And if you find it interesting and helpful, I’d highly recommend you look into becoming a full fledged member of Don’s community. Lots of great tutorials and information to help you on your way to becoming a Mac genius!

The site was dormant for awhile, but recently woke up and has resumed posting.

Interesting side note, it’s run by Tim Gaden who is Dean of the Theological School , College Chaplain and Stewart Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College within the University of Melbourne. He also teaches Greek.

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most innovative learning tool ever created for “switchers.” It’s all about teaching you the Mac by connecting the dots to Windows equivalents. When the instructor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the virtual Mac that’s built into the learning tool–an interactive experience unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s compatible with Mac and Windows so you can check it out even if you’re just thinking about switching to a Mac.

I have a iBook G4 — 1.33 GHz — 512 MB RAM. It’s running really slow. Do you have any “quick fixes”? I was looking on the internet and saw that “anacron” was suggested. Do you guys have any suggestions. I don’t really want to buy a new mac (yet) so any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks.

There’s two areas you can look at when trying to speed up a computer: hardware or software. If your Mac is running Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) or earlier, then something like Anacron or Onyx (my personal favorite) work really well for cleaning up your machine. If your computer is running Mac OS 10.5 or later, then you don’t really need these programs (at least for the reasons that they’re usually recommended).

As noted on the current version of Anacron:

Note: This version of Anacron will run on MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) but it is not needed, as the Leopard launchd will run skipped jobs when the machine is next awake.

On older (pre 10.5 / Leopard) Macs there was a set of utilities designed to keep your Mac running smoothly that would only run at a certain time of day and if your Mac wasn’t awake/turned on at that time, then the utility wouldn’t run until the next time. For some folks, this might never happen if there Mac wasn’t turned on/awake at the right time — which is where Anacron/Onx came in. They would allow you to automatically run the utilities or schedule them for a different time so that your Mac would get, for lack of a better term, cleaned up.

Aside: How to tell what version of Mac OS you have — click the Apple icon in the top left corner of your screen, choose About This Mac (that sounds familiar?). You’ll see a little screen pop up that looks something like this:

That tells me I’m running Mac OS 10.5.6, currently the latest version.

Let’s assume you have Mac OS 10.5.x Leopard on your Mac. Your next step would be to make sure it’s not just one or two programs that seem to run slow, but rather, that everything seems slow. If you can narrow it down to just one program, for example Microsoft Word, then you might want to check for updates to that program that may fix your problem. If that doesn’t seem to be the issue, then you can look at hardware.

Upgrading the memory (or RAM) on your computer is probably the simplest, and in the case of a notebook, almost your only option. The 512MB your iBook has currently is the minimum required amount of memory for Leopard as detailed by Apple. (Tiger, Mac OS 10.4, minimum required RAM was 256MB). Depending on the exact iBook G4 model, you can most likely upgrade your iBook to 1.5GB of RAM by adding a 1GB stick of RAM to your iBook. Prices will vary, but should be around $60-$80 depending on your location. Install prices will vary as well, but should be in the $30-$50 range. More RAM will help a lot with the “smoothness” of your Mac while having multiple programs running and also helps with more system intensive applications (i.e. iMovie, etc).

Any other tips from the AboutThisMac community?

This is what you will see before you do any customizing.

What we intend to do is customize the image that you see in this screen. To start goto Finder and locate /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app

If you have trouble finding this folder you might be looking in your current users home folder and not the root folder of your computer. From here you will then need to right click and click Show Package Contents, and find /Contents/Resources/MacOSX.tif

Make a backup copy of this file to somewhere you can find it, so you can change it back if you want. Then find any new image you’d like, making sure that the new image is the same size image as the current one. When you have your image ready, just rename is to MacOSX.tif and place it in the location above.

To make sure it all works, just Logout and Login again to see changes. Here what I got when I was done. If you get a chance to customize your About This Mac Screen, we’d love to see it. Just post a link to the image so we can all check it out.

Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Publisher version for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newsletter that’s done in publisher, for now anyway, but I have my mac)

Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to convert a Microsoft Publisher file to something that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fingers at Microsoft for releasing a program that is so proprietary that nothing else supports it (our vote!), or you can blame Apple for not trying to support a somewhat popular program on their platform. Either way, you’ve got a file you can’t open now that you’ve switched to your Mac. Here’s a few options:

• If you still have access to the Windows computer with Publisher on it, you export/save as from Publisher as a Word document which will then be able to be opened by various programs on your Mac (i.e. Microsoft Word for Mac, Apple’s Pages, OpenOffice, etc). You’ll most likely lose some formatting but at least the contents of your document are there to be edited.
• Again, assuming you still have access to the Windows computer with Publisher on it — You could take a screenshot on your Windows computer of the various graphic elements (i.e. logos, graphs, funky text) and then copy and paste the text into one of the programs mentioned above and rebuild your document.
• Apparently, though we’ll have to say we haven’t tried this ourselves, using an old version of Adobe’s Pagemaker for Windows you can open the Publisher file, save it as an Adobe InDesign file which will then be useable by Adobe InDesign for Mac. We don’t recommend this route unless you already have the programs as they are quite expensive and unless the document is going to generate or save you a bunch of money (or if your time is worth a lot of money?), it’s not worth pursuing this route.

Unfortunately that’s the best we could come up with. Anyone else have any good suggestions or things that have worked for you?

Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been running really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not running anything. Also, the battery has been lasting for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?

One thing you can check is the activity monitor (if you use spotlight and search for Activity Monitor). Change the little box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are something like Safari or Firefox is running really high and when you’re shutting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still running even though you think it’s not, which is why the battery isn’t lasting as long as it used to. If it’s a program that you recognize (i.e. Safari, Firefox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign looking button that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

You can try restarting the computer completely if you haven’t in awhile.

If it continues to be a problem, I’d recommend taking it to your local Apple service centre (click here to visit Apple’s Online Service Assistant to determine your options) and get it checked out. It could be something simple like the battery needing replacement — or something more serious like your hard drive dying a slow, painful death.

To make a .pdf in almost any Mac application:
1. In the Title bar, click File>Print

2. In the popup window, click the PDF button

3. Choose a location, name your document and save. You can even insert keywords and the like, if you’re cool like me.

4. If you want, you can preview the document in preview without saving it, or email the .pdf right from this prompt. Pretty rad if you ask me!

The following is a list of things that stick out from when I made the move to my first Mac. So if you’re delving into Macs for the first time, the following should come in handy.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Luckily, when it comes to the actual keyboard shortcuts, a lot of the shortcuts on your Mac are the same as they are on your Windows PC; generally you can just swap Command for Control for a lot of the standards. For example, the Ctrl-C/X/V for Copy/Cut/Paste become Cmd-C/X/V. Simple, right?

Instead of boring you with a long list of keyboard shortcuts like those, I’m just going to highlight some of the less obvious shortcuts.

• Force Quit: When a program freezes up on your Windows PC and you want to force it
  closed, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. On your Mac, you’ll hit Cmd-Alt-Escape. This brings up the Force Quit dialog — a similar tool
  to the task manager for the purpose of closing unresponsive apps.

• Minimize/Hide: You can minimize a window to the dock from your keyboard by pressing Cmd-M. Or you can Hide an application by pressing Cmd-H. The difference is that hiding an application does not put anything on the dock, but hids every window of that app. Instead all application windows disappear from view until you switch back. In my opinion hiding is a better option because you can Cmd-Tab back to a hidden application and it will restore to your screen; however pressing Cmd-Tab to a minimized app will leave the app on the dock.

• Opening selected file: If you’ve ever opened a file or program on your PC by selecting the file and then hitting Enter to launch it you will need to know this tip. If you try to do the same on your Mac, your Mac will think you want to rename the file instead of open it. To open the file, you have to hit Cmd-O (for open).

• Backspace vs Delete: On Macs, the backspace key is called Delete. This key deletes from right to left, just like the backspace key. If you want to delete test from left to right, like the windows delete key, you will have to press Function-Delete (especially if you’re on a laptop). As well if you want to delete a file or folder from with a key press, select the file and press Cmd-Delete and it will go straight to the Trash.

• Closing windows and apps: In the Windows environment, whenever you close the last open window from a program, that program quits. Things do not opporate like that in the Mac world. Cmd-W will close the active window, however — unlike in Windows — once you’ve closed the last window of an application, the app will continue to run. If you want to quit a Mac app, you hit Cmd-Q (for quit). This one is especially important when you first switch to a Mac so you don’t end of wasting your system memory running several apps you’re not using.

Installing apps

This may seem like somewhat of a no brainer for Mac veterans, but when you switch to a Mac from a PC, you may find the installation process of new applications a bit confusing at first. That’s because, in general, there’s absolutely nothing to it. When you download an application (generally in the form of a compressed .dmg file, which will mount as a drive when you open it), you’re pretty much done with
the installation process. You can run an application (marked by the .app extension) from anywhere on your computer, and there’s really no installation to it. Broadly speaking, the installation of a new Mac app generally consists of moving the new application to your Applications folder. Many apps make this very simple, like the mounted Firefox .dmg above.

Unless you have your own system for arranging apps on your Mac, copying new apps to the Applications folder is a good practice. What you don’t want to do is forget to move the app from the .dmg folder to your hard disk.

While this article is just scratching the surface I hope it helps those readers who have just switched to a Mac or plan to soon. I’m sure their will be more written on this topic hear in the future, so if you’ve got questions on the subject; say there is something you did on your Windows that you just can’t seem to figure out how to do on your Mac — then let’s hear it. Send us your questions and we will do our best to get answers up. Also if you’re a Mac Addict like us hear at About this Mac and you have your own tips, we’d love to hear those as well.