Indie+Relief is not only a great way to help out with the relief efforts in Haiti — it’s also a great list of the huge variety of indie software available for the Mac. If you’re new to the Mac and haven’t dipped your toe into the huge ocean of great independently developed software, this is a great place to start.

Buy any of the software listed today (January 20th, 2010) and help out the relief efforts in Haiti.

Here’s a few of my picks:

• Acorn is a great alternative to Photoshop and stands on it’s own as an image editor
• Billings is a great app to do any sort of billing out (freelancers) in just about any field, not just web/design work.
• Birdfeed is an iPhone Twitter client that I’ve heard good things about.
• Delicious Library 2 is an amazing cataloguer of your stuff: DVDs, video games, books, toys, etc. It comes with a web cam barcode scanner that is so fun to use.
• Ego is a great looking web analytics app for your iPhone that I’m trying very hard to resist buying.
• Fetch is one of the better FTP clients for Mac. If I wasn’t already a card-carrying Transmit fanboy I’d be all over this one.
• iFart Mobile — just kidding. I can’t recommend this one. (What is that smell?)
• Instapaper Pro for the iPhone. I’m so close to buying this but haven’t used the free version enough to justify it. Yet.
• Marsedit is a desktop blogging app. If you’d prefer to write your blog without having to worry about the internet until you’re ready to publish, this one is for you. Haven’t used it in awhile but continue to hear great things about it.
• Nota is a tool for musicians, like me, who can’t remember the major-4th chord of the 5th pentatonic scale when inverted in G-minor 7. Or something like that. Haven’t bought it yet but only just heard about it.
• Postbox is an alternative to the Mac’s built in Mail program. I tried this out in Beta and loved the look and feel of it, I just couldn’t bring myself to switch.
• Soulver is, according to Marco, a great calculator replacement for either your iPhone or desktop calculator.
• Tapedeck is almost worth the $25 just for the user interface. It’s a great, simple audio recording tool for your Mac.
• Tweetie is my personal favourite iPhone Twitter client. Set the bar with version 1 and raised it again with version 2.

Any of your favourites that I’ve missed? Leave a comment with your feedback!

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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!

Currently these are the benefits Apple lists to having a MobileMe subscription:

• Mail, Contacts and Calendar syncing from your Mac(s) to your iPhone to the web
• MobileMe Gallery that allows you to show off your photos in a very nice looking online photo gallery
• iDisk storage online — store or backup files with 20GB of storage. You can also access this through an iPhone app designed by Apple
• Me.com web apps including email, contacts, calendars, photos and files. Used with the syncing mentioned previously, this allows you to login from any web browser (Mac or otherwise) and access your information. Any changes made Me.com are synced back to your iPhones/Macs. The web apps themselves perform remarkably similar to their desktop counterparts.

For a Mac desktop, these are some additional benefits:

• Back to My Mac is a feature that has gotten mixed reviews. For me personally, it’s worked as advertised. For others, it’s been hit and miss. It’s definitely a nice idea: wherever you are, you can access information back on your home Mac. On the road with your MacBook Pro and forgot a presentation on your home iMac? Just log in and grab the file without having to worry about VPN settings and having someone at home to send you the file. It works well — when it works.
• Syncing system preferences, dock items, Dashboard widgets and more is another feature, though it’s also hit and miss as to it’s usefulness. For example, syncing preferences from a desktop iMac with a 24″ display to a laptop with a 13″ display doesn’t always work but there definitely benefits to be had.

In addition to that, there are added benefits if you own an iPhone or iPod touch:

• Find my iPhone is a killer feature that is nearly worth the price of admission alone. If you lose your iPhone you can simply visit the MobileMe website and using either the GPS built into the iPhone or the last known WiFi access point of an iPod touch allows you to see on a Google Map where your device is. You can then play a sound and display a message to alert someone nearby to your iPhone’s location. Neat!
• If you lost your iPhone and can’t find it, or someone stole it you can also remotely wipe the iPhone and all it’s data, restoring it to factory settings. Combined with Find my iPhone, these two features make a strong case for MobileMe subscription for iPhone owners

The case for MobileMe is very similar to the case you would make for buying a Mac or iPhone in the first place: it’s simple, easy to use and just works as advertised for the most part. Where it breaks down is you can configure your Mac/iPhone with a lot of free software to do similar, if not exactly the same, things as MobileMe offers you for a yearly subscription. The question for you is whether it’s worth it to pay for that or look after it yourself. I won’t list all the options out there here (watch for an upcoming article or see the comments on this post from AboutThisMac.com readers), but the main one would be using Google’s suite of services (Gmail, Calendar, etc.) and their Sync services. This is what I’ve switched to since letting my MobileMe account expire.

It’s been almost two weeks since making the switch and I can’t say that I’ve really missed much. I didn’t really ever use the Me.com web apps and my use of Back to My Mac was fairly minimal — nothing that can’t be done with a free VNC setup. The syncing ability is something I will come to miss as I make more changes on my MacBook Pro that aren’t reflected on my home iMac. For example, any new FTP sites added to Transmit used to be automatically synced to both computers along with the appropriate user name/password. Now I’ll have to remember to add them manually or look at other syncing options. Two of which I’d heartily recommend are Dropbox and 1Password. When used together, these two apps create a great alternative to MobileMe password syncing.

I’d have no problem recommending MobileMe to people if they actually will make use of the services. Take a look at the features and honestly think about whether you’d use them. There’s alos a 60 day free trial that you can use to see if you like it — though I’m sure once they’ve got you hooked in, you’ll be much less likely to stop using it.

I don’t currently have an iPhone so using Find my iPhone or remote wipe aren’t necessary yet. I have a feeling if I do upgrade to an iPhone I’ll probably end up using MobileMe again — just for the insurance of being able to wipe it remotely and/or find it. Other than that, I can live with using a few 3rd party services to keep everything running.

How about you? Do you think MobileMe is worth the yearly subscription?

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.

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?

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.

My Windows XP PC kicked the bucket, but its hard drive is fine. I bought an iMac; how do I get my documents from my PC’s hard drive to my new Mac?

You could network your PC and iMac, but your PC is fried. I recommend buying a 3.5 inch hard drive enclosure that has a USB or FireWire interface on it. Take the hard drive out of your PC, install it in the enclosure and attach it to your iMac. Voila! There’s your hard drive! You can copy whatever important documents you have to your Mac.

This process is extremely easy; don’t get intimidated by the task of doing surgery on your old PC. Look on the bright side: you don’t have to put anything back together!

Once you’re done, format the hard drive using Disk Utility (it hides in Applications>Utilities) and you can use it as extra storage on your Mac.

*Note: Make sure your hard drive is compatible with the enclosure! Most desktops manufactured in the last year and a half use SATA interface while older ones use the IDE (or PATA) interface. Take a quick peek at the cable and compare it with the aforementioned articles.
**One last thing: You can do this with a laptop hard drive as well; just buy a 2.5 inch enclosure.