cool things a mac can do

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nasha

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Hey all, I am a new switcher to MAC and I absolutely love it. I have worked on PC's my whole life and I know them inside and out basically. So I was wondering if there is anything cool, or a nice little feature that the macs can do that they don't tell you about. I hope you understand what I am looking for. Does anyone have cool things on there macs? Or make itunes play as your alarm clock? I have been using my ibook and i feel like I understand the basics but that I am missing out on some sweet features.. Thanks for the help
 
There's a million things that I would consider "cool" on a Mac. Most of these have Windows equivilents, but that's not the point. What makes a Mac "cool" is that it does all these things in style.

For instance, have you tried filling your iPhoto library with every digital image you have, importing a mix of pictures and video into iMovie, creating a movie, exporting that movie with one click to iDVD, creating a three-dimensional DVD menu with your movie on a link, and playing it on a consumer DVD player for your family?

Macs are all about expression, at least to me. They allow you to create whatever you want to create with ease.
 
I think the fact that it can recognize other filesystem than those made by the company that made the OS is a cool thing. I still can't understand why Windows doesn't come with the ability to interoperate with other filesystems, especially today. Linux, Mac OS X, and other free Unix variants (although OS X isn't free :p) have this ability and have had it for some time now.

Also consider that there are now a LOT of open source developers coding for the Mac, so you'll find some really cool open source software out there that you might not find on Windows (even though there are developers working on free and open source software on Windows).

Plus, the fact that it's a Unix operating system allows you to run a ton of the already available UNIX applications provided you have the right software like X11 (which already comes with the OS X discs) if they require it.

And to be honest, it's just plain FUN using a Mac! While I do have fun on my Linux computers, I enjoy working and playing on my Mac more than anything. Sure, I use Windows, but I don't find it as fun....I get bored with it quick. I just have it for my wife and games (the latter I barely have much time for lately anyways and the former has her own laptop running Windows).

And while it might seem that the Macs are more expensive, you definitely get what you pay for which means you get a better return on investment than you would with a PC.
 
Quick Show Off stuff:Quick keys.
control.option.command.8 repeat to put the screen back to normal.

If you are typing in a cocoa app and don't know how to spell the word you've started, hit option-escape or F5 and you get a pop-up list of words. Use the fn key too on iBooks etc.

Control.Command.D = dictionary definition of word under cursor

Select pictures in finder (Column view) control click (right click) slideshow ~ try the index sheet too.

Heaps more, have fun.
 
thanks for all of your info i appretiate it wow ashka those shortcuts and cool things you said about are wicked i tried them all out today and they are the kind of things i am looking for little shortcuts and cool features that mean i can have more fun on my mac and show off to my pc friends of all the cool things that a mac can do

if from now on if you are going to post here could you please do the kind of things that ashka has done because that is the kind of thing i am looking for

thanks a lot i appretiate it
 
Well, most of the other posts pretty much incluide a lot of cool things that Windows on PCs can't do that the Mac can. There are even things that other open source operating systems can't even come close to the cool things the Mac can do. Now, if you had asked more specifically about cool shortcuts, fine, but you just asked about all the cool things a Mac can do. And thus, we have provided. :D
 
:)
Hold down the shift key when using exposé or when minimising anything to the dock.

Type, Shift.Option.K. 

Command.Tab to cycle through open apps.

Command.Shift.4 then draw around anthing on screen,
Command.Shift.3 = capture screen. Both will leave pic on desktop.
(Grab in your Utilities has more options)

The Digital Color meter (Utilities) is great to find color profiles.

You can use Preview to view several picture files at once. Select files. Command.letter O. The thumbnails are in the drawer.
(If the files have been changed in Graphic converter they will open in that app instead).

Sending a large mail attachment. Command.Zero will bring up Mail's activity viewer.

Have fun Nasha and welcome to Mac.
 
Hold down Command (the Apple key) and Option and press 8. Then try Command-Option + and Command-Option - (plus and minus) to magnify your screen.

Fun stuff!

Of course there's F9, a good one to make a Windows user's jaw drop. And F11 is very handy to get back to the desktop.

Open a Finder window with a lot of files and/or folders in it. Then type the name of the file you're looking for and Finder will select the closest match. I'm so dumb I didn't know about this. I knew that you could type the first letter. I didn't know that, as long as you type quickly, you can refine your search. Windows may do this too. I don't know. If so, I'm REALLY dumb.

Go to System Preferences (Apple Menu>System Preferences) and look at the Universal Access options. Fun. By the way, take a look at how System Preferences is organized. Once I got used to it, I realized it is organized far better than the Windows Control Panels. I even compared the XP control panels to OS X System Preferences. OS X provides similar functionality in _HALF_ the number of "pages" or "screens."

Make the machine talk in TextEdit. Type text, the click the Edit menu. Then click Speech. Then click Start Speaking.

Also look for a program called Backlight 2. I'm not sure how it runs on an Intel Mac, though. It will allow you to play screensavers on your desktop in place of the picture you usually have there. Pretty stunning effect. It does use processor time, though.

Try pressing Option-Tab. Kinda like CTRL-TAB on a PeeCee, but prettier. Option-Tab to a program you want to quit, let go of Tab while still holding down option, and press q. That program will quit. Repeat with any other programs you'd like to quit.

That's a few I can think of off the top of my head.

Doug
 
Have you checked out Quartz Composer? Its installed with the XCode developers tools (you should have got that on a CD, if not its a free download from Apple). Try it out, you can make your own 3D animated screensavers with movies, images, live-video and effects. Its very popular with VJs or just for making your own screen-savers.

And take some time to muck around with Automator. If there's any task you regularly do that requires a few steps to be carried out, Automator is the place to start. When I had to send a particular report file to the same person every day for a couple of months, Automator helped me there: I whipped up an Automator workflow to compose and send the email whenever I dropped the file onto it. That 3 minutes of fiddling saved an hour of my time over the next couple of months.

Some cool stuff is the Bluetooth connectivity in Address Book. You can read or type SMS messages, get caller ID on the mac's display, and dial numbers. While you're on that track, try out Salling Clicker or Romeo to use your Bluetooth phone as a remote control. Neat.

Another thing that I love about my Mac is that I can print from any application directly to a PDF file, or even directly to a new mail message. Check out that little button on the Print dialog in any program. Finished that spreadsheet or report and ready to send it to your boss? Just go to File -> Print and choose "Mail as PDF" and take the rest of the day off. :)

Have you also noticed that as well as the traditional copy & paste method of working with text and pictures, you can also select text and drag it around to different programs? When I am doing research on something I'm unfamiliar with, I like to grab snippets of text that helps explain things and dump them all into one document. If you're working in the Terminal you can drag in a file to get its full pathname typed-in automatically. Every day or two, I drag photos straight from iPhoto to FlickrUploadr. Drag and Drop is better on a Mac.

Theres lots more to be discovered: I couldn't get by without the unit & currency conversion widget in Dashboard. RSS feeds in Safari make it easy to navigate and browse your favourite news sites. I'm sure you'll find some cool stuff in there. :)
 
Man these are all great things, i was also wondering how you made a print screen on mac but now i know, so thanks for that one.
 
They are simple.

They just work.

You can drag and drop practically anything.

iLife - Does everything above.

iWork - Also does everything above.

They are made by Apple..

They are not made by Microsoft.

They are cool.
 
My friend was surprised over how fast it was to browse his Windows network. :D He hates Macs, but at this time he was impressed!
 
kokaiinum said:
Man these are all great things, i was also wondering how you made a print screen on mac but now i know, so thanks for that one.
Click to expand...

One thing that wasn't mentioned about screenshots, but probably should be is the camera mode.

Press Cmd+Shift+4, and then press the Space bar. The cursor will turn to a camera.

Now hover the mouse over whatever you want to take the screenshot of. An application's window. The Dock. The menubar. Your desktop. A dashboard widget. An open menu.

It's very cool :).
 
Have you tried fast user switching? You need more than one account on the machine (system preferences/accounts) and under the login options button you can 'enable fast user switching'. You'll get a name in the top tight hand corner of the screen and you can log in to the other account while still logged in yourself. It's pretty impressive when the whole screen moves as you log in to the 2nd account. You can even both be signed in to ichat and the net at same time.
 
Hi Nasha,
as a fellow Windows to Mac person, these are the things I use:
- the dashboard I use for all things non-document/email/calendar related, so I have TV programs, stock market quotes, cinama times, TV programs, weather, calculator, harry potter countdowns (no comments!), news RSS reports, basically, all the stuff I used to do that took time to get from the internet when I had Windows
- I recommend getting Parallels, MacFuse and TNEF's Enough to fill the gaps with windows programs, reading Windows portable hard drive and reading attachments to rich text emails.
- Get the Missing Sync if you have a windows PDA.
- I love the icons for the folders (alias's ) on my desktop to look really cool (and inspirational if that's what I need for the topic)

Enjoy!
 
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