better: where are our nationally elected hacks when we need them? Where are the powerful CEOs who make large contributions to both political parties, who are aware of the appalling cost of spam to their companies? This cannot be fought on a state-by-state level; it needs to become high priority in the FBI, with sanctions on any company that uses spammers to promote their products, web sites, etc., and extra penalties to those who steal the identities of domain holders to send out their garbage. Example: Many spammers are selling Norton SystemWorks but it isn't Symantec's fault; they are all pirated copies. Gotta be some way to trace the money.Shrub should be commenting on this in a photo-op somewhere, as should Daschle, Dean and other out-of-power leaders. The UN needs to get involved. You think Iraq's expensive? The world economy is losing more money to these twits than to most of the world's dictators and kleptocracies combined.I get upwards of 300 spams a day, which is over 80% of my email. If it weren't for Spamfire AND Eudora 6's own filters, I would have had to give up my domain by now.Again, not to advocate or anything, but I will pay $100 of my own money for an original photograph of the body of a spammer, along with the accompanying newspaper report, which I will put up on my web site and ship off to anyone who will mirror it.