So You Bought a New Mac, Now What?

Congratulations, you’re one of the approximately three million lucky so and so’s who got a new Apple computer so far this year. It’s agreed, that sleek aluminum unibody looks gorgeous on your desk, but now that it’s out of the box, are you getting the most out of your new computer?

For those of you ready to dive in but just need a gentle nudge in the right direction, here are the first five things you should know about your Apple computer.

Menu Bar

Across the top of every screen lies the menu bar. It has consistencies across every application and is the key to the functionality of your system and commands. Ever-present in the top left corner is the Apple Menu, a drop down menu which holds root level commands over your basic system preferences. The Apple Menu contains some handy day to day operations, including force quit, software update, and a shortcut to your 10 most recent documents and applications.

To the right of the Apple is the active application preferences menu and next to that is a file menu (open, save, print etc.) edit menu (cut, copy, paste) a number of app-specific menus, (bookmarks, view, share,) and finally the help menu. It’s comforting to know that whatever program you happen to be using, the basic navigation is essentially the same. From the right side you can expect to see your Spotlight icon, active user name, keyboard language, clock, speaker volume, Bluetooth, Time Machine and various other icons.


Dock and Dashboard

The Dock is the graphical panel that shows your currently open and chosen favourite applications. You can customize the dock to sit on the left, bottom or right of your screen, or disappear altogether and reappear with the scroll of the mouse.

The Dashboard also lives in the dock and contains various handy tools and widgets such as calculators, weather reports, dictionaries and stock-tickers at the click of a button. There are hundreds of fun and/or useful little apps available for download at the Apple site.

Spotlight

This is the blazing fast and ultra-thorough search tool that appears at the uppermost right corner of your screen. It indexes every character in your entire home folder and can find not only files, folders and applications that match your search term, but also documents, web pages and emails that contain that term. It’ll also display exactly where in your home folder said document resides.

Time Machine

It’s true, sometimes bad things happen to good computers, and if something in your computer is going to fail, chances are it’ll be your hard drive. Time Machine is the built in, automatic back-up tool that can prevent that sinking feeling you get when you realize your computer has died, taking with it your family photos, music collection, masters thesis or client database. Simply attach external hard drive and never think of it again.

Viruses

The actual science on this matter is misunderstood. Apple quite rightly claims that its computers are immune to all viruses that infect PC’s. However that doesn’t mean there aren’t malicious files out there that can affect the Apple OS. True, the Unix platform on which the operating system is based is more robust and secure, but immunity to malware simply does not exist. The short answer is that yes, Mac computers can be susceptible to various non-PC based viruses. Anecdotally speaking, neither I, nor anyone I’ve ever met, has ever (knowingly) suffered from a computer virus.

In the future we will explore some more indepth features of your Apple computer. For now, the most important lesson to learn is that, short of physically breaking it, there’s not much you can do to ruin your new computer, As long as you keep your data safe, you can feel free to explore your Mac system, change the settings and layout to your specific needs and comforts without fear. Enjoy.