Knowledge Work

I haven’t used a Mac regularly since 1996, but about a month ago I found myself in a techno-trance state, in the Apple Store in SoHo, New York City, swiping my AmEx card to buy one of the new Intel-based MacBooks.

(I was driven screaming back into the arms of Apple by a hauntingly awful experience with a late public beta of Microsoft Vista. I’ve transitioned quickly in the last few weeks to using the MacBook as my primary work machine, and I haven’t looked back.)

My new MacBook 1.83Ghz (512MB RAM, 60GB HD, $1099 at the Apple Store in NYC) arrived ready to go right out of the box. It was unusually well-equipped with pre-loaded software; not just a Web browser (Safari), e-mail client (Mail) and a host of related tools, but a licensed copy of Apple’s powerful and cool iLife multimedia suite, plus 30-day trial versions of iWork and Microsoft Office 2004.

From the time I broke the seal on the box and unpacked the cute little beast, I was up and running in about ten minutes… the first clue that I was in for an experience that was very, very different from my last ten years in the Wintel Wilderness.

That being said, if you are of the geekly inclination, you’re going to want to make some additional tweaks and purchases to optimize your Mac-using experience, especially if you have to continue to collaborate with colleagues who are tethered to their Windows machines. So with that in mind, here’s what I’ve learned in the first month of owning a new Intel-based Mac and fitting it out so that I can still work with my Windows peeps.

(Muchas gracias to long-time Mac user and old friend Chap of Chapomatic for helping me identify and select some key downloads and purchases for my new toy… er, tool. Thanks also to Take Control Books, whose inexpensive e-books Take Control of Switching to the Mac and Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac were invaluable aids and worth five or ten times the $15 I paid for the pair in time saved and frustration prevented. )

PROTECTION

I almost never purchase the extended warranty on any electronic item I buy, but I make an exception for laptops. The three-year AppleCare package for a MacBook runs $349, or just a tad over $115 a year (not quite $10 a month, about 32 cents a day, etc.) Just do it.

And while you’re at it, check out your homeowners or renters insurance policy to see what kinds of electronics coverage you’ve got; you might want to call Safeware for a price quote as well (replacement-cost insurance coverage for my MacBook for one year, covering theft and all kinds of damage that AppleCare won’t: $51.)

As for the other kinds of protection a migrating Windows user might be worried about–anti-virus, anti-spyware, and so forth–fuhgeddabouddit. OS X comes with a built-in firewall, which I recommend that you turn on, but as for viruses and spyware, they basically do not exist in the wild in the OS X world (yet.)

For the truly paranoid among you (I can relate!), download ClamXav, a shareware antivirus tool for the Mac, which allows on-demand scanning of files and folders… and use your PayPal account to toss a few pounds sterling to Mark Allan, the nice English fellow who writes and maintains it.

PIMP MY MACBOOK: RAM EDITION

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. If you didn’t buy the maxed-out version of your MacBook, the good news is that you can add third-party RAM (fully compliant with Apple specs) for a fraction of the cost that Apple will charge you.

2GB of MacBook-compatible RAM from the incredibly nice people at Small Dog Electronics ran me about $225 with tax and shipping, a significant savings over the $500+ that Apple charges; installation took ten minutes and a small Phillips-head screwdriver, and was actually a breeze even for a mechanical klutz like myself. Just download, print and follow the simple RAM installation directions on Apple’s web site (PDF link.)

The increased performance you’ll experience when you max out your memory is hard to believe. (RAM is a user-replaceable part on the MacBooks, and upgrading your RAM does not void your warranty.)

WRITING AND PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

I write for a living, so this is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart.

If you want to share documents with colleagues in the Windows world, you’re going to want to bite the bullet and pony up for a licensed copy of Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh. It’s not optimized for Intel processors (yet) but it runs okay on the new Intel-based Macs, and it’s pretty much a must if you have to collaborate on documents with folks who use other versions of Office on other platforms. (Unlike the Windows and Linux versions, the free and open-source OpenOffice is not something I can recommend on the Mac side; it feels clunky and unreliable, and even the Mac-specific builds like NeoOffice are Not There Yet in my opinion.)

Suggested retail price for the full version of Mac Office 2004 is $499 (ouch), but the “Student and Teacher Edition,” which you can qualify for if you or anyone in your household is, well, a student or teacher, is widely available for a street price of $140 or less, sometimes a lot less; there’s a $50 rebate going on right now that brings the price to around $80 at some outlets. (Hint: The “Student and Teacher” version, which allows installation on up to three machines, is widely available online, e.g. on eBay and Amazon.com; even though I actually qualify for it through my continuing education teaching gigs, nobody demanded to see an ID or proof of eligibility at any point in the purchase or registration process… nudge, nudge, wink, wink.)

If you’re a hard-core writer or blogger, for actual day-to-day text editing and word processing use, you’re probably going to want something a little nicer, more Intel-optimized, and muscular than Microsoft Word. As nice as iWork’s “Pages” program is, my preferred option is actually Nisus Writer Express, a $70 powerhouse available in an Intel-optimized version, that Just Works for a bevy of writing tasks.

In addition to being a very competent and affordable word processor, Nisus Writer Express has a bunch of power-user features that geeks will love, including a built-in Perl interpreter and a well thought-out graphical interface (“PowerFind Pro”) to GREP, an incredibly feature-rich search-and-replace tool. It’s screaming-fast, supports a wide variety of file formats (though in my experience, complex Word documents that rely heavily on styles don’t always transfer well) and is just generally a pleasure to use; I’m writing this blog entry in Nisus Writer Express right now.

If you present ideas for a living, you should also take a hard look at OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, two very powerful programs from The Omni Group. OmniGraffle is a diagramming tool, like a Mac version of Visio (the Pro version reads Visio XML output, kinda-sorta; complicated Visio diagrams will require a fair bit of reformatting.) And as for OmniOutliner, I haven’t enjoyed using an outlining tool so much since the days of the late lamented MORE in the early 1990s.

All Omni products are available for separate purchase; the “Omni Professional Productivity Bundle,” which includes the professional versions of both OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner as well as a few other tools, runs $225, which I paid without demurral.

COPING WITH WINDOWS

If you’re dependent on Windows programs that are *not* available on the Macintosh side, and you have one of the new Intel-based Macintoshes, you’ll want to download and install Apple’s free Boot Camp (which allows you to choose between OS X and Windows XP at startup) or my preferred solution, Parallels Desktop ($79; on sale for $49 through July 15) which allows you to run Windows (or Linux, or just about any OS that runs on Intel) in a Macintosh window.

Both Boot Camp and Parallels require you to supply a legal copy of Microsoft Windows XP, as well as your own Windows software. I use Parallels with a copy of XP SP2, and run programs like Microsoft Visio and Project with no difficulty at all.

Remember that even a virtual Windows session is prone to viruses, spyware, and the like; you’ll want to protect your Windows partition or virtual disk just like a regular Windows machine.

Oh, and if you need to keep your address book, to-do-list and calendar synchronized between and among multiple machines on multiple different platforms, give Plaxo a look. $49 a year for Plaxo Premium is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made in the computing world. (Currently, only address book/contact information is synced on the Mac.)

BASIC UTILITIES TO BUY

In alphabetical order, a few things you’ll want to pick up:

• Audio Hijack Pro - capture and record any audio source you can play on your Mac; includes timer and automation features, making it not unlike a TiVo for streaming audio. $32 from Rogue Amoeba.
• The aforementioned shareware anti-virus tool ClamXav; donation to Mark Allan Software at your discretion (I chipped in GBP 5, or about $9.25 US; hey, big spender!)
• GraphicConverter - convert, tweak and resize graphics from one format to another; a must-have. $30 from Lemke Software.
• Fetch - great, easy to use FTP/SFTP client for the Mac; $25 from Fetch Softworks.

GREAT FREE STUFF

In alphabetical order, a few things you’ll want to download and install:

• Adium - Multi-platform chat (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google) for the Mac.
• Audacity - Free, open-source audio editor. Yes, the Mac ships with GarageBand, and there are other audio tools available, but I put out a podcast for quite some time using Audacity and I’ve grown accustomed to, and comfortable with, it.
• Camino - The web browser of choice for the Mac; a Macintosh-optimized version of Mozilla.
• Handbrake - DVD to MPEG ripper/converter (see also: Mac The Ripper.)
• Nvu - Free, powerful HTML editor.
• QuickSilver - A ‘launcher’ program, but so much more; I am just beginning to scratch the surface of what can be accomplished with this powerful tool, which basically learns the way you work on your Mac and helps you find files, launch programs and perform combinations of the two (e.g., “e-mail this file I just found to my friend Chap”) with stunning speed.
• TextWrangler - Free, versatile text editor from the folks at Bare Bones Software, who make the excellent BBEdit.