{"id":132,"date":"2008-03-13T15:15:25","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T19:15:25","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-02-27T09:13:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T13:13:09","slug":"switching-to-a-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Switching to a Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The publisher I work for has a book out now by this title.&nbsp; I&#39;ve scanned through it briefly but as in all things technology related, I prefer to just dive in head first and figure it out.<br \/><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>My employer for the past 6 years uses Macs in many areas.&nbsp; This was really my first hands-on experience with one.&nbsp; Had seen them before, even knew a few people who had one, but never really had used one.&nbsp; I was a little unsure as I started my first day, but after diving in I quickly discovered the similarities to windoze was very comforting.&nbsp; Actually Microsoft took the idea for windows from Apple.&nbsp; So, yes, there are differences.&nbsp; Over the past several years they have become fewer, but still remain.&nbsp; THANK GOD!<\/p>\n<p>The first thing you notice If you&#39;re one to use shortcut key strokes, is that those change.&nbsp; <em>ugh<\/em>&#8230;&nbsp; well if I learned them on windoze I can surely get it on the Mac as well.&nbsp; So not a huge deal. <\/p>\n<p>The next thing you notice, almost immediately, is that you&#39;re not spending time waiting for the computer to do something.&nbsp; ANYTHING.&nbsp; The Mac operating system (OS, with the latest being OS X) is, to put it very simply, built upon the same underpinnings as UNIX.&nbsp; This makes the OS <u><em><strong>extremely<\/strong><\/em><\/u> stable!&nbsp; Where, depending on what you&#39;re doing and the load you put on your machine, you may need to reboot your windoze system after a few hours, while OS X hasn&#39;t even begun to break a sweat.&nbsp; You can easily leave OS X running for weeks and really not see a dramatic loss in speed.&nbsp; There is no constant hard drive chattering.&nbsp; In fact the robustness of the OS makes using a Mac such a pleasure that the inconveniences of different key strokes or software seems a rather trivial matter.&nbsp; Don&#39;t get me wrong, there are times you can bring OS X to it&#39;s knees, but it won&#39;t happen by just surfing the web for an hour. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The most difficult hurdle is not so much in adjusting to the OS as it is in finding applications that are similar to what you&#39;re used to using on the PC.&nbsp; Many of the high end (big dollar) applications are available and for the most part look and feel and function the same. Of course you&#39;ll have to purchase them again because software that runs on a PC will not &quot;natively&quot; (as a true OS X application) run on a Mac (more on this later). &nbsp;So you may wish to budget in some software purchases as part of the cost of changing.<\/p>\n<p>For me, many of the applications I have embraced through my PC years are either freeware, open source, or simply just no longer being upgraded.&nbsp; This presents a problem for finding new applications to replace these trusted &quot;friends&quot; with.&nbsp; Fortunately some of the applications I use are what is known as multi-platform, meaning they have versions for windoze, Mac, and in some cases LINUX.&nbsp; This is a <em>wonderful<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n<p>There is a footnote to needing all new software.&nbsp; Now that Macs are using Intel processors there are a couple of Mac applications that will allow you to run your windoze programs on your Mac and they aren&#39;t brutal on the wallet.&nbsp; So if you&#39;re inclined to go that route, the change to a Mac won&#39;t be as big a hurdle.&nbsp; However I&#39;m not inclined to do that because I don&#39;t want to sacrifice the stability of the OS by running crappy windoze software.&nbsp; So I&#39;ve decided to make the switch completely which means several hours of research and testing to find software to do what I want to do.&nbsp; I&#39;ll try to document that process here.<\/p>\n<p>viva la Mac &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The publisher I work for has a book out now by this title.&nbsp; I&#39;ve scanned through it briefly but as in all things technology related, I prefer to just dive in head first and figure it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,25,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","category-pc2mac","category-technology"],"views":2040,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tech.creed3.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}