Before I move into the “making the world a better place” motif for Season 04 of G’Day World, I wanted to do a show about my recent experiences of migrating from Windows to a Mac.

Yes – hell has finally frozen over and I’ve bought a Mac.

As some of you (those who read my Twitter feed) will know, about two weeks ago the terrific folks at Global1Training sponsored a 17″ widescreen MacBook Pro for your humble host. Global1Training are the folks who run Dr John Demartini’s seminars around the world. If you haven’t listened to the interview I did with Dr John (G’Day World #276) then you really should. He’s got a lot of good tips for taking control of your life. If you’d like to attend the upcoming Demartini seminars, click on the Global1Training link above for a 2 For 1 discount on tickets.

So.. onto the Mac.

This show is going to detail my reasons for getting a Mac and my experience of the migration.

Is a Mac as easy to use as Mac aficionados claim?
What is a .dmg?
What does “eject from disk” mean?
What is the “Command” key?
Why doesn’t CTRL-C work?
Where is the “Backspace” key?
How do you drag to “Applications”?
Why doesn’t tapping the touchpad work?
Where is the right-click button?
Where is the “START” button?
Why won’t Safari or Firefox go full screen?
Do Macs “blue screen”?
Do you have to buy two versions of all of your favourite programs if you are still running a Windows machine and a Mac machine at the same time?
Which is the best 3G card – the Telstra NextG card or the Three NetConnect card.
What do I think of the Blue Snowball USB mic?

These were just some of the issues I faced after cracking the seal on the MacBook. Is the Mac truly superior to Vista? Listen to this show to find out.

Update: A good suggestion by Raf, here are the recommended apps that Jono from Xero and Duncan Riley sent me:


Jono’s list with his comments:

Twitterrific: Best twitter client, IMHO

Growl: Notification software – ties in with a whole bunch of Apps. So, new emails, downloads finishing, etc.

Delicious Library: Cataloguing software… Sounds nerdy, but it looks soooo good…

Sapiens: Mouse gesture launcher. Version 1, so doesn’t do much yet.

Transmission: Nice BitTorrent App, very clean interface.

xTorrent: More fully featured Bit Torrent & downloading App, has very good search feature.

Download these so quicktime player will play a lot more codecs:

Perian: This adds DivX playback, amongst others…

Flip4Mac: This adds WMV playback.

Any other movie files should work in either VLC or MPlayer…

And of course: Google Earth, Skype (features lag behind on the Mac unfortunately).

Use iPhoto, its awesome 🙂

Duncan’s list with his comments:

Twitteriffic: you’ll love it

Audio Hijack Pro for Podcasting: Hijacks any audio on your mac (ie Skype calls). easy to use but you do have to pay for it after a trial. If wasn’t expensive for memory. General podcasting support is built in via Garageband for non-sykpe calls.

Cyberduck for FTP: it free, there are paid clients out there but this does a pretty good job

Snapz Pro if you want to do screencasting, captures SL as well. Payware but fairly cheap after trial.

For running Vista
Parallels: if you’ve only got the upgrade Vista I can tell you how to install. Parallels allows you to run windows from the Mac desktop, and programs like they were native on your mac. Bootcamp from Apple is free but you cant run Windows and OSX at the same time.

I presume you’ll stick with Microsoft Office under win, but if you switch try Neo-office, its Open Office code but customized to be more Mac friendly. It’s a little slow in loading, but its cheaper than buying office itself. You’ll find Thunderbird for Mac cool as well.

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