Learning Mac: Basic Setup

Background

A few month ago, a friend just gifted me his MacBookPro.
About two years earlier he felt to need a Mac to be cool, but never managed the transition as a decades old Windows user. So he switched back to Windows. And his old MacBookPro now is mine.
Thanks Martin!

To overcome my almost exclusive Windows only experience so far, I decided to use the Mac to dive into node.js development.

This blog post is just a little scratch pad to note down some steps and findings with the basic setup of OSX. Development related stuff will come later. More might follow.

Attention: For an even moderately experienced Mac user most of the things might be trivial. But being an almost Windows-only person so far, I'm constantly finding myself struggling with absolutely basic stuff.

Phase 0 - Six Month Ago

Basic Setup

On my first weekend as a Mac owner, I tried to clean it up from everything left over from the previous owner, update the software, and setup some basic stuff.

Here's what I did (from the top of my head):

• Created a new user account including getting an AppleId. - Interesting: It felt strange to type apple.com into a browser's address bar. :)
• Deleted the previous owner's account
• Got the latest version of OSX
• Got Dropbox from the AppStore and set it up
• Set up the pre-installed Microsoft Outlook 2011 (strange version number for a Windows-guy)

Print a Photo from my Camera

That was astonishingly hard.
A few of the challenges along that way:

• Simply seeing a file from the inserted memory card. Constantly hitting Win+E (which is not there of course) to open a Windows Explorer. Accidentally found the automatically mounted memory card on the Desktop (is it called like this on a Mac?)
• Installing the correct driver for my photo printer
• Chosing photo paper instead of normal paper. I remember that I gave up on this one. The result of the print was awful.

Bottom Line

For the first day, I had the feeling that it is incredible hard to work on the Mac. I was constantly googling almost every little command. On windows, I love using keyboard shortcuts all way. And on the Mac it is all different.
I'm sure it will take quite an amount of time until I will feel productive on OSX as well. But I will strive for it and share.