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A few days ago I wrote a note on my move from Windows XP to Mac. I received some comments since, and have also discovered some additional tricks; maybe it is helpful if I write a follow-up… It serves as a set of notes for myself but, if it is useful for anybody else, all the better!

First of all, as one of the comments by Daniel Grace to my previous note made me understand, I could have used the installation DVD I got with my machine to install Xcode, instead of getting on the Web for that. My impression was that this DVD is there only when one has to re-install Snow Leopard, hence I did not really consider this. My bad, I could have saved some transfer time…

So here are some other smallish tricks and discoveries

• You can recycle a bunch of hardware goodies that you might have had for your PC:
  • My mouse works out of the box and, in contrary to the popular belief, the right click also works automatically. Nothing to do…
  • I also have a cheap Logitech USB keyboard: just plugged it in and it worked. The ‘Windows’ key (the one with the Windows Logo, ironically) maps to the most typical Mac key, the one with this curved symbol and usually referred to as ‘Cmd’; the ‘Alt’ and the ‘Ctrl’ are simply reused.
  • Actually… the default keyboard setup, though works, is not ideal. There are indeed some unfortunate small differences in the physical layouts (I use a US keyboard): the horizontal order of the ‘Cmd’ and ‘Alt’ keys are reversed compared to the laptop‘s own keyboard and the ‘~’ character and the ‘±’ characters are also switched. Disagreeable, because one‘s fingers get messed up. But the flexibility of the Mac comes at your rescue for the command keys. Indeed: go to the Keyboard setup in the system preferences, click on the “modifier keys”, be careful to choose the right keyboard on the top menu, and change the setting. I switched the command and option keys and, voilà! it is exactly like on the laptop.
  • I also switched the default setup for the laptop’s keyboard so that the function keys would behave, by default, like the external keyboard’s function key (instead of the built-in facilities like dimming the screen). This helps my fingers remembering the right usage… If you begin to use things like Exposé (most of us have already seen Mac users displaying a small version of all windows on the screen to switch quickly among them, that is the one!) it is good to have the same keyboard setup than on your external keyboard. You can do that change in the ‘Keyboard’ setup panel, too.
  • I also have a small Polycom® Communicator C100 that I use for Skype: although the Polycom site claims that it is usable with Windows only, that is actually not true. I plugged it in and it works. The only thing you cannot do is to start up Skype using the button on the device. Big deal.
  • One difference, though, that cannot really be handled: the PC-s, usually, have two slots for headphones, ie, one for listening and one for the microphone. If you want to use a headphone on the Mac for Skype, for example, you will have to invest into a separate headphone with USB. Which is unfortunate because the Mac laptop has only two USB slots, which is not much these days. That being said, the mike of the laptop itself may be good enough, in which case any headphone will do for listening.
• I need accented characters, plus some other special characters like quote marks or ellipses. Most West-European characters (e.g., for French or German) are available using a two-key solution. For example, to type the character ‘ü’, you have to type ‘Alt-u’ then ‘u’. You also have a help tool: go to the Language & Text setting and choose the ”Keyboard & Character Viewer”. You should also click the ”Show input menu in menu bar”. You will get a symbol on the upper right hand corner of the screen and you can then get a virtual keyboard on your screen which shows what you have to type. The rest is just trying and getting used to. B.t.w., you can also add other keyboard types; e.g., I checked the Hungarian keyboard, too. What happens is that using the same menu item you can change the keyboard to be Hungarian. Although the physical keyboard remains the same, using the virtual keyboard you can get characters like ‘ű’ or ‘ő’. A bit convoluted (better use a real Hungarian keyboard for this case) but can be helpful in some cases.
• The Mac user interface, e.g., the Finder, is the land of keyboard shortcuts. It will take many weeks before I get used to all of them. If you do have David Pogue‘s book, keep the relevant appendix under your pillow. The possibilities in getting around in the Finder are rich and well worth getting used to.
• One of the tiny goodies: if you want to have your shell windows’ title to show the directory you are in, add this to your profile (I use bash, so it is in ‘.bash_profile’:

  PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${PWD/#$HOME/~}\007"'

  A bit cryptic, but it works… (thanks to Carine and Coralie).

• As Karl said in his comment, some GNU software, that are usually installed on a Linux box or with cygwin (e.g., wget) does not come installed. But downloading the source code from the GNU site, going through the configure+makefile dance seems to work. I tried it with wget, although I had to run the configure script with –prefix=$HOME (ie, install the program in my home directory, not into /usr/local). I presume that this is related to the super user vs. administrator account that I noted in my earlier blog.
• Of course, there are programs that crash or have otherwise strange behavior although, truth must be said, until now I had only problems with Thunderbird (in combination with some extensions) and with Komodo Editor, i.e., not with Mac software (I know, this will come:-). It is therefore good to know about the “Force Quit” menu entry under the Apple menu (upper left hand corner). It gives you an easy way to shoot a program.
• OpenOffice (or its Apple equivalent, NeoOffice) is fairly easy to find and well documented. I had more difficulties finding LaTeX, but I found, after all MacTeX. It is a fairly standard (though large) Mac distribution and it seems to work (add /usr/texbin to your Path variable if you want to use it from bash).
• Bluetooth is always black magic. I paired the Mac with my Nokia and (with the extra driver I had to install, see my previous blog) it synchronizes and I can also browse the content of the phone (submenu for the small bluetooth sign on the upper right hand corner), send files to and from. Great. But I also paired it with my EEE PC (runing Linux); I can send files to the EEE PC but not from. No idea why (this worked without problems on Windows).

A few days ago my laptop has changed. After about 13-14 years of Windows usage I decided to take a deep breath and change for a Mac running Snow Leopard. I was never a pure Windows user in the sense that the first thing I always did was to install cygwin to give me a pseudo-Unix environment on Windows (I had used various Unix look alikes for about 15 years before and I still use various linux boxes on and off). Also: I stopped at Windows XP, never used Vista or Windows7 (I have heard that some of the features I found on the Mac are now around on those, too). Finally, I am a computer person, working on and with computers, so I do need some features that the lambda user does not. I thought writing down my journey may be useful for others.

A dear friend and colleague of mine used to say “I know the jungle, and therefore I am afraid of the jungle”; ie, with all the praise you hear about OS 10, I was still a bit weary and expected hiccups. And there were of course small issues, essentially finding the right information; some of my colleagues both at W3C and at CWI were of a great help. And, of course, when you do not find something, there is also a google search, which often yields the answer. And the bottom line of my 3 days’ experience: this jungle is friendly:-)

First of all, the book of David Pogue, “Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Snow Leopard Edition”, was of a great help (as an aside, kudos to O’Reilly that all their books are available as electronic only, too…). That book, plus some chats with my colleague Jack Jansen at CWI gave me some information in advance that may not be absolutely obvious at first. As an example, and in contrast to Windows or Linux, the “thing” you click on when starting a program is not an executable, but a special folder, that carries everything the program needs. This why installing a program, moving it around, etc, becomes so much more easier than on a Windows; no trace of that damn registry that makes re-installation and uninstallation so complex there.

So here are some of the issues I did hit, however (I do not want to spend time on installing, say, Thunderbird. That just goes smoothly and is well documented…)

• Snow Leopard does not come with CVS installed. Bugger. However, after poking around on the Web, I found out that you have to install the XCode tools from the apple developers’ site. You have to register as a Mac developer (it is free), installation is simple, and it does install CVS. To be honest, I am not sure what else is installed…
• There is an installed Apache server on the machine (to be precise, Apache 2), but it is fairly well hidden. I expected to find it as a program to be started from the command line (that is the only way I could get it reliably working on Windows for various reasons) but that is not the case. Apple->System Preferences->Sharing gives a bunch of preferences, and you have to check the “Web Sharing” box to start the server (not really obvious, I must say). Then it almost works, except for PHP: luckily, I found a blog item from Kev Chapman that gives details on how this should be done. Essentially, the http.conf should be changed (good I found it because I had my own extra settings to add).
• Although the machine is mine and I am an administrator, I am not a super user automatically. One has to use, say the sudo commands in some rare cases. I have seen that in Linux, but is unknown to an average Windows XP user… something to get used to.
• Coming from cygwin I was used to be able to start up an editor for a specific file from bash (it was not always easy to set that up in Windows, but that is another matter). After my queries, a bunch of colleagues at ran to my rescue (thanks to Coralie, Bert, Yves, Carine, Thomas from W3C and Jack from CWI) telling me that the open command can be used to open a file with its default “handler”; even better, it can even be overridden. Eg, to open a file with the Komodo Editor, one can say open -a /Applications/Komodo\ Edit.app fname and off you go.
• I was of course a bit wary of the old files moving over from the old environment. No real problem. The only slight issue I had was with iTunes: I expected to simply move my sound files, set iTunes to take that as its library. Nop. You have to import the sound files to the local iTunes set up. No big deal, just takes a bit of time with the 40+GB of music I have on my disc. All other moves were just a piece of cake from my external PC hard discs.
• At first my Nokia E90  did not synchronize with iCal and Address out of the box. Thanks to Thomas I found out that one has to install an extra driver from the Nokia site and then it works.
• The only failure: my old, HP printer+scanner does not work as a scanner (although it works without problems as a printer). Unfortunately, Snow Leopard has scrapped this old, 10 year old model from its list. Nothing I can do about it. A little investment to come…
• It took me a while to find out how to use the Mac with an external display and only the external display (eg, with the lid of the Mac closed). After a while (and poking around the Web) I found out: you set up the external display with mirror (that is relatively straightforward), then you close the lid (ie, the Mac goes to sleep) then you, say, hit a key on the external keyboard, put something into the USB slot, or something similar. Ie, you wake the system up with the lid closed; it will use the external screen. I found that a bit convoluted (maybe there is a better way), this is usually a matter of a function key on Windows…

Of course, I had to install a bunch of extra software. This is largely a matter of taste, though, not really of a major interest here. Many programs (Komodo Editor, Mendeley desktop, Skype, browsers like Opera or Firefox, mailer like Thunderbird) have a version for both Windows and Mac, so that was an easy choice for now. I found Colloquy as an IRC client; it seems to work well. I found the ease of the backup system (TimeMachine) remarkable; backup has always been such a complicated issue on Windows…

Many people told me that once you have transferred to a Mac, you do not look back. I cannot say that yet,  of course, but the transfer has been remarkably smooth.  Maybe these notes will make it even easier for others…

(I have received some useful comments since the original version of this blog. In case you face the same transition problem as I did and you read this blog, make sure to read the comments! See also a continuation blog…)