Hi.

Iv been looking at macs for a while now and iv done my look arounds and im buying me one of the new mac books. But any ways i was wondering if anyone could give me some webpages or just some tips to learning Darwin. If ppl wouldent mind sharing the pros and cons of a mac.

Thanks alot.
TJ

Resources for learning how to use a Mac? I'm not really sure exactly what you mean by that. About two years ago, I bought an iMac (I had never used OS X before then). I just played around with it until I got the hang of the interface and everything. The single most helpful resource I can point you to (and one that I've used countless times when trying to get something done on my Mac) is Google. Beyond that, try visiting something like macworld.com. They review Mac software and accessories, as well as providing a steady supply of how-tos and other stuff for Mac users.

You want some pros and cons. Well, some things I can think of off the top of my head include very good stability, ease of use, and a pretty interface. :-) The software integrates very nicely into the hardware, so the only need for installing drivers is external stuff (and Macs usually handle that pretty well, too).

Bad things? Well, a strange phenomena I have observed on my Macs (both Intel and PowerPC) is a slowdown as I use more and more applications. Before you start laughing at me, let me point out that I only have one or two applications open at one time. So by the end, I've still only got a handful of applications open, yet my Mac is often so slow I can barely use it. A simple reboot does the trick. But actually, I haven't had too many things things that bug me on my Mac (except for a bunch of partition table issues, but that's because I'm a geek).

thanks Joe

you could always buy a book. Ive noticed a lot of OSX related ones coming outy lately.

Congratulations. I got my first Mac about a year ago and love it. It's got a great interface and is very stable. I usually have about 4 or 5 applications open at a time, sometimes more, and still haven't noticed any slowdowns. Just be aware that if you run Firefox on it then you will see the same memory leaks that it has on other platforms as well. Safari isn't much better with memory either so I just close the browsers when I'm not using them.

I don't know if you have much Linux experience, but that is one of the main things that drew me to the Mac. The shell is so powerful and the functionality is similar to what I am used to with Linux since it uses many of the same gnu utils.

A couple of things I would do when you first get it is to grab some additional freeware applications.

#1 Rudix -http://rudix.org/
If you are used to a command line environment this is great. It adds some utilities that are present by default in linux and bsd systems, but didn't make it into OSX.

#2 If you use IRC at all there is Colloquy and Macirssi. Macirssi is my favorite but both are good apps.

#3 Ichat is nice, but Adium is better for instant messaging. Adium has a customizable interface with some great themes and supports more protocols.

#4 Mactex - I love LaTeX for writing documents and this is an all-in-one port for the mac.

As far as books and things there are a ton out there. One of the guys at work uses one from the "Missing Manual" series, but it is really self explanatory. There are a lot of resources on the web, plus some decent IRC channels as well. Have fun with it.

you can get msn for the mac too

Tack Flip4Mac onto that list. Because Microsoft discontinued WMP for Mac, the only way you can stay up-to-date with WMP codecs is with this beautifully simple QuickTime plugin.

Sorry to come late to the party, but I found that the VLC player/adapter worked much better than the "Flip". At least when I used Camino, didn't try it on Safari brfore I pulled it with uApp, (sorry, don't know enough HTML) which works great at pulling ALL the files of an app. Better than any uninstaller I used on Win.