Quotes from a First Time Mac User

Dad got a new iMac last night, his first Apple product (besides the Shuffle) since his Apple IIe. Here are the highlights:

"Where's the computer?"

"How do I click this mouse?"

"Get an iChat account? What's Jabber?"

"Woah!! Ho ho ho!"

"I could actually watch things on this."

"Are there more Widgets?"

"Oh, wow."

"Wow."

"Let me say it backwards: wow."

"Your mother wants to press my Menu button."

"That is just beyond modern."

"I must buy more Apple stock immediately."

And that was just the first day. :D

Simplicity in the Dock

I'm a "down Dock" kind of person. Also, I tend to keep only the Open apps in there, along with a few shortcuts to Parallels, remote machines, links-du-jour, and my network drive.

Then, I just use Quicksilver to lauch or find anything, or even to drag and drop onto an app.

This reduces visual clutter, and saves me valuable milliseconds when parsing my work environment. There is less to see.

Another habit that I've nutured is: constantly review what's in the Dock. This mostly means removing things. but occasionally I'll add things temporarily.

This practice is easy to remember:

Reduce visual clutter,
Reuse the space in your Dock,
Recycle valuable mental processes as a result.

Mac Tip: Activity Monitor

Ever wonder why your Mac has grown hot? Or starts acting sluggish or seems to be thinking really hard? Enter Activity Monitor.

This is an Apple app that ships with OS X and helps you examine the processor load, network activity, disk and memory usage on your Mac.

1. Go to Applications > Utilities to find it (or just type "Activity" and then spacebar in Spotlight).
2. Choose View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History in the application menu (or right-click on the Dock Icon itself).
3. Close the main window if you want (just click on Dock Icon to show it again).
4. You can even go one step further and make it a Login Item.

Voila! A handy, instant peek into the brain of your machine. It's free, it's always on, but takes less memory than iPulse, which is still cool.