Total newbie!

H

Hanyoung

Guest
Hello Mac Forums!

Thanks to the wonderful advice on this forum I have made the jump! I'm a proud user of the mac mini (1.25- 512mb- Airport/ BT), and an accompanying Dell 17" LCD and Logitech LX 500 keyboard/mouse combo.

Things are great! It's almost as if my Thinkpad has gotten computer envy, as a vertical line of pixels went dead on my monitor one day after installing the mac mini. A couple of questions that I wanted to ask... being new to Macs that I didn't find on the forums or on the help books.

1. The download manager: One of the first things I did was to download Firefox and also Citrix client in order to access remote access from my house. In XP, whenever I downloaded anything, it would make it's own folder in the Programs menu and that would be that. On the mac, everything downloads onto my desktop. I then open these files, unzip them, and install the program. Unfortunately the icons are still on my desktop... what should I do with these? Can I trash them? SHould I save them somewhere else? I just don't want my desktop to be full of icons in the future.

2. Best browser? Due to several friend's recs..., I've downloaded Firefox. ANy other recs? ANy way to make this my default browser?

3. The great thing is that my mac recognized my keyboard/mouse combo right out of the box... no more of this semi-plug and play BS. But... is there any way to take advantage of the literally tens of extra keys on this keyboard? Looking it up on the Logitech site..., there are no drivers YET for Mac Os.

4. ANy recs for "must haves" on the Mac? I'm currently looking for a weather program that can show me current/forecast weather on a small box on the screen.

5. I plan on getting a BT phone in the future. I'm in the process (painful) of transferring all of my contact info from my current phone into address book. Is this the best way to go about doing this?

Sorry for the long e-mail... excited to hear from the community!
 
Joined
Jul 22, 2003
Messages
6,999
Reaction score
187
Points
63
Location
Hamilton College
Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac C2D 2.16ghz, 13" MacBook 2.0ghz, 60gb iPod vid, 1gb nano
1. When you unzip programs it usually will give you a white hard disk icon where the program will appear, or it will just place the icon on the desktop. Drag these files to the Applications folder and then you can get rid of them off of your desktop

2. I like Firefox the best. To set it as default go into Safari -> Preferences and Select Firefox as your default browser

3. Unless Logitech releases software for it there are no ways

4. Go to www.versiontracker.com to find a bunch of programs. WeatherPop is my favorite weather program

5. That is the only way I can think of
 
OP
M

meltbanana314

Guest
2. Safari is by far the best for OS X, but for cross platform work - Firefox is still the best. You can make it your default by opening the Safari preferences and changing the default to Firefox.

3. No, Logitech pretty much likes to keep those application keys propriatary and locked down under Windows. I find those keys are pretty much useless anyway.

4. WeatherPop. I don't know anything about you, and "must-have" applications are subjective.

5. Probably
 
OP
H

Hanyoung

Guest
Thanks for the quick replies!

1.) When I try and drag the Firefox drive icon onto applications, it creates a shortcut onto that menu (or "alias"). My guess is that it won't copy it there and if I delete it from the desktop then I'll lose it. Also, what about all the other accessory files on the desktop? Such as the .dmg files and .zip files. Can I delete those?

Couple addt'l ?'s.

ANtivirus: Yea or Neah? I download a fair amount (music and e-mail...) and I seem to get a strong response from both sides.

Thanks!
 
OP
M

meltbanana314

Guest
You don't need antivirus. Some people say you should have AV on your Mac to protect your PC, but as long as you have AV on your PC (which you MUST) then you're better off without it.
 
Joined
Jul 22, 2003
Messages
6,999
Reaction score
187
Points
63
Location
Hamilton College
Your Mac's Specs
20" iMac C2D 2.16ghz, 13" MacBook 2.0ghz, 60gb iPod vid, 1gb nano
Don't drag the Drive's icon just the firefox icon inside of it. Then you can drag the .dmg,.zip and the white hard disk to the trash
 
Joined
Feb 13, 2005
Messages
1,186
Reaction score
73
Points
48
Location
New Orleans, LA, USA
Your Mac's Specs
13" Macbook Pro 2.26Ghz Unibody 4G RAM 160G HDD Superdrive
Regarding your fancy Logitech keyboard/mouse combo, I also have (recently gotten) a Mac Mini and have a fancy wireless Logitech keyboard/mouse combo. It came with a CD that has drivers for the mouse and keyboard for both Windows and MacOS X. After installing that it has a little applet You launch from the System Preferences which allows me to assign the extra keys to just about any application I want. The volume control works, I assigned the "Messenger/SMS" key to iChat, and if I wished I could probably assign whatever apps to any of the keys I want. The Apple keys and command keys seem to be mislabled for Macs, but I'm going by their placement rather than what is labelled on them.

Perhaps you can find someone with a similar keyboard who might have the CD if you do not. It's labelled "iTouch 2.2 Logitech Control Center 1.1.1", and states it is for "Microsoft Windows XP, Me, 2000, 98, NT 4.0 SP6" and "Mac OS X v10.1.2-10.2.6"

Firefox is a pretty okay browser for the Mac, I used Camino briefly but went back to Firefox since I'm used to its controls and extensions. For weather there is a "ForecastFox" extension that puts icons down in the status bar that pulls info from weather.com and you tell it where in the US (or possibly world) that you are and a configurable tooltip pops up a summary of the current and forecasted weather. Nice little extension. You can find it on the extension page at mozilla.org.

I, too, noticed that downloaded things came down to the desktop and once they were "unstuffited" and installed I just trashed [ejected] the mounted dmg and any .sit file that might have been left over. Rather than create aliases for commonly used apps on the desktop I just told the Dock to keep it in the Dock to keep things cleaner on the desktop.

Also if you do lots of multitasking get familiar with (yes, you all know this, but we're n00bs to the Mac world) the F9, F10, and F11 keys. In addition to being a cool effect they can help you figure out where the heck you are in general, in an application, or clear things temoporarily away so you can ask the Finder what is up.
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top