After having lived primarily in the world of Windows for over 15 years, you get accustomed (\u201cprogrammed\u201d?) to the Windows way of doing things.\u00a0 Of course that is the way with us humans, and we really don\u2019t like to change.\u00a0 So when you enter the world of Macs you discover instantly that there are other ways of doing things, such as starting your favorite application.<\/p>\n
\nOne of the first things you miss is the Start Menu.\u00a0 I say \u201cmiss\u201d because it\u2019s how you\u2019ve grown used to launching applications, unless like myself you also had other taskbar helpers and desktop icons for the same thing.\u00a0 You can still have those trusted desktop icons to launch your applications in a Mac, but there is after all only so much real estate on the desktop.\u00a0 The curren Mac operating system (OS X) also features it\u2019s Dock, where the most commonly used application icons live, either permanently or only when the application is running (your choice).\u00a0 Think of this as somewhat similar to the Windows task bar.\u00a0 It\u2019s also limited in space so you can\u2019t possibly fit the icons of every application there that you might have.\u00a0 The previous Mac OS (OS 9) featured a menu in the upper left hand corner that you could get to your applications with, much like the Windows Start menu, but it was replaced in OS X with an option to select from the most recent used applications or files.\u00a0 The search was on.<\/p>\n
Anyone that knows me well knows I\u2019m a huge fan of open source applications and freeware.\u00a0 So when I search for this sort of thing that\u2019s where I start first.<\/p>\n