5 Pieces of Information and Software I've Found Useful Since Switcing to a MacBook

B bought me a MacBook for my birthday in July. It's my first Mac and I love it to bits. I was a Windows geek from way back. If there was something I needed to do with or to a Windows machine I could do it without much issue. I'd hardly ever used a Mac before I got one. Thus a learning curve was to be expected. Truth be told though I'm surprised at how small the learning curve has been. Save a few bumps it's been a pretty smooth and easy transition. A smooth transition yes, but transition nonetheless and I've had to learn some new ways of doing things, find some new software and figure out how to tweak my Mac to work how I want it to. There are a million sites and articles dedicated to setting up your first Mac, switching to Mac and learning how to use Macs. Sue me for creating a million and one. This is my list, culled from many other lists and trial and error of information and software that have made the marriage between my MacBook and I a very happy one.

1. Right Click Please
If you've played with a MacBook you know it only has one button beneath the trackpad instead of the two buttons that are standard with Windows machines. The lack of a second button takes away the right click for the contextual menu option but there are two different ways for accessing it with your MacBook. The first is ctrl + click. That is, holding down the ctrl key while clicking will bring up the "right click menu." The second, and infinitely better option in my opinion, is two finger clicking. Place two fingers on the trackpad, click and there's the "right click menu." Unfortunately the two finger method isn't enabled by default on MacBooks so you have to tell you want that option.

Go to System Preferences (click the blue apple), choose Keyboard and Mouse, click the check box beside "Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click."

2. Two Finger Scrolling
This one is turned on by default so you don't have to do anything but put two fingers on your trackpad and move them around. Move them up and down on this page is the equivalent of scolling with the scrollbar or your mouse and much handier.

3. WriteRoom
WriteRoom is billed as Distratction free writing and that it is. WriteRoom turns your entire screen into an old school word processing environment. By default the entire length and width of your screen becomes black with a blinking green cursor in the middle of it. Write until your heart is content on that black screen with your green text and nothing else on the screen to distract you.

4. Print Selection in Firefox
I loved Firefox for Windows and now I love Firefox for Mac. What I did not love was not being able to figure out how to print a selection in Firefox on my Mac. It took me a while to figure it out but I finally did. In the print dialogue box look for "Copies & Pages." Pull down that menu and select Firefox. This will give you access to Firefox specific printing options including printing a selection only.

5. Tabs in Safari
Love Firefox as I do I would have been remiss not to try out Safari Mac's very own browser. At first I was very perplexed because I'm so used to tabbed browsing it seemed really, really unnatural not to have tabs. Then I thought "there is no way THE Mac browser doesn't have tabbed browsing." A bit of looking around on the internets confirmed that fact. I felt dumb for a minute for not automatically knowing I had to turn on tabbed browsing in Safari but then I quickly moved on to feeling angry that I had to turn on tabbed browsing instead of it being turned on by default.

In any case Safari is very, very pretty and makes the internet very pretty. Sometimes I just stare lovingly at it. So I'm glad I chose Preferences in the Safari menu, selected the Tabs, um, tab, and clicked the box for "Enable Tabbed Browsing."