How do I make everything appear bigger so I can actually read the screen from three feet away?
How do I cut and paste (what is the equivalent of Ctrl C, Ctrl V)?
Is there a way to import bookmarks from my PC?
Is there a way to transfer picture files from my PC?
I will add more questions as they come up.
But I am up and running!!
Get a Windows PC.
JUST KIDDING!
Copy & paste are apple-c and apple-v. Also: apple-q is quit, apple-. is aboart, apple-p is print, apple-h is hide (yellow button), apple-w is close (window).
find keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences/Keyboard & Mouse
To increase screen size, check out universal access in the System preferences.
Easiest way to import pictures is to burn them on a CD and import them into iPhoto from the CD.
Dunno about bookmarks.
Admit it, Dale: You’ve been dying to do that. 
Jessie,
Macs are designed to be very, very simple to use.
A few years ago Apple studies found that users were having a very difficult timing figuring out how to use Mac OS9, particularly the “double click” feature. To solve this problem and make it easier for the majority of Mac users, Apple opted to remove such features as “copy”, “paste” and “delete” . "double-click, et al, from the new OSX.
Fortunately there is an upgrade patch that can be downloaded from Apple for $29.99 that will enable a bunch of the features that were taken out with the release of OSX, as well as add the ability to play other games besides Snood, Breakout, SuperBreakout, Myst, the Apple Logo Game and Photoshop. You can find the download link here at Apple’s home page.
Just download the file to disk, run it and then you’ll have to register it with Apple to enable it.
Chris
How do I cut and paste (what is the equivalent of Ctrl C, Ctrl V)?
keyboard commands are usually next to the pulldown menu commands in parentheses
Is there a way to transfer picture files from my PC?
JPG files can be read by either computer. You can email them to yourself, or copy from a cd or floppy.
not sure about the bookmarks either. Prob. easier to just type in your sites, then add bookmark.
Speaking of floppy…is there a floppy drive? I can’t find one!
I’m confused. None of these have been “removed” from OSX. Exactly what are you referring to?
Macs haven’t come with floppies for a few years. USB floppy drives are available for like $30, which is several times what they’re worth.
For the same price you can get around a 128 meg USB stick, which is (literally) hundreds of times faster than a floppy, and that’s not even including the fact that they hold 100 times as much. I think they come up to a gig, and you might be able to get little ones (32M) almost free.
That’s what I use to transfer between computers at home and between home and work.
Thanks, Charlie…I’ll have to look into that.
Also…do I need Microsoft Office?
And how do I do an FTP transfer?
One way is to run System Preferences (it probably appears in the dock–a white light switch with a gray apple), click “Displays”, and select a resolution that gives you the result you want. It will apply it right away, so you can see how it looks.
How do I cut and paste (what is the equivalent of Ctrl C, Ctrl V)?
As Bloomfield mentioned, you can generally substitute a “command key” (on either side of the space bar, with the outline apple symbol and the command symbol on it) for the Ctrl key. In any application, you can see a lot of the command key equivalents for menu items by simply opening a menu. The command key symbol is that little thing with four loops. Other symbols you may see in menus are the option key–which looks a bit like a graphic representation of an old typewriter shift-lock key, and the shift key, which is an upward-pointing arrow.
Is there a way to import bookmarks from my PC?
Which browser are you using on the Mac? Which one did you use on the PC? If you have a “Favorites.html” file, from Exploder, or a “Bookmarks.html”, from Netscape, on your PC, you may be able to just copy it (or email it) to the Mac, and see if you can find out where the equivalent is stored on the Mac. If you’re using Exploder on the Mac, you should just be able to replace the “Favorites.html” file with the old one. If you’re using Safari, it doesn’t seem so simple. I tried renaming a “Favorites.htm” file as “Bookmarks.plist”, and replacing the one in the Safari folder, but it doesn’t seem to recognize it, although it opens fine in Property List Editor. It will require a little more research to figure out what it’s missing. I don’t use Safari, because I don’t like the way it shows multiple images in the Digital Photography Review forum, so I’ve stuck with Exploder–which doesn’t even explode with the latest system (10.3.4).
Is there a way to transfer picture files from my PC?
If you have both machines running, you can also email them. JPEGs will be the same on both platforms.
Rather than hooking up my camera directly, I use a USB card reader, which lets my Nikon compact flash cards show up as hard drives, and then I just drag all my picture files to appropriate folders on my real hard drives. I don’t see any point in using software to transfer files.
I haven’t used iPhoto much. Instead, I use a third-party application called iView. I’m not crazy about either one. All I need is a simple cataloging ability with minimal file manipulation, so I may end up writing my own–someday, but not soon.
It’s probably worth it. I got it cheap as part of a bundle. I only needed Word, but I don’t know if it’s available separately.
It all depends on what you want to do with it. There are some other word processors around, such as Nisus Writer: http://www.nisus-soft.com/
If you just need a word processor, look at http://www.macuser.co.uk/labs/labs_subindex.php?issue=9&headline=Word+processors&site=macuser
Of course, there’s AppleWorks for a more complete, vaguely Office-like package.
The US Macworld site at http://www.macworld.com/ may be of some use to you.
And how do I do an FTP transfer?
I strongly recommend Interarchy: http://www.interarchy.com/main/
It’s fast and pretty easy to use, once you get started. It’s also very well supported.
Hmm… strange. I wonder what that patch is all about then?
Chris
Go to Hard Drive: System Preferences: Displays You can change your resolution there.
I like Microsoft Office for the Mac. It’s interchangable with Office for the PC. If you have any ties to education, you can get it for $129 at Amazon.
As far as file transfer of pictures from the PC to the Mac: Once you network the PCs, you could simply navigate to your photos, select them (select all), and drag or copy to the Mac. Pictures are usually placed in Your Hard Drive: Users Folder: Your Name: Pictures: iPhoto Library. You can place them wherever you want, but iPhoto will find them more easily in this location.
By the way, I use a cheap shareware program that lets me customize the Apple menu the way I want. (It’s somewhat like the Windoze start menu, but more flexible). I highly recommend it: Fruit Menu.
Dana
You can get Word separately for the Mac.
Liz
The other computers are, indeed, networked, but I can’t get to them from the Mac. It shows a Network icon, but won’t go fufther than that. Arrgghhh!
I’m jumping on the conversation wihtout knowing what came b4, but if you have shared windows folders, and if your Mac is OS X, then you should be able to open the shared windows folders in the Mac’s Finder using the special “SMB” protocol:
Finder → go → server
smb://servername/sharename
HTH…
g
I can get to the finder. I don’t see any “go” or anything like that.
Sorry, maybe different OS version. This is what i use here, with our OS X iMac. I’m not a Mac person (mostly Unix). But keep that in mind and poke around, you may find the right menu item somewhere.
The pre-OS X version of Nisus was very highly regarded, but the current one lacks some features much appreciated (especially by scholars). However, version 2.0 has been announced for “later this summer” and it appears to restore most or all of them.
By the way, I highly recommend their newsletter even if you don’t end up buying their products. It’s very entertaining!
Darwin’s URL above for Nisus doesn’t work for me, and if others have the same problem, try:
Besides the new version of Nisus due out in a few months, the latest version of Office for Mac is available for a free 30-day “test drive”:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=office2004td
Word 2004 adds Unicode capability to the program, although it still won’t work with languages written right-to-left (or so I’ve read).
An excellent word processor MacUser.UK doesn’t include in their comparison is Mellel:
It’s particularly good for multi-lingual word processing with Unicode and a demo can be downloaded from the site (the only feature disabled is printing, unless you don’t mind a great big “UNREGISTERED” watermark on your output ). It’s an incredible bargain, too, half the price of the already quite reasonable Nisus Writer Express.
John