So you’ve moved to the Mac, but you can’t seem to find this “Ease of Use” that everyone keeps talking about. What’s the matter? Usually what I’ve found is that old habits just die hard. You’ve been using Windows so long that you think like Windows now, instead of looking at the problem. Sure, you’ve found some things are are as easy as they look, but you’re still doing things the old way – the long way – and haven’t found anything that could be an easy alternative, mostly because you haven’t looked. Well, let’s try to un-teach you your Windows habits, and hopefully you’ll begin to see all these easy ways of doing things pop up while you’re working & playing on your new Mac.
An Easy Example: iChat
Sometimes when chatting on the computer with a new user over iChat, they send me links to things. When I get them, they’re formatted like “http://webdff.ead;lbjb213411lsa;r43w…..”, as if they typed that whole mess in. If you’re using Safari to browse the web, you don’t have to manually type the address in, or even select copy and then paste. If you simply drag the URL(or even easier, drag the icon next to the URL), you’ll notice a green “+” appear
So instead of doing the old-fashioned, slow, and not generally as easy Windows highlight, copy & paste routine, you can simply drag the URL (or URL icon) to the iChat text field, and accomplish the task in fewer steps, with a nicer outcome.
Another Easy Example: iChat Integration with Address Book
If you’re not already using the Mac’s Built-in Address Book program to keep tabs on everyone’s contact information, you really should! There are fields there for addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, websites, and… instant message screen names! So say that a buddy of yours emails you or calls you and says they have an AIM screen name.
And the integration doesn’t stop there, either. If you get an email from the address you have on file with them, when you check your mail in the Mail Application, there will be a green circle next to their name, indicating to you that they are online at this moment (provided you’re connected to the internet, of course). It also applies if you have added them to an event in iCal as an attendee; you’ll again see the green dot if you see their name in the Attendees field in iCal should they be online & available. All throughout the system, there is tight integration such as this. A book could be written and still miss some, and it expands beyond the scope of this article. But even just as mentioned in this example, you can see how using the tools properly can make things much easier everywhere else, by preventing you from doing duplicate work, and making things & information more available to you.
Another Easy Example: Dragging Text around
There’s programs out in the wild that you can buy to help you copy text & have multiple “clipboard entries” at one time. But there’s an easy & free way to accomplish this, using drag & drop functionality built in to Mac OS X, as well as one of their bundled programs.
You probably didn’t know this, but if you select (highlight) text in a document, such as Microsoft Word or Safari on a web page, you can drag it around to somewhere else. This is useful for instance, if you are creating a document and need to grab a line to quote out of a web page. Simply highlight it, click on it & drag it to where you wanted it in the document you are creating. Poof! It’s copied there, just that fast. No need to right-click, select Copy, then go to the other document & right-click again & select Paste. Simplify with a one-step process of drag & drop.
Now why pay a company money to do something you can do by teaming up this functionality with the “Stickies” program? Instead of worrying about having multiple clipboard entries, create your own way of doing it. Open the Stickies application, and drag the text you want to keep “Paste-able” into a new note. This is really easy, you can do it by – you guessed it – drag & drop. There's a few ways of doing it, and I'll show you two. First, once you open the program, you can go to File>New Note, and a new note will open up that you can drag stuff in to. The easier way to create a new note though, is to make sure the program is running and/or in your Dock, and just drag the text
Another Easy Example: Moving Files
In the Windows world, I see people all day long who end up with copies upon copies of the same document they’re trying to move to somewhere else. It usually starts when they accidentally saved the file they were working on in the wrong place. Well, now to put it where it belongs, they either re-save it to the other location, or they do this: they go to the file, select it, copy it, and then paste it where they wanted it. And what’s the purpose of this?
On the Mac, the easiest way to accomplish this is the easiest way to accomplish it, which is the most intuitive as well. You drag the file from the location it is in already and just drop it where you want it. Usually, if you’re trying to move it to a subfolder that’s buried deep in other folders, I find it easiest to make both the folder where the file already resides and the destination folder visible. Then, you just click, drag, and drop the file from one place to another.
Yeah, but how do you open two different folders is what you're asking now, right? Well, don’t forget what we’ve learned previously! Every option you have available to you on the Mac is readily visible in the Menus for each program. If you want a New Finder Window open, make Finder the active application, go to File>New Finder Window, and now you have two.
And of course, there’s the shortcut method. Say you’re at one level of folders in the Finder, and need to open a subfolder you’re looking at (as I was for the pictures), and you don’t want to start a new window at the top but instead just open a new finder window of the folder you want to select immediately. You can do this by holding down the ⌘ key and double-clicking the folder you want to have opened in a new window. Easy as pie, now you have two Finder windows open and one of them is the exact one you want already!
Easy as Intuitive: The Mac Design Philosophy Explained
As I've said before, the thing to remember about the Mac is that it’s meant to be intuitive. What’s that mean? Well, we call the main computer screen the “Desktop” because it was meant to mimic a real desktop. You put your commonly used files front and center on it, and file your mounds of paperwork and files that needs to be organized into “folders” in cabinets. Well, let’s take this a step further. Say you had a paper file of a shopping list you made by hand. Say you left it on the desktop, but you decided you actually wanted to put it in the top drawer for later. What sense would it make to “copy” the list (by hand, mind you), then put the copy in the place you wanted the list to go now? What you’d probably really do is this: you’d grab the file and move it (drag) to the place you wanted it, then put it there (drop). Easy. Now the file is where you wanted it, and you didn’t have to have another useless copy lying around and go through the steps necessary to make it.
That’s the idea behind the Apple OS and Mac platform, and often the very area I find that the disconnect that happens between people having a computer that does for them as what would “come naturally,” versus people’s insistence that using a computer (a logical computing device) must require setting aside intuitive logic and a forced learning of different principles (i.e, having to “cut” or “copy” a file from where it is and then “paste” it into a new location, rather than just “moving” it).
Why this happens is still a mystery to me, but it would seem that since the computers are the tools, not the people, that they should behave the way we want them to, meaning they need to learn to function in accord to our principles of logic (the Mac way), as opposed to having the people forget everything they know about how things work and do things the way the computer specifies. You want the file right there? Sure thing, boss, there it is. No extra copies, no “cutting,” no welding, I just moved it right there from where it was, just like you wanted me to, because you're the boss and I'm just a tool used to accomplish the tasks you specify.
Isn’t that what we want? We want things to be easy and intuitive, because it’s our nature to be lazy! And that’s why I have put these pages up on the internet for you: To try and help you understand that it’s not hard using a Mac, it’s actually a lot easier, but somewhere along the lines in your computing past, you forgot that the computer was the tool, not you. Time to think like a person and have the computer adapt to your logic, instead of you otherwise adapting. Forget the cryptic & inane habits you learned in the Windows World, and instead focus on trying to work with the content you wanted, putting things where you wanted, and doing it easily.
And what’s more, since it’s all so easy, you’ll notice that the “veil of computer logic” that exists in Windows (everything that happens behind the one window you have open) actually makes logical sense, and it won’t eventually pile up to a mess you’re too afraid to delve into. You’ll know where your files are, you won’t be afraid to access them, and it’ll all make sense! Your documents folder is on your hard drive, under your user folder (since your a user), and any documents you put in there will stay there, and any OTHER folders you put in there will stay there, as well!
There! Just like we all intended it!