Your New Mac
I am writing this so I can attempt to explain some of the differences between OS X and Windows, and to offer a guide on how to complete certain tasks on your Mac.
First Arrival
So it just came in the mail, boy aren't we excited! Since Apple takes a little more care beyond simply putting all the stuff into cardboard boxes and then placing those cardboard boxes into a larger cardboard box. I would recommend saving all the packaging that comes with your new Mac, since that can add value when reselling the machine if you decide to do that down the road.
First Boot
Upon first boot, the machine will ask for your user information, as well as some rudimentary contact and location information. This is then later used for darn near everything on your system. Auto-complete forms, iTunes purchases and I believe .Mac all use this information so you don't have to keep filling it out. If I am not mistaken, there is a check box that tells it not to send this information to Apple, so those of you that are more privacy interested can rest easy.
In OS X for the first time
So now you are in OS X. The first thing that I recommend you do is start looking around the machine, see how things are set up, and decide if you want to change anything. From any Finder window (the equivalent to Windows' Explorer) hit Command (Cloverleaf)+J to bring up the View Options for that window. From here you can also make those the system defaults for all Finder windows, so make sure that if you do that, you really want those settings for all windows. I personally use the largest icon size possible in the Pictures folder so I can preview the images in there easier.
In addition to doing things like changing the Finder window background color, you can also make it an image. You can change the font size, how much information is given to you, icon size, etc.
Next, move your mouse up to "The Mighty Blue Apple" (hereafter referred to as TMBA) in the upper left corner of your screen. Clicking this is analogous to the Start Button in XP, which Microsoft replaced with the Windows button in Vista, in that it brings up our recent documents, allows you to shut down the system, and gives you access to the control panel. However, except for your most recently used applications, you cannot launch apps from TMBA.
After you have clicked on TMBA, navigate to System Preferences and start taking a look in there. You may want to change things involving the network settings, Dock, Dashboard (more on those two later), set up Security on the machine, fiddle with the user accounts, or alter the mouse speed. *See Note
Note
If your new Mac happens to be one of the glorious new MacBooks or MacBook Pros, then I would highly recommend that you go to the Keyboard & Mouse settings and do the following things:
1) Go to the 'Trackpad' tab and select the 'Clicking' checkbox.
2) Also make sure that that "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click" is checked.
3) Adjust your tracking speed, scrolling speed, and Double-Clicking Speed while you are in there. Please bear in mind that OS X handles mouse tracking significantly differently from how Windows does. OS X seems to track the acceleration from the mouse movement more directly. So if you are moving your finger at a constant rate, then the cursor will move across the screen at a constant rate, but if you were to move your finger very quickly across the trackpad, then the cursor will fly across the screen.
Now that you have acquainted yourself with the preferences of the OS, it is time to start fiddling with programs.
The Desktop
You will notice almost immediately that the OS X desktop is arranged differently from the Windows desktop in that in Windows, the icons are arranged on the left side of the screen, however on OS X they are arranged on the right side of the screen. Also, remember how earlier I told you that you could hit Command+J to change your view options? Well you can do it for the desktop as well, these being specifically applied to the desktop, so you can do things like have your desktop icons be much larger than the rest, have their font size smaller, or perhaps give you more information about the icons there.
Furthermore, you hit Command+, (the default keystroke to access Preferences in all OS X programs) to bring up the preferences for the Finder. Among those preferences are options specifically for the desktop as well, such as what things to show on there.
Please try not to let your desktop become the dumping ground for applications. Things that are on the desktop are loaded into memory upon boot, so any large files that you may have on there will cause the rest of your machine to slow down. Apple does this because they figure that the desktop is where you will want to store your most commonly used files, things that you will want to get to and open quickly.
Finder
The Finder is analogous to Explorer on Windows, with some differences. The first thing that you might notice from the Finder window, is the sidebar on the left of the window. This is locked in place, you cannot move it to any other location, however you can minimize the sidebar if you are not fond of it. The sidebar, much like the Dock, and well, pretty much everything else in OS X can be dragged and dropped to, so if you create (using my machine as an example) a separate Downloads folder, you can then place this on the sidebar so it is accessible from every Finder Window.
The Sidebar also contains your network, physical hard drives, network hard drives, external storage devices (be they firewire, or USB) and your mounted images, pretty much in that order.
You can consider the Finder window a combination of the Explorer window and the My Computer window in that it can give you immediate access to all of the storage devices on your machine, and to the files on your machine.
Installing Apps
First thing, they are called Apps on OS X since they are .app files, so no more programs for you, applications only! There are 2 main ways for apps to get installed onto your system, the incredibly easy, foreign way and the still easy, more familiar way. Bear in mind that it is the developer's choice as to what method is chosen, so you don't get to choose.
Let's start by downloading an application, so go ahead and download Firefox. I personally prefer Safari 3 (the beta is available from Apple) but a lot of people like firefox. So, you downloaded Firefox, using Safari and now you have a .DMG (Disk iMaGe) that you mount to the OS, much like an ISO, just double click on the file that was downloaded. This will cause a new Finder window to open, and inside of it will be the firefox icon, along with a little graphic of what to do with it. What it is telling you is, drag the firefox icon contained in the .DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive. The problem is that Firefox, like a lot of other apps don't have the Sidebar available. To reveal it, click on the little oval in the upper right corner of the Finder window (hereafter referred to as the Lozenge). Now, drag the firefox icon to the Applications icon on the Sidebar. It will copy the files, and you will be done. And that is the super easy, foreign option. So few programs on Windows allow themselves to be run solely from the .exe that this is probably a little strange.
The other way to install apps is what you are more used to from Windows. An installation Wizard, that walks you through all the steps, verifies what options you want to install and where, and finally asks your permission 2-3 times before it installs.
The Dock
The Dock appears at the bottom of the screen and is akin to the Windows Taskbar, with the properties of the Windows Quick Launch Bar. You can launch applications directly from the Dock, jump between open applications by clicking the associated icon, even control some programs from it, such as iTunes.
Adding and removing items from the Dock is incredibly straightforward, all you do is either drag an item to the dock that you want to add *See Note, or drag an item off the Dock that you want to remove. Bear in mind that much like the QuickLaunch in Windows, the Dock is merely a holding place for shortcuts, so anything that you remove from it just deletes that shortcut, the file or application is still there.
Note
Applications have to be placed on the left side of the Dock divider along with all the other applications, but documents, files, and folders have to be placed on the right side of the Dock divider, next to the Trash Can.
Expose
Expose is Apple's answer to Alt-Tab, and in my opinion, is a little bit faster, and definitely more useful, especially as compared to XP. Vista's Flip 3D is close in terms of useful-ness since it will let you see the actual program window, but still limited in that you have to scroll through to get to the program you want.
There are 3 aspects of Expose
F9 This will tile all of the application windows that are currently open. If you have any video files playing, they will continue to play, and any thing else that is running will continue to run. Here is a preview
F10 Similar to F9, this only tiles the windows from the currently active application. So, for Photoshop if you have quite a few pictures open, you can tile all of them on the screen so you don't get distracted by other open applications. Here is a preview
F11 Show Desktop, 'nuff said.
Dashboard
If you haven't removed anything from your Dock just yet, then you probably noticed the one application down there, Dashboard. Go ahead and click that now if you like, and you will see the Dashboard come into place. Here are located what are known as Widgets (similar to Gadgets in Vista, but out of the way, and there are more of them, and well, they are widgets, not gadgets). Widgets are little applications that you can install on your system that tell you things like the weather, the time, how many inches are in a meter, that sort of thing. Press the big (+) in the bottom left corner to bring up all the widgets currently on the system. I like having the converter widget because it also includes a currency converter, so that is handy. So, grab a widget you like, and drag it onto the screen. Once you have it where you want it, let go of it, and watch the cool ripple effect... nifty huh?
If you want more widgets, you can get them here
Included Programs
Every new Mac includes the following major applications
iTunes Media Player used primarily for music playback, but can do some video playing. Is also used to connect to the ITMS (iTunes Music Store) so you can purchase songs, audiobooks, movies, music videos, TV Shows, and other things.
iPhoto Basic photo organization software. Nowhere near as powerful as the Adobe Lightroom+Photoshop combination, but hey it is free. You can do rudimentary photo editing with it, things like cropping, minor color correction, red-eye reduction, re-sizing, etc. From iPhoto you can do a great deal such as setting up a slideshow, order a picture book, put together a calendar or greeting card, upload your images to via iWeb, or email, and more.
iWeb Pretty good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creator. Anyone that has ever used PowerPoint can figure out iWeb, since it is all drag and drop, no coding required. However the files can be saved in .html format so you can go in and edit the code to your hearts content.
Mail My personal favorite desktop email client. Feels lightweight (hands off calendar work to iCal and its Address Book is handled by... Address Book) but still full featured, and is dirt simple to set up. In fact Mail in Leopard is, I think, even easier to set up than Mail in Tiger, if that is possible. Mail is fully capable of handling multiple email accounts, each with their own rules, signatures, outgoing and incoming address... the works. I used it for a long time to grab my gmail and school email accounts, and it worked flawlessly. It is clever enough to realize that if you receive an email via gmail, it replies via gmail. However, should gmail's server be unreachable, it will kick it to any other outgoing server that it knows.
iDVD Easy to use DVD Authoring app. You can drop in videos, music, images, and text to make the DVD how you want it. Has quite a few pre-loaded themes which are pretty nifty, and they generally include the themes from older versions as well. So in the iLife 08 version that I have, I have 7.0, 6.0, 5.0 and older themes. For iLife 06 users, it is pretty much the exact same thing, only no version 7.0 themes.
iMovie TO BE COMPLETED (I have iLife 08 now, and iMovie is not only significantly different, it plain doesn't work on Leopard. If someone else could please write this section up, I would appreciate it)
DVD Player Simple, easy to use DVD playback software. It will remember where you last left off a particular DVD, even if you haven't watched it in years (so long as you haven't reformatted of course). Not much more to say about DVD Player in Tiger.
Front Row Front Row on Tiger is basically a front end for the 4 main AV apps on OS X. iTunes, DVD Player, iPhoto, and Quicktime. When you press the Menu button on your remote (anyone with a new iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Mac Mini has it) it will bring up Front Row. Then simply navigate using the remote and you can show off your stuff. You can also access Front Row by pressing Command+Escape, and then you can use the arrow keys to navigate, and Space in place of Play/Pause.
Programs that should have been included
Ever Mac owner should get at least these, and check out the stickied app thread on this Forum
VLC You probably already know about VLC, but let me just say that the OS X version absolutely puts the Windows version to shame. Pretty much a silver bullet when it comes to video playback, the only complaint that I have about the latest beta is that it doesn't work with Front Row, for that you need Perian (see below).
AppZapper Great Great Great app. "Making Uninstalls as easy as Installs" is their tagline and they mean it. By now you probably have found that installing things on your Mac is so easy as pie. Well, sometimes the programs don't keep all their information inside their package (it's a technical term) and let it spread to the Library. AppZapper eliminates everything associated with a program; its preferences, the application, the settings... everything. Shoot, it will even delete the installer if you want it to. I highly recommend it, and feel that it is worth the $13 price tag.
XSlimmer What would my life be without XSlimmer? Well certainly more cluttered, slower, and larger. XSlimmer is a wonderful little app that eliminates un-needed source code from applications to make them smaller, and load faster. If you bought your Mac within the last year+ then you got a shiny IntelMac, and with it a whole slew of UB (Universal Binary) applications. The catch is that you only really need Intel apps, you have no use for the PPC code. So XSlimmer deletes that, as well as any extraneous languages that may be there. I for one, have no need for Swahili language translations, so they get deleted. Hand to god, most Apple made apps get reduced by 50% or more. Definitely worth the $12 fee.
Perian Although not technically an application, Perian is as they like to say, "the Swiss Army knife of Quicktime Components". This will allow Quicktime to play almost everything that VLC can, and that means that Front Row can now display almost everything. Once you install Perian, you can playback AVI, MKV, MP4, WMV, etc... it is great, and I cannot live without it on my system.
Other Things
Some things to keep in mind when it comes to OS X are:
The minimize, zoom, and close buttons are located in the upper left corner of each window, not the upper right like you are used to from Windows. Also, the X button in OS X does not usually close the program, it instead just closes that window. The advantage to this is for a program such as Mail, where you don't actually have to have the window visible at all times in order for messages to be downloaded, so you can close the window, but leave the application open, and so when you do want to send an email, or receive one, you launch it from the dock and it appears much quicker than if you had to cold start it. Also, the close button switches from this (X) to this (O) if you are in a situation where you can/should save before closing the window. Try it now with Textedit. Open up a new Textedit window, and type something. Now, look at the upper left corner of the window, it looks like (O) doesn't it?
The Zoom button (+)does not have the same function as it does in Windows. There, if you press the Square button, the windows expands to fill the screen, in OS X however, the window will resize between 2 sizes. The User defined size and what that program defines as the 'Smart' resize. For Word documents, that resizes the window so the document fills it width-wise.
The Minimize button (-) does exactly what you think it does, it minimizes the window to the dock (if you are watching a movie in Quicktime, the movie will continue to play in a thumbnail in the Dock). I personally prefer to Hide open windows (Command+H usually) rather than minimize them. Since the Dock is where you keep apps that you want to get at quickly, why clutter it with minimized windows?
You can only resize windows from the bottom right corner, no idea why.
Quick access to the Applications Folder
This is something that I do pretty much religiously and it is o so handy. Move the mouse down to the dock, and Command+Click on an application that you have there. This will cause Finder to open up to the folder that contains that application. A quick and easy way to get to your Applications folder directly. *See Note
Note
Since this takes you to the Parent folder, Command+clicking on something like Word or Pages will take you to its parent folder, not the Applications folder directly
Keyboard Shortcuts
Apple likes keyboard shortcuts, and they want you to like them too. So much so that you can define your own under System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts.
Want a shortcut for finding Album Artwork in iTunes? For saving a selection of text as a new document? For doing anything, in any menu, in any application? You can do that. Plus, here you can also see most of the other shortcuts for the system as a whole, such as Command+Alt+Ctrl+8, which will invert all the colors. Or Command+Shift+3 which takes a full screen screen shot.
For a full list of keyboard shortcuts look here
Ejecting
On the new Apple Slim keyboards and the MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the Eject button is located above the delete key directly to the right of F12. This is (to the best of my experience) solely used for ejecting a disc from the optical drive, however, this button is generally useless if the disc is currently in use (obviously)
If you are in the Finder, and have mounted a DMG so you can install something, or have a USB/Firewire drive connected to the system, or a network share, you can eject that from the system either by pressing the eject symbol next to its name, dragging the item to the trash (anachronistic, but i guess should be noted), or by clicking on the item in the sidebar, and then pressing Command+E.
This is what I have so far, so please feel free to correct where I may be mistaken, critique where it is needed, and offer suggestions.
I am writing this so I can attempt to explain some of the differences between OS X and Windows, and to offer a guide on how to complete certain tasks on your Mac.
First Arrival
So it just came in the mail, boy aren't we excited! Since Apple takes a little more care beyond simply putting all the stuff into cardboard boxes and then placing those cardboard boxes into a larger cardboard box. I would recommend saving all the packaging that comes with your new Mac, since that can add value when reselling the machine if you decide to do that down the road.
First Boot
Upon first boot, the machine will ask for your user information, as well as some rudimentary contact and location information. This is then later used for darn near everything on your system. Auto-complete forms, iTunes purchases and I believe .Mac all use this information so you don't have to keep filling it out. If I am not mistaken, there is a check box that tells it not to send this information to Apple, so those of you that are more privacy interested can rest easy.
In OS X for the first time
So now you are in OS X. The first thing that I recommend you do is start looking around the machine, see how things are set up, and decide if you want to change anything. From any Finder window (the equivalent to Windows' Explorer) hit Command (Cloverleaf)+J to bring up the View Options for that window. From here you can also make those the system defaults for all Finder windows, so make sure that if you do that, you really want those settings for all windows. I personally use the largest icon size possible in the Pictures folder so I can preview the images in there easier.
In addition to doing things like changing the Finder window background color, you can also make it an image. You can change the font size, how much information is given to you, icon size, etc.
Next, move your mouse up to "The Mighty Blue Apple" (hereafter referred to as TMBA) in the upper left corner of your screen. Clicking this is analogous to the Start Button in XP, which Microsoft replaced with the Windows button in Vista, in that it brings up our recent documents, allows you to shut down the system, and gives you access to the control panel. However, except for your most recently used applications, you cannot launch apps from TMBA.
After you have clicked on TMBA, navigate to System Preferences and start taking a look in there. You may want to change things involving the network settings, Dock, Dashboard (more on those two later), set up Security on the machine, fiddle with the user accounts, or alter the mouse speed. *See Note
Note
If your new Mac happens to be one of the glorious new MacBooks or MacBook Pros, then I would highly recommend that you go to the Keyboard & Mouse settings and do the following things:
1) Go to the 'Trackpad' tab and select the 'Clicking' checkbox.
2) Also make sure that that "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click" is checked.
3) Adjust your tracking speed, scrolling speed, and Double-Clicking Speed while you are in there. Please bear in mind that OS X handles mouse tracking significantly differently from how Windows does. OS X seems to track the acceleration from the mouse movement more directly. So if you are moving your finger at a constant rate, then the cursor will move across the screen at a constant rate, but if you were to move your finger very quickly across the trackpad, then the cursor will fly across the screen.
Now that you have acquainted yourself with the preferences of the OS, it is time to start fiddling with programs.
The Desktop
You will notice almost immediately that the OS X desktop is arranged differently from the Windows desktop in that in Windows, the icons are arranged on the left side of the screen, however on OS X they are arranged on the right side of the screen. Also, remember how earlier I told you that you could hit Command+J to change your view options? Well you can do it for the desktop as well, these being specifically applied to the desktop, so you can do things like have your desktop icons be much larger than the rest, have their font size smaller, or perhaps give you more information about the icons there.
Furthermore, you hit Command+, (the default keystroke to access Preferences in all OS X programs) to bring up the preferences for the Finder. Among those preferences are options specifically for the desktop as well, such as what things to show on there.
Please try not to let your desktop become the dumping ground for applications. Things that are on the desktop are loaded into memory upon boot, so any large files that you may have on there will cause the rest of your machine to slow down. Apple does this because they figure that the desktop is where you will want to store your most commonly used files, things that you will want to get to and open quickly.
Finder
The Finder is analogous to Explorer on Windows, with some differences. The first thing that you might notice from the Finder window, is the sidebar on the left of the window. This is locked in place, you cannot move it to any other location, however you can minimize the sidebar if you are not fond of it. The sidebar, much like the Dock, and well, pretty much everything else in OS X can be dragged and dropped to, so if you create (using my machine as an example) a separate Downloads folder, you can then place this on the sidebar so it is accessible from every Finder Window.
The Sidebar also contains your network, physical hard drives, network hard drives, external storage devices (be they firewire, or USB) and your mounted images, pretty much in that order.
You can consider the Finder window a combination of the Explorer window and the My Computer window in that it can give you immediate access to all of the storage devices on your machine, and to the files on your machine.
Installing Apps
First thing, they are called Apps on OS X since they are .app files, so no more programs for you, applications only! There are 2 main ways for apps to get installed onto your system, the incredibly easy, foreign way and the still easy, more familiar way. Bear in mind that it is the developer's choice as to what method is chosen, so you don't get to choose.
Let's start by downloading an application, so go ahead and download Firefox. I personally prefer Safari 3 (the beta is available from Apple) but a lot of people like firefox. So, you downloaded Firefox, using Safari and now you have a .DMG (Disk iMaGe) that you mount to the OS, much like an ISO, just double click on the file that was downloaded. This will cause a new Finder window to open, and inside of it will be the firefox icon, along with a little graphic of what to do with it. What it is telling you is, drag the firefox icon contained in the .DMG to the Applications folder on your hard drive. The problem is that Firefox, like a lot of other apps don't have the Sidebar available. To reveal it, click on the little oval in the upper right corner of the Finder window (hereafter referred to as the Lozenge). Now, drag the firefox icon to the Applications icon on the Sidebar. It will copy the files, and you will be done. And that is the super easy, foreign option. So few programs on Windows allow themselves to be run solely from the .exe that this is probably a little strange.
The other way to install apps is what you are more used to from Windows. An installation Wizard, that walks you through all the steps, verifies what options you want to install and where, and finally asks your permission 2-3 times before it installs.
The Dock
The Dock appears at the bottom of the screen and is akin to the Windows Taskbar, with the properties of the Windows Quick Launch Bar. You can launch applications directly from the Dock, jump between open applications by clicking the associated icon, even control some programs from it, such as iTunes.
Adding and removing items from the Dock is incredibly straightforward, all you do is either drag an item to the dock that you want to add *See Note, or drag an item off the Dock that you want to remove. Bear in mind that much like the QuickLaunch in Windows, the Dock is merely a holding place for shortcuts, so anything that you remove from it just deletes that shortcut, the file or application is still there.
Note
Applications have to be placed on the left side of the Dock divider along with all the other applications, but documents, files, and folders have to be placed on the right side of the Dock divider, next to the Trash Can.
Expose
Expose is Apple's answer to Alt-Tab, and in my opinion, is a little bit faster, and definitely more useful, especially as compared to XP. Vista's Flip 3D is close in terms of useful-ness since it will let you see the actual program window, but still limited in that you have to scroll through to get to the program you want.
There are 3 aspects of Expose
F9 This will tile all of the application windows that are currently open. If you have any video files playing, they will continue to play, and any thing else that is running will continue to run. Here is a preview
F10 Similar to F9, this only tiles the windows from the currently active application. So, for Photoshop if you have quite a few pictures open, you can tile all of them on the screen so you don't get distracted by other open applications. Here is a preview
F11 Show Desktop, 'nuff said.
Dashboard
If you haven't removed anything from your Dock just yet, then you probably noticed the one application down there, Dashboard. Go ahead and click that now if you like, and you will see the Dashboard come into place. Here are located what are known as Widgets (similar to Gadgets in Vista, but out of the way, and there are more of them, and well, they are widgets, not gadgets). Widgets are little applications that you can install on your system that tell you things like the weather, the time, how many inches are in a meter, that sort of thing. Press the big (+) in the bottom left corner to bring up all the widgets currently on the system. I like having the converter widget because it also includes a currency converter, so that is handy. So, grab a widget you like, and drag it onto the screen. Once you have it where you want it, let go of it, and watch the cool ripple effect... nifty huh?
If you want more widgets, you can get them here
Included Programs
Every new Mac includes the following major applications
iTunes Media Player used primarily for music playback, but can do some video playing. Is also used to connect to the ITMS (iTunes Music Store) so you can purchase songs, audiobooks, movies, music videos, TV Shows, and other things.
iPhoto Basic photo organization software. Nowhere near as powerful as the Adobe Lightroom+Photoshop combination, but hey it is free. You can do rudimentary photo editing with it, things like cropping, minor color correction, red-eye reduction, re-sizing, etc. From iPhoto you can do a great deal such as setting up a slideshow, order a picture book, put together a calendar or greeting card, upload your images to via iWeb, or email, and more.
iWeb Pretty good WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creator. Anyone that has ever used PowerPoint can figure out iWeb, since it is all drag and drop, no coding required. However the files can be saved in .html format so you can go in and edit the code to your hearts content.
Mail My personal favorite desktop email client. Feels lightweight (hands off calendar work to iCal and its Address Book is handled by... Address Book) but still full featured, and is dirt simple to set up. In fact Mail in Leopard is, I think, even easier to set up than Mail in Tiger, if that is possible. Mail is fully capable of handling multiple email accounts, each with their own rules, signatures, outgoing and incoming address... the works. I used it for a long time to grab my gmail and school email accounts, and it worked flawlessly. It is clever enough to realize that if you receive an email via gmail, it replies via gmail. However, should gmail's server be unreachable, it will kick it to any other outgoing server that it knows.
iDVD Easy to use DVD Authoring app. You can drop in videos, music, images, and text to make the DVD how you want it. Has quite a few pre-loaded themes which are pretty nifty, and they generally include the themes from older versions as well. So in the iLife 08 version that I have, I have 7.0, 6.0, 5.0 and older themes. For iLife 06 users, it is pretty much the exact same thing, only no version 7.0 themes.
iMovie TO BE COMPLETED (I have iLife 08 now, and iMovie is not only significantly different, it plain doesn't work on Leopard. If someone else could please write this section up, I would appreciate it)
DVD Player Simple, easy to use DVD playback software. It will remember where you last left off a particular DVD, even if you haven't watched it in years (so long as you haven't reformatted of course). Not much more to say about DVD Player in Tiger.
Front Row Front Row on Tiger is basically a front end for the 4 main AV apps on OS X. iTunes, DVD Player, iPhoto, and Quicktime. When you press the Menu button on your remote (anyone with a new iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, or Mac Mini has it) it will bring up Front Row. Then simply navigate using the remote and you can show off your stuff. You can also access Front Row by pressing Command+Escape, and then you can use the arrow keys to navigate, and Space in place of Play/Pause.
Programs that should have been included
Ever Mac owner should get at least these, and check out the stickied app thread on this Forum
VLC You probably already know about VLC, but let me just say that the OS X version absolutely puts the Windows version to shame. Pretty much a silver bullet when it comes to video playback, the only complaint that I have about the latest beta is that it doesn't work with Front Row, for that you need Perian (see below).
AppZapper Great Great Great app. "Making Uninstalls as easy as Installs" is their tagline and they mean it. By now you probably have found that installing things on your Mac is so easy as pie. Well, sometimes the programs don't keep all their information inside their package (it's a technical term) and let it spread to the Library. AppZapper eliminates everything associated with a program; its preferences, the application, the settings... everything. Shoot, it will even delete the installer if you want it to. I highly recommend it, and feel that it is worth the $13 price tag.
XSlimmer What would my life be without XSlimmer? Well certainly more cluttered, slower, and larger. XSlimmer is a wonderful little app that eliminates un-needed source code from applications to make them smaller, and load faster. If you bought your Mac within the last year+ then you got a shiny IntelMac, and with it a whole slew of UB (Universal Binary) applications. The catch is that you only really need Intel apps, you have no use for the PPC code. So XSlimmer deletes that, as well as any extraneous languages that may be there. I for one, have no need for Swahili language translations, so they get deleted. Hand to god, most Apple made apps get reduced by 50% or more. Definitely worth the $12 fee.
Perian Although not technically an application, Perian is as they like to say, "the Swiss Army knife of Quicktime Components". This will allow Quicktime to play almost everything that VLC can, and that means that Front Row can now display almost everything. Once you install Perian, you can playback AVI, MKV, MP4, WMV, etc... it is great, and I cannot live without it on my system.
Other Things
Some things to keep in mind when it comes to OS X are:
The minimize, zoom, and close buttons are located in the upper left corner of each window, not the upper right like you are used to from Windows. Also, the X button in OS X does not usually close the program, it instead just closes that window. The advantage to this is for a program such as Mail, where you don't actually have to have the window visible at all times in order for messages to be downloaded, so you can close the window, but leave the application open, and so when you do want to send an email, or receive one, you launch it from the dock and it appears much quicker than if you had to cold start it. Also, the close button switches from this (X) to this (O) if you are in a situation where you can/should save before closing the window. Try it now with Textedit. Open up a new Textedit window, and type something. Now, look at the upper left corner of the window, it looks like (O) doesn't it?
The Zoom button (+)does not have the same function as it does in Windows. There, if you press the Square button, the windows expands to fill the screen, in OS X however, the window will resize between 2 sizes. The User defined size and what that program defines as the 'Smart' resize. For Word documents, that resizes the window so the document fills it width-wise.
The Minimize button (-) does exactly what you think it does, it minimizes the window to the dock (if you are watching a movie in Quicktime, the movie will continue to play in a thumbnail in the Dock). I personally prefer to Hide open windows (Command+H usually) rather than minimize them. Since the Dock is where you keep apps that you want to get at quickly, why clutter it with minimized windows?
You can only resize windows from the bottom right corner, no idea why.
Quick access to the Applications Folder
This is something that I do pretty much religiously and it is o so handy. Move the mouse down to the dock, and Command+Click on an application that you have there. This will cause Finder to open up to the folder that contains that application. A quick and easy way to get to your Applications folder directly. *See Note
Note
Since this takes you to the Parent folder, Command+clicking on something like Word or Pages will take you to its parent folder, not the Applications folder directly
Keyboard Shortcuts
Apple likes keyboard shortcuts, and they want you to like them too. So much so that you can define your own under System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts.
Want a shortcut for finding Album Artwork in iTunes? For saving a selection of text as a new document? For doing anything, in any menu, in any application? You can do that. Plus, here you can also see most of the other shortcuts for the system as a whole, such as Command+Alt+Ctrl+8, which will invert all the colors. Or Command+Shift+3 which takes a full screen screen shot.
For a full list of keyboard shortcuts look here
Ejecting
On the new Apple Slim keyboards and the MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the Eject button is located above the delete key directly to the right of F12. This is (to the best of my experience) solely used for ejecting a disc from the optical drive, however, this button is generally useless if the disc is currently in use (obviously)
If you are in the Finder, and have mounted a DMG so you can install something, or have a USB/Firewire drive connected to the system, or a network share, you can eject that from the system either by pressing the eject symbol next to its name, dragging the item to the trash (anachronistic, but i guess should be noted), or by clicking on the item in the sidebar, and then pressing Command+E.
This is what I have so far, so please feel free to correct where I may be mistaken, critique where it is needed, and offer suggestions.