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melonpool · Jul 5, 2005, 11:40 AM

Hey everyone. I am soon to make the switch to Apple computers sometime in the next month. I imagine suddenly being tossed into a new environment will be new and exciting, but also very frustrating. I've been searching the internet for any and all guides to Apple computers and MacOS just so I'm a bit more familiar when the time comes. I don't want to fault Apple for my frustrations, after all.

I've found many guides for "y0 d00dz i buy apple! how do i worked this?" type of questions, but nothing for a power user. I'm very interested in how Apple computers work. I don't mean just the operating system (though that would be nice too), I really mean a very broad way of looking at it all.

I'm interested in knowing about the .DMG format....memory management....the filesystem...etc. Things like that.

Does such a broad guide exist?

analogika · Jul 5, 2005, 12:57 PM

Nobody has been able to work out to date what "power user" actually means.

Info on technical background here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1

A month with a Mac from the perspective of a die-hard PC user (by Anandtech):
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2232

The same with regard to Apple laptops here:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2326

Note that Anand tried that back when Panther was current. Tiger has changed some things.

Millennium · Jul 5, 2005, 01:02 PM

I don't know of any broad guides, but here are a few things:

From a technical standpoint, the .DMG format is basically the same thing as the .ISO format, which is used for making CD images; the only difference is that the "filesystem" inside the file is formatted as HFS+ instead of ISO9600. Unlike Windows, however, OSX lets you mount these files directly onto the Desktop as though they were actual discs. They are popular for distributing software, because you can do anything with them that you could do to an actual disc. They also preserve some of the unique quirks of the HFS+ filesystem, which most other formats don't.

OSX's memory management scheme is pretty dynamic. The OS and many apps will start out using as much RAM as they can get, but will yield excess RAM to other applications as needed. There's also a virtual-memory system in place which creates and deletes swapfiles as needed. You do need to be careful to make sure there's enough space -the usual rule of thumb is to leave 10% of your boot drive free- but other then that there's not much that you need to worry about. One thing you should be aware of on the hardware side is that OSX is very sensitive to RAM which doesn't completely comply with the various standards; most reputable vendors are fine, but be wary of anything that looks too inexpensive to be true. On the other hand, you should probably avoid buying RAM directly from Apple if you can help it; it's good-quality stuff but they overcharge pretty severely.

As for the filesystem, I'm not entirely sure what you mean: do you mean the actual mechanism used to store files on disk, or the way that files are presented through the Finder (roughly analogous to Windows Explorer)?

mhuie · Jul 5, 2005, 06:46 PM

Originally Posted by melonpool

Hey everyone. I am soon to make the switch to Apple computers sometime in the next month. I imagine suddenly being tossed into a new environment will be new and exciting, but also very frustrating. I've been searching the internet for any and all guides to Apple computers and MacOS just so I'm a bit more familiar when the time comes. I don't want to fault Apple for my frustrations, after all.

I've found many guides for "y0 d00dz i buy apple! how do i worked this?" type of questions, but nothing for a power user. I'm very interested in how Apple computers work. I don't mean just the operating system (though that would be nice too), I really mean a very broad way of looking at it all.

I'm interested in knowing about the .DMG format....memory management....the filesystem...etc. Things like that.

Does such a broad guide exist?

The best way to learn is to get one and use it.

melonpool · Jul 5, 2005, 10:34 PM

Thanks for the replies. The reason I'm asking these questions is that I might find myself frustrated when I go to use it for the first time and I'm set in my old ways.

As far as my question about the filesystem, I was wondering about the little "quirks" you mentioned.

tooki · Jul 6, 2005, 12:36 AM

HFS+ supports "forked" files, that is, files with two data streams (the "data" and "resource" forks) as used in Classic Mac OS. HFS+ is, by default, a case-insensitive but case-preserving filesystem.

Those are the biggest things, really.

tooki

Macpilot · Jul 6, 2005, 01:21 AM

Welcome to the Mac! Glad to see another switcher.

I would highly recommend purchasing the ProCare service from Apple. You get 1 hour of personal, scheduled instruction on whatever you want to discuss, per week. Costs $99 for one year. Other benefits too.

A great book is the Missing Manual from David Pogue. Tiger edition coming out this month supposedly. Still waiting for mine.

As you can see, these Forums are a great resource too. Lots of helpful, friendly people here!

Good luck!

Gee4orce · Jul 6, 2005, 03:27 AM

My advice is to 'just use it'. Use the Mac. See how you get on. I think you'll be surprised, coming from Windows, how little you actually need to know in order to be very productive on a Mac. After all, you don't need to be a mechanic in order to drive a car, do you ?

If you get stuck, post a question here and you'll probably have an answer in a few minutes....

Gavin · Jul 6, 2005, 03:51 AM

One stage windows power users go through is unlearning all the habits they get with windows - all that care and feeding. The main thing that stumps them is that there is so much that you DON'T have to do. You never need to reinstall the OS or defrag the disk. You don't need a virus scanner or pop up blocker. There are no registry hacks or anything to set in the bios.

Other difficulties come from overlooking the obvious when it comes to solving a task. Things like adjusting network settings or setting up a printer are almost too simple; people who know what they are doing in linux or windows can walk right past it because they expect it to take more steps.

We see a lot of question threads from windows users that end with "that's all there is to it? You're kidding."

I'd guess the most frustrating thing would be the keyboard shortcuts. Hitting the command key instead will drive you nuts for a week or two.

The best resource is this board.

melonpool · Jul 7, 2005, 12:27 AM

Originally Posted by Gee4orce

My advice is to 'just use it'. Use the Mac. See how you get on. I think you'll be surprised, coming from Windows, how little you actually need to know in order to be very productive on a Mac. After all, you don't need to be a mechanic in order to drive a car, do you ?

If you get stuck, post a question here and you'll probably have an answer in a few minutes....

I actually learn better without abstraction.

I like knowing the inner-workings of something simple. For some reason, the bigger picture seems clearer to me.

BTW, thanks for the bit about the filesystem being case insensitive.

Chuckit · Jul 7, 2005, 12:51 AM

Originally Posted by Millennium

OSX's memory management scheme is pretty dynamic. The OS and many apps will start out using as much RAM as they can get, but will yield excess RAM to other applications as needed.

A little more detail on this: It's a sparse, copy-on-write memory system, meaning (basically) that while a program may see a vast memory space, the kernel only allocates those blocks that it's actually written to. The rest is either shared memory or pure virtual memory.

You can check out Apple's developer docs for more on how the memory management works.

analogika · Jul 7, 2005, 02:10 AM

Originally Posted by melonpool

I actually learn better without abstraction.

I like knowing the inner-workings of something simple. For some reason, the bigger picture seems clearer to me.

Make sure to read the arstechnica link I posted above.

wataru · Jul 7, 2005, 02:54 AM

One thing you should not do is expect to use all your apps in fullscreen mode. It's a waste of space, and there's no quick, reliable way to make windows fullscreen to begin with.

msuper69 · Jul 7, 2005, 07:39 AM

This is not really a "power user" guide but is good if you're brand new to Macs and OS X Mac 101 (from Apple)

You are in for a treat! Welcome.

mpancha · Jul 7, 2005, 09:39 AM

I just ran across this on slashdot this morning:

A Tour of the OS X kernel its a flash walkthrough of the kernel, haven't viewed it yet, but I intend to tonight to see if its worthwhile.

There are plenty of other "guides" or presentations on his site as well: http://kernelthread.com/

Superchicken · Jul 7, 2005, 04:10 PM

just make sure to look around the system prefs. And realize that nearly every app will have it's own prefs under it's menu (When you're in the App it's the menu in bold right beside the Apple menu that is the name of the app) that will let you set things about that App.

I've switched a good six people and all of them range from advanced to intermediate and all of them say things like, "This is a lot easier than I thought" just keep in mind, a lot of the basic UI concepts of Windows were ripped off from Mac OS but then changed a bit so they had less of a chance of beings sued. So things will often seem familiar but different. Often, better.

giggs11 · Jul 8, 2005, 12:24 PM

Originally Posted by Gavin

One stage windows power users go through is unlearning all the habits they get with windows - all that care and feeding. The main thing that stumps them is that there is so much that you DON'T have to do. You never need to reinstall the OS or defrag the disk. You don't need a virus scanner or pop up blocker. There are no registry hacks or anything to set in the bios.

We see a lot of question threads from windows users that end with "that's all there is to it? You're kidding."

That said, as another Windows power user who recently bought a Powerbook, there are a few things that need to be taken care of maintenance-wise, the most important being to Repair Permissions. Luckily, things like Software Update are much cleaner in OS X than in Windows.

Something else that's slightly less intuitive in OS X is that there isn't really a Character Map. Instead, to get to nonstandard characters, you have to pull up the somewhat awkward Keyboard Viewer.

Popups in OS X are generally stopped by Safari or Firefox, though the latter is for Windows as well. Unfortunately, I am finding a number of popups recently that manage to sneak past the built-in blocker, and as OS X doesn't have a Taskbar like Windows, I often don't know they are there and taking up memory until I use Exposé.

Overall, as a power user I think you'll actually appreciate the simplicity and general lack of bloat in OS X. Power users know what they are doing and don't need cute little popup reminders from the OS so we know what's going on all the time. OS X respects that, and its just much less of a pain to deal with at times. There are still some things I dislike (compatibility with a Windows network is still a bit spotty), but overall I agree with the Anandtech article. The best way for a power user to learn about an OS is just to play around with it. It sure worked for me.

Millennium · Jul 8, 2005, 12:32 PM

One last piece of advice: if you don't plan on leaving your machine on all the time, get anacron.

OSX has a bunch of built-in system maintenance routines which it runs periodically, in order to help keep the machine in top shape. However, it is set to run them all very late at night relative to the time zone the machine is in, so that these routines won't disrupt most people's work schedules. This is fine if you leave the machine on all the time, but if you don't then these tasks won't get run. Anacron fixes this, by checking every 15 minutes to see if any scheduled tasks "missed" their last appointed time; if they have, then it runs those tasks. Truth be told, the maintenance routines aren't really enough to be terribly disruptive anyway, since they happen seamlessly in the background. You're not likely to notice they're even being run unless you're doing something very CPU-intensive.

The reason I like Anacron so much is that it neither has nor needs any GUI or configuration options; you just install it and forget it. Make sure that you get the version appropriate to your OS, though; there's one for 10.4 Tiger -the latest version of OSX- and there's one for everything else. Tiger made some major under-the-hood changes which required changes to anacron, but those changes are themselves not compatible with any earlier version of the OS.

wataru · Jul 8, 2005, 01:46 PM

Originally Posted by giggs11

Something else that's slightly less intuitive in OS X is that there isn't really a Character Map. Instead, to get to nonstandard characters, you have to pull up the somewhat awkward Keyboard Viewer.

Ahem... Character Palette?

MaxPower · Jul 8, 2005, 03:44 PM

I have to also reccomend the ARS Technica / MacNN dual forum surfage for your technical questions.

Another thing you might be used to is keyboard navigation of the GUI. You can do this by going to System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Keyboard Shortcuts and setting full keyboard access to 'all controls'.

Accessing special characters with the alt+numkeypad method has an equivalent as well on the OSX side. It's actally a lot easier, IMHO. Here's a good primer on it:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/i...s/codemac.html

Hope that helps you!