Learning My First Mac

This morning Firefox crashed and I couldn't get out of it - it turns out Mac does have their own version of Ctrl+Alt+Delete; you can use Command+Option+Esc to bring up the Activity Monitor and close a frozen application

From Learning My First Mac

I've been looking for a free simple image editing tool for Mac that can take the place of Windows Paint, and a friend tipped me off to Skitch. It's easy to use and beautifully designed (kind of like Tweetie). Rather than tell you more about it I've embedded their video:

I'm having some serious trouble getting used to all of the different keystroke combinations on Mac after so many years of PC use. Hand gestures, on the other hand, I'm getting pretty good at. To make using multiple tabs in Firefox easier, I just followed CrunchGear's instructions on hacking the multi-touch settings. Now a 3-finger swipe left or right moves me from tab to tab, which I find much more helpful than moving back and forth through the web history!

Right away I downloaded VLC Player as an all-in-one video player to replace Quicktime. However, this weekend I was trying to play XVID compressed files and VLC Player couldn't really get the job done. Video played, but very often it froze for a bit and even crashed a few times. Enter Perian, a codec you can install to bring a diverse set of codec support to Apple's native Quicktime player. Perian calls itself the "swiss-army knife of Quicktime components", and it worked as advertised. Now I can play XVID compressed videos right on Quicktime; its not perfect, but it's performing much better than VLC.

Back when I was using a PC I had my computer completely pimped out for Google. I was running Google Desktop for its quick-launch & gadget integration, Google Talk for it's chat & Gmail integration, and Google Chrome. So far I've been trying to find alternatives for those programs, such as Adium for chat (I'll definitely use Chrome though when it's finalized for Mac). However, I really missed seeing instant Gmail alerts. Enter Google Notifier for Mac. It puts icons in your top bar for Gmail and Google Calendar that give you alerts and quick access to functions. For now I've turned off Google Calendar alerts because I've sync'd Google Calendar with iCal, but I might swap one for the other in the future.

So this might be the most surprising find yet: Apparently there is no native "full screen window" mode in Mac OSX. Not only does this mean that you can't quickly maximize a random program window, but you also can't move into full screen browser mode in Safari or Firefox (Windows users are used to hitting F11 to make all of the window frames and toolbars disappear when you need all of your screen space for browsing, screenshots, or slideshows). Instead of having a full screen mode Mac focuses on giving you what it feels optimally need, though this seems impossible to predict on many web pages. I've embedded someone's video below that illustrates how annoying this can be.
From everything I'm reading there are two options for fixing this problem. The first is to install an app called Megazoomer, which adds a hot key to fully maximize your active window. However, it doesn't remove the toolbars etc. when you're in a browser. To solve this challenge supposedly you Opera for Mac has a full screen browser mode. Together these two apps supposedly should get me to a feature that was built in on Windows, one that I found very useful often.