A friend of mine reminded me that he is not an old salt with a Mac, and he wanted me to give him 5 things to do to help him set up his Mac. These are the 5 Things I would do if I had to set up a new Mac right out of the box. The list after the break.
1. Create two accounts for the Mac.
When you get a new Mac the set up walkthrough has you create only one account. Most people stop at that, but I am going to tell you that if you create only one account you are missing a good security best practice. That best practice is that you should never use an admin account to run your computer normally. Go ahead and create your account. The setup automatically makes it the admin account for the computer.
To demote yourself to a standard user, you need to create another account. That;s done through system preferences>>accounts. Give this account admin privileges on your computer. You can go wild and name it admin if you want. Then give it admin rights to your computer. Once you got that new account, then go to your account and you should be able to remove admin rights by unchecking the checkbox. You’ll need to restart the computer. Login as yourself, but now you will have to use the admin account to install and do anything vital to the computer.
2. Download and Install QuickSilver.
QuickSilver can launch anything using a key combination. You have have to change the hot key in the preferences for QuickSilver. I use ctrl + space. I press those two keys and then about three letter of the program I want to run, and press enter. The programs is now running. This is one of these wow things that I use when I want to impress people.
3. Download and Install NeoOffice
Just about everyone asks me about productivity software. There is MS Office for the Mac, but I find that it’s too expensive. There is iWork which is $79 for the big three, word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Then there is OpenOffice for the Mac, which is a simple port of the Open Source Office productivity suite. NeoOffice is different in that they are trying to make OpenOffice more mac like. Their’s is a true port to the Mac. It feels more like a Mac program than the OpenOffice for the Mac.
the cost for NeoOffice is free, but if you can I’d recommend giving them a ew bucks. If you want to take advantage of their mobile NeoOffice then you have to meet their donation level.
4. Buy Bento and install it.
A lot of my early purchases for the Mac were databases, like Yojimbo. Bento is a simpler desktop database. It consists of a library of tables with forms creation capabilities. Just about all of the smaller databases I have been able to create with Bento. So, It can be sued to replace about three or four databases. A big one I’ve made is a passwords database, and a table of serial numbers for software.
5. Buy and Install Eaglefiler
I used to think that I needed a dedicated note taking program, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I get so much paper that I’ve taken to scanning it into my computer. I’m using PDFPen to OCR the scanned pdfs. I then put the ocred Pdfs into EagleFiler. I also use EagleFiler to maintain all my research and other files including Scrivener book files.
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