Getting Started

Yesterday, I dropped by my local Columbia, Maryland Apple store and attended my first One To One session, hosted by Nick. Nick was a smart guy, helpful, and ready with all kinds of answers. But aside from all of that, Getting Started was actually worth the time it took. Let's get a little deeper.

Okay, so I had been putzing around with OS X for a little under a week, and I was fairly confident in my abilities. "Oh, that's how you uninstall a program. Oh, THAT's the keyboard shortcut for closing a window." The most aggravating thing so far had been the similarity yet greater differences to Windows. Once I let go of preconceived notions, it became a great deal simpler to just start clicking and learning.

Nick helped me out a great deal, and it's a great credit to him that he kept his cool while explaining to me what to him were just the basics of operating. For instance, did you know that on a laptop, it can recognize different energy savings settings for being operated in either AC cord or battery mode? Yes, and it works. Or, did you know that in System Preferences > Displays that the little check box at the bottom (Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes) really is a neat feature? Try this. Check that little box and place your hands on the upper most portions of the keyboard, but on the outsides of the keys. Notice the screen growing dimmer when your hands cover those spots? Nice feature huh? It's nice that Apple thought about us late-night gamers' and DVD watchers' eyesight.

Other features we covered included pretty much everything in the System Preferences folder, which should be default installed to your dock. System Preferences is similar to Window's Control Panel, except there are no subdirectories to navigate through. Exploring around in there is pretty informative. One question I posed was how to password protect my system on screen saver and login. Nick showed me the simple solution. System Preferences > Security, the first checkbox after the break in the window should work for password protecting from screen saver and sleep mode returns. Want a log in screen even if only one login for the system exists? No problem. System Preferences > Accounts. Navigate the sidebar to the account in use, and "unlock" the settings menu by clicking the lock icon on the bottom of the window and entering a password. After it's been unlocked for changes, click the Login Options icon and uncheck the "Automatically login as:" box. Make any other changes you'd like to the login screen and click on the lock at the bottom of the window again to lock those settings. Viola!

Of course, some things we didn't cover. Most of the iLife programs we did not use. But to learn basic navigation, the course worked well. I recommend this for all new Mac users. I came to OS X thinking "I know Windows, this can't be that challenging." It's not, but there's always those one or two tricks you can't just pick up on your own. Expose...I would have been clueless if not for Nick. Now I know how to map my screen corners for various presentation functions.

Okay, now I'd like to do a little shout out recommending for someone. When you get a chance, make sure you stop by MacbookPodcast.com. It's a site hosting podcasts done by Jason Whitener and he's got some good information for Mac n00bs like myself. You can also listen in on Talkcasts that he's now doing. So make sure you stop by soon and check out his site.

That's all for now. I know this first post is quite unpolished, but I hope to change that in the future. I'd like to work on my writing style, prepare notes much better, get some screen captures and pictures to place in posts, things like that. As always, feel free to drop me a line at my email address, cam.macn00b@gmail.com, or leave a comment from the link below.

Thanks, and stay tuned for more soon.