I am a mac person now

I made the big switch about a month ago and I have never looked back. Virtually everything I used to do using computers I can do better now that I finally have a mac. I have Snow Leopard and haven't come up with any major problems yet. I am printing wirelessly three printers ( direct via bluetooth at home, direct via Wi-Fi (router attached to printer) at work, and via smb to another networked printer at work. The latter two were trickey: direct via Wi-Fi you have to find out the printer's IP address, and to find that out you have to hold down one of the printer's buttons to make it print it's identifying information, including the IP address. For the networked printer, even trickier. You have to find out the URL of the printer on the network and translate it into a format mac understands: in my case it is smb://xxx-03.yyy.phy/HPLaserJ. (That's the networked computer name/PrinterName) I needed to download Snow Leopard drivers for the first two printers; for the third, no driver needed since it is a shared printer.

Other fun things I have learned: Snow Leopard has a built-in VNC client, which means that with the free app VNC Lite I can see and control everything on the mac desktop over the Wi-Fi network on the screen of the iphone. in fact, I just typed this sentence using VNC on the iphone. It is useful if I want to dicate into MacSpeech Dictate using my wearable wireless microphone while in a different room from the Mac. I can still watch the words pop up on the iphone via VNC. Woo.

More great stuff: Mac Mail Rules and Applescript. You can define Rules for mail that act like powerful little macros and the rules can invoke Applescript scripts. Since mobile me email is "push", I can write php scripts on my MAMP server, and run the scripts remotely using the iphone, which results in pushing commands to the mac via mobile me -> via rules -> via applescript. In this manner I can print customized documents to a crisp laser printer right off of my iphone, and I can alter the content of document by entering the data on the phone via MAMP, and the php script handles the formatting (because it's html email with formatting tags). Two big helps on this: (1) Get rid of the unwanted headers (Mail->Preferences->Viewing->Show Header Details->None. (2) Rules run on the mac BEFORE the mail message that triggers the rule is delivered. So send a second mail message with the actual command in the subject line AFTER the HTML message is received (in php: sleep(1); makes the script wait just long enough to work) .

I'll mention a few more things in less detail: Finder -> Command-K is similar to Windows Key-R for connecting to servers: but instead of \\servername use smb://servername. When adding printers, remember to click the plus sign and then control-click the menu bar to get the option to customize the menu bar by adding the "Settings" icon. Built-in Automator macro app. Publishing your iCal calendar on-line for integration into your family's various calendars on their iCals (and iphones via mobile me). Time machine. Backup. The keyboard shortcuts under System Preferences -> Language and Text AND System Preferences -> Keyboard.

In short, it's a whole new world and a better one. Wow.