PC User to Macintosh

[Lyris]

Hey everybody, my friend recently raised the point of buying a Macintosh. Over the past few months I've become more and more accustomed to the idea, in the past the only major complaint I'd had was the lack of games available. This seems to have improved a little but to me that doesn't matter anyway, I rarely play games on a computer anymore. I mainly use my PC for web browsing, instant messenging, watching downloaded videos and video capture and editing (something I hear Macs are also very good at).

Now I've quite recently bought a new PC and I'm in no real hurry to get rid of it any time soon, but my friend is and when the time does come to replace it, does anyone on here have any tips or recommendations for new Mac owners? I know software like Photoshop is available, I'd still have FireFox as an option for web browsing, is there anything else I should be taking note of? Sorry I can't be more specific than this...

Thanks!

[the shape]

1. He/you may want to get a three-button mouse, as some Switchers feel uncomfortable with only one. Not me, but some.

2. He/you will need to come up with a new excuse to procrastinate as OSX doesn't crash.

That is all.

[Paleface]

Get yourself a decent usb mouse, or at least your old pc one. They're plug and play, but a right button is fairly essential for OSX, and scrollwheels make your life better.

Safari is very good as a browser, though Firefox is there too. The built in mail program, mail.app, is very good indeed. Entourage, which is part of OSX, is a big mother of an outlookalike. Personally, I'd avoid.

Useful little things: a P2P app (I use Acquisiton); an all-purpose divx player (VLC); a decent FTP client if you need it - Fetch, Transmit, cheap shareware. MSN Messenger is assy, and doubly so on mac, but iChat is nice. If you want a trillian-a-like, Fire 4.0 or Proteus might fit the bill.

For basic videoediting, iMovie is very good. However, further up the bill, there's Avid Free which is limited, but free, Final Cut Express, which is about ?299 iirc, and Final Cut Pro, which is something around ?700. And then there's Avid itself. As it is, your new Mac will come with iMovie, which is dead easy to use - just firewire to your camcorder, it'll pick it up straightaway, import clips, sort out timeline/transitions/etcetera, and there you are. You can then link music from your MP3 library or from Garageband.

If you've got any questions, feel free to Private Message me; it's easier to give examples to very specific questions, as we all have our little bits of shareware that make our lives easier. There's lots of great shareware on the Mac that often outdoes proper commercial software...

[womblingfree]

After a couple of weeks using a Mac you will find using a PC horrendously and needlessly cumbersome and cluttered. (IMO)!

To make your life a bit easier in the transition get yourself a copy of Microsoft Word. You can get by with AppleWorks, but Word just makes transporting formatted documents that much smoother.

A scroll wheel mouse will make you feel initially less disorientated, but honestly in the two years I've been using a Mac I've never had a need for a second mouse button. Something I couldn't have imagined before I switched.

Download LimeWire to fill the Kazaa void. Works pretty well and dumps downloaded music straight to iTunes.

You will have trouble with some AVI files, but this is only an issue if you are downloading bucketloads of porn. Mpegs are fine.

Aside from that iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes should take care of many, if not all your digital needs.

[Wild_Cat]

Nope, AVI file problems will easily be solved through the use of VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ), which also doubles as an universal video player and zone-free DVD player. A must-have.

You may encounter some problems to play weird Microsoft proprietary video file formats (WMV, ASF...), but the Mac version of Windows Media Player (which you should *not* use for anything else) will take care of them.

[womblingfree]

Nope, AVI file problems will easily be solved through the use of VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ), which also doubles as an universal video player and zone-free DVD player. A must-have.

Really? I thought that certain AVI's couldn' be convereted due to the fact that they relied specifically on Intel hardware?

I'll try out the link and be very happy if I'm wrong!

[Valken]

Indeed certain video in an AVI might not be supported by VideoLan due to no port of the codec existing but tbh most AVI's have DivX or XVid encoded video these days which is supported.

[Wild_Cat]

Yup. I've yet to come across a file that can't be played by either VLC, MPlayer OSX or Windows Media Player for Mac.
Well, putting aside videos encoded with ancient codecs that even current PCs can't read, that is. By the way, does anyone know of a WinNT (or Mac) implementation of the codecs used in the PC version of Final Fantasy 7? (I think it was called something ilke "TrueMotion")