Switching Here... But have a few questions.

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Howdy All,

Been Looking for a Cool,Apple forum to join and this one seems to be the best I have seen,SO,I joined this one... and this is my first post.



I am a Switcher... As a musician i saw the bright light which was apple,in the audio production dept,when searching for the right software for my needs,and was amazed by OS 9`s Simplicty elegance and functionality...



And was blown away by Imovie/Final cut And then came the 733 mhz with DVD burner everything i need out of the box?



WHOAH... then came OS X,My jaw is still on the floor to this day!!!!! I decided to switch,but i wanted to wait until the move to shift to os X was complete.



also having a job would help too.



Well we are here now and also are the G5s I am saving up for one as we speak... and am not going back to...



"Plug and get mad, Blue screen of death,immense frustration,"Gosh this thing rivals the 8 bit nintendo as far as looks and thats putting down Nintendo",human mice for microsh*t$ Antitrust slaver "pee sea" world."



I am used to having however having 100 percent screen real estate.... Whynne "DOZE" has an auto hide function for any tool bar,where its hidden until i move my mouse into that area and then it appears for me as needed only.



so my web pages take up the whole screen as well as my photos and documents...



I have only had very limited time to play with macs,their are no places near me that even so much as sell mac software

the nearest being an apple store that is 200 miles away.



but from what i have seen and experienced i have a few questions....



1)I know the Dock is Auto-hideable But The bar at the top with the "blue apple symbol" and find edit clock etc. is that auto hide-able???



2) can i surf full screen in safari with the tool bar and tabs auto-hid??? with just a small slider on the right to scroll up and down with Like i can in explorer???



I know these are dumb questions but as available and obvious as these features may seem to you guys,I havent seen them emplimented in any demo or in any way yet.



Im just getting over the fact that i have to buy Norton

60$ to clean,defrag,and registry clean the mac with and these features are built in,In Win$dough$z.



I hope Apple does`nt have another major strike like this against them,which would give me second thoughts or pain my mac experience such as not having these most obvious features,So Far Every Mac Addict i have met has been so kind and great to talk to and welcomed me to their way of Ilife SO I thank you guys and dolls for your patience.



Cheers!!! Catman4d2

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catman4d2

    I am a Switcher...



    Congrats.



    Quote:



    1)I know the Dock is Auto-hideable But The bar at the top with the "blue apple symbol" and find edit clock etc. is that auto hide-able???




    No, not by any default feature of the OS. That is your one, your only, your single... menu bar. You know how in Windows there's one per window? Well, that's rather wasteful of space, and much much harder to hit with a cursor. (it's called Fitt's Law, and it's well used in the MacOS X UI.) On the Mac, that's your menu bar. And no, it doesn't auto-hide.



    However, I do believe that there are shareware apps to perform that function. Don't know them off the top of my head though.



    Quote:



    2) can i surf full screen in safari with the tool bar and tabs auto-hid??? with just a small slider on the right to scroll up and down with Like i can in explorer???




    Close. No auto-hide, but you can turn on/off the various 'extra' elements in the browser view such as the toolbar.



    Quote:

    Im just getting over the fact that i have to buy Norton

    60$ to clean,defrag,and registry clean the mac with and these features are built in,In Win$dough$z.




    DO NOT BUY NORTON!



    I repeat.... DO NOT BUY NORTON!



    I have *NEVER* seen it do anything buy cause more harm than good.



    On the Mac, it sucks, plain and simple.



    Go for Diskwarrior for disk recovery and optimization instead.



    And...



    Defrag: MacOS X does it *on the fly* for you. No tool needed.



    Registry: No such thing under MacOS X. Hence, no way for it to get fubared for you to have to clean up.



    Enjoy.
  • Reply 2 of 12
    catman4d2catman4d2 Posts: 174member
    Thanks for responding,

    I had read somewhere that alot of the problems associated "as seldom as they may be with a mac" were from a fragmented drives a.k.a the dreaded i have 4.8 gigs of storage left but it says i have none problem.



    Yes i have heard that the mac auto defrags,but also that the mac only defrags files that are smaller than 20 mbs at a time while in/or shortly after use.



    what about the whole drive??? or drives???



    In my experience at least with windows their is a major difference in a freshly defragged puter in speed and stability.



    I will miss the full screen functions for surfing and work and basics, ill try some third party custom software and hope apple will change these things in the future, its worth letting go of thse small things though, to take advantage of this Amazing platform.



  • Reply 3 of 12
    mattjohndrowmattjohndrow Posts: 1,618member
    i have to agree with kickaha on this- DO NOT BUY NORTON! EVER!!! it sucks so much, either use techtool or diskwarrior, and diskwarrior is the shit, saved me so many times on my old HD, DW is the king!
  • Reply 4 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catman4d2

    Thanks for responding,

    I had read somewhere that alot of the problems associated "as seldom as they may be with a mac" were from a fragmented drives a.k.a the dreaded i have 4.8 gigs of storage left but it says i have none problem.




    Can't say I've seen that.



    There have been times when specific users have been confused by the 'disk space remaining' reported by various under-the-hood tools, since they were made to report different measures...



    Quote:

    Yes i have heard that the mac auto defrags,but also that the mac only defrags files that are smaller than 20 mbs at a time while in/or shortly after use.



    what about the whole drive??? or drives???




    You are correct on the <20MB, however, HFS+ is tremendously better than NTFS or *shudder* FAT when it comes to fragmentation. FWIW, I've never seen a Mac over 20% fragmentation, ever... even those that have run for several years between reformats. OTOH, my NT4 workstation at my old job would hit 35% in a couple of weeks and require regular defragging.



    Let me put it this way - in 20 years of Mac use, I've defragged a drive once... and only because I thought I had to. The block allocation algorithms in HFS+ result in a relatively lesser defragmentation in general than occurs with file systems you may be more familiar with... as usual, though, if your disk space gets low, fragmentation gets worse.



    Quote:

    In my experience at least with windows their is a major difference in a freshly defragged puter in speed and stability.



    Speed, perhaps, although much of that will only be seen if you're doing something that requires regular streaming of data, such as video editing or encoding.



    Stability? Not so much.



    Quote:

    I will miss the full screen functions for surfing and work and basics, ill try some third party custom software and hope apple will change these things in the future, its worth letting go of thse small things though, to take advantage of this Amazing platform.



    I think you'll find that the non-full-screen actually makes you more productive... at least it does me. For one thing you end up being *able* to access multiple applications at once - something that the robust multi-tasking in MacOS X handles without a hiccup. And Expose makes window management a non-issue.
  • Reply 5 of 12
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    thers no full screen option in (virtually) any program for mac. the interface takes a very differnt approach. the closest button is the green one (i think with a plus sign in it). it enbiggens a window to the largest size necessary. ie, it'll make a folder as wide as the contents. or, it'll make a web browser (like safari) as big as the widest content. if you have a full width (or super width) picture (i think) it'll make the window full wide. the idea of a program taking over the full real estate of the screen is generally against guidelines. its not cooperative with other programs. the mac approach can make windows as big as they need to be, plus give space to other programs. so you can do things at the same time. right now, i have several windows scattered around the screen, at various widths and hiehgts, and can see much of each of them. its a very rare occassion i need a window to be full screen. i dont think apple will change this behavior in the foreseeable future.



    as for fragmentation, its generally not a problem on macintosh. windows uses different file system(s), which are handled differently. i can't remember the last time i used a defrager on a mac, and have rarely heard of them being more than marginally useful. i don't think they present enough benefit to support their cost.
  • Reply 6 of 12
    catman4d2catman4d2 Posts: 174member
    Thanks you guys have been awesome!!!!!



    This is all very helpful...



    but... what about full screen Gaming???



    Think about that for a second and you will really see my point, these issues have been a reason why alot of windowz users dont switch, though i think its a small price to pay for using the Mac platform......



    In one of his recent keynotes Steve Jobs talked about moving the Mac towards user centricity and away from computer centricity, and went on to say how the computer should be out of your way so you can do what you want,which their is nothing more computer centric than being forced do deal with screen space and tools that i am not using at the moment while trying to do pixel painting and cloning in photoshop etc.



    I will have to think about keeping my wintel and use it for gaming and internet "Although i dont want to", like some of the other switchers do,NOW I SEE WHY THEY KEEP THEM FOR THOSE USES, and use the Mac for my film making and music making.



    All other fuctions besides Gaming and internet are a damn nightmare on one of those other machines...

    cant wait to have some real fun on this board.



    Think Different...
  • Reply 7 of 12
    mattjohndrowmattjohndrow Posts: 1,618member
    you can have full screen gaming-most games, like UT, or whatever have a full screen option, it wil be full screen, it's just that certain won't always fill the screen, but if there is a full screen mode, then it should work.
  • Reply 8 of 12
    thuh freakthuh freak Posts: 2,664member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catman4d2

    but... what about full screen Gaming???



    don't worry, they thought of that. games can, and often do, take over the whole screen. but, i don't think, in general, that the mac gaming market is as big [even by percentages] as the consoles, or windows.
  • Reply 9 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catman4d2

    but... what about full screen Gaming???



    Heh.



    Setting a window to full-screen (without a menu bar even) is one line of code... but it breaks every UI guideline Apple ever set out, so it's put in place for... ta-da! Games. (And other situations that step utterly outside the boundaries of normal UI design.)



    Don't sweat it.



    Quote:

    I will have to think about keeping my wintel and use it for gaming and internet "Although i dont want to", like some of the other switchers do,NOW I SEE WHY THEY KEEP THEM FOR THOSE USES, and use the Mac for my film making and music making.



    Naw, they keep them for gaming because there are simply games available for Windows that you can't get for the Mac, not because of some silly full-screen problem.



    Quote:

    All other fuctions besides Gaming and internet are a damn nightmare on one of those other machines...



    Well, you'll be glad to know that Internet interaction is a breeze on the Mac, so basically it just boils down to "Are the games you play available on the Mac?" as to whether you want to keep your PC around.
  • Reply 10 of 12
    catman4d2catman4d2 Posts: 174member
    OK... things have changed in the last few minutes????



    First of all,I got an E mail from apple!!!!



    I sent Somthing to their feed back dept. a few weeks ago about these same issues.... they said they were aware of Windows users greatly missing thess features especially in Safari... and said that their is an apple script available in the software section of their site, that i can use to surf full screen "whatever that means"



    Somthing i can write into the program???



    And that many new customizable features will be made present in tiger to stay tuned "they were pretty vague but to the point... cool.



    Ok upon that i googled the whole issue and found a site called icapture where i could see any webpage in safari

    using quicktime......... WOW!!! So i proceeded to load up some of my favorite pages...



    HOLY SHIRT!!!!!!!!!!!



    this is the most amazing browser i have ever seen!!!!



    1) The entire page loaded into the window, all content that was on the page was viewable zero/nothing was missing, no sliding bars to the right or left and barley anything needed to be scrolled it was all there and fit the window "from leia all the way to han and the falcon on the force.net" all my heroes appeared no window adjustments........... AMAZING!!!!!



    2) It trimmed the fat!!!! no window space was wasted no blank spaces filled with wallpaper that went on for miles between menus or icons, everything that had a function was neatly tucked together but not crowded it was breathtakingly perfect!!!!!



    The only thing being left was depending how big yours/my screen is maybe you might have to scroll down some to read some things but thats it!!!! its all up and down no resizing every friken thing.



    I actually like this approach better.. i can see everything without having to hog anything... this blows the doors open i could have many pages open at once and see everything thats on each page and just expose it!!! to go back and forth.



    I typed in some bull crap in an effort to get an error message, i was rewarded with a little almost like a card that slipped out of the address bar like an old penny arcade fortune machine,"very charming and polite"that said cannot find server inttitled "sexy nipples" and an option to hit ok....not some bulky ugly window that popped up that i have to close or deal with resize or move. It did everything inside the ONE safari window!!!!!!!!!!!!



    3) Its faster than greased goose poop!!!!!!



    And in seeing the whole page in a smaller more unabtrussive way no resizing,I didnt mind having the toolbar right there its so "zen" and minimalist but yet does so much... it jsut faded and i didnt notice it at all. WOW



    My fears about my favorite features being absent are no more

    this really is the new king of browsers,and i would be plussed not to drag "Hexplorer" over into the trash bin when i get my mac if it still comes pre loaded...



    I am blown away and cant wait to work with safari on my own mac...im going back to icapture to see how safari trims up my home page!!!!!! and ill make the adjustments to it using its take on it... thanks everyone my boogeyman just bit the dust!!!!!!!!!!!! jaw melting and sinking into the earth.



    Catman4d2



    p.s. I Will say one thing about myself though, unlike some switchers I aint afraid of no one button mouse!!!!!

    My best freind and i both have had the "tunnel of carpel" which SUCKS!!! and is more serious of an epidemic than most media and people let on. and its all from moving your finger up and down up and down scrolling and from "finger tennis" left and right clicking over and over.



    With the mac, I can rest my whole hand and shift my hands weight with my palm and click and do arrow up and down and shift click with my left hand. which rules!!! in the comfort dept. any switchers complain about one button mice? send them to me!!!!!!!







    Thanks again all.
  • Reply 11 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Ha ha, we told you so, neener neener neener!







    Glad you like it.
  • Reply 12 of 12
    stroszekstroszek Posts: 801member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Catman4d2

    3) Its faster than greased goose poop!!!!!!



    Part of me wants to know how you know this, but part of me thinks that I really don't want to know



    BTW, congrats on seeing the light, you'll never go back
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