Mac Kindergarten

In the last post we covered Perian, a great, free extension to the Apple QuickTime Player to play all kinds of video and audio files.
However, as you might have seen, Perian does not support Windows Media. But be not afraid, we are here to help you.

Please welcome Flip4Mac, which enables you to play Windows Media Content with the QuickTime Player or view Windows Media videos in your browser (e.g. Safari).
There are several versions of Flip4Mac available, with only the Player itself being free. Unless you want to create content in Windows Media format, this basic version is enough.

You can get it at the Flip4Mac website, just hit the “Download Now” button to get the installation image.

Here is how to install it:

1. After the download has finished, the file shows up in your “Downloads”-Stack.

2. Click the stack to open it up and locate the downloaded file.

3. Click the file called something like “WM Components …” Doing so in a stack opens the file.

4. Now the mounted disk image shows up in the Devices list in Finder.

5. Now double-click the Installation package and proceed according to the instructions on the screen until you successfully finish the installation.

After the installation, as with Perian, you receive a new item in the System Preferences, that allows you to set up Flip4Mac according to your needs. The things you can set up, speak for themselves.

Mac OS X uses QuickTime as the standard for everything in connection with video (file extension: .mov). However, there are situations, when you receive video files that have a different file format and thus can not be played with the standard setup of Mac OS X.

This is exactly where Perian comes in. It’s a free addition to the QuickTime Player, that enables you to watch all kinds of video and audio file types on your Mac using QuickTime Player.

It adds native support for a long list of file types, so you can play them as they were QuickTime files, or e.g. use them in iLife programs.

Great, huh? Go get it at www.perian.org

Ok, this project is going fairly easy for us.

It turns out, there are great tutorials for everything around your new Mac directly from Apple. One is the Mac 101, which is a set of tutorials cover the first steps of setting up, customizing and getting used to your Mac.

This is great for us, since it gives us the resources to prepare tutorials and how-tos for you, covering all the great freeware tools for Mac OS X. In the near future we will look at a bunch of applications you will not be able to live without.

In the meantime, click here to get to the Mac 101 tutorials from Apple.

Click here, to go to the Switch 101 set of tutorials, aimed at people, switching from Windows to a Mac (aka switchers).

See you around and help us to spread the word about Mac Kindergarten!

Apple recently posted a series of instructional videos and text tutorials. They are aimed at people new to the Mac platform.The tutorials cover

• Mac OS X
• Photos
• Movies
• Web
• and Documents

and are a great way to start exploring your Mac.Enjoy!

Here we go. Welcome to Mac OS X Leopard!

This is pretty much how Mac OS X Leopard looks like after you finished the inital boot of your Mac.

(click thumbnail to enlargen image)

You see the two main things the Desktop.

The menu bar at the top. It always stays there - not matter which program you have open. See the apple-icon to the very left in the menu bar. Click on it to access things like information about your Mac, System Preferences and also to shut down or restart your Mac. On the very right side of the menu bar you see different icons, such as the time, a little speaker (for volume control) and a magnifying glas.

This is Spotlight, which is used to search for all kinds of things on your Mac - files, folders, emails, dictionary entries, etc. We will cover Spotlight later. Of course you can play around with it. Just click on the icon to open the search box and enter something; e.g. “Leopard” (without the quotation marks). Just give it a try.

The dock at the bottom of the screen. It is used to launch programs and to indicate running programs (you see a blue light-spot below the icon). See also the folders on the right hand side (next to the trash bin). If you click on them, they open up in a nice way. Give it a try now. These two items - menubar and dock is what we will refer to in the future.

Hello everybody!

This is the Mac kindergarten, the place to make you a better Mac user. Together we will explore why Mac OS X is such a fantastic operating system and how we can use it in a nice and effective way.

This blog is dedicated to switchers, beginners and everybody not so used to computers. Some basics like a mouse usage and keyboard input are required and we guess you have that already, so we’ll skip that. But don’t worry, if something is Mac-specific, we’ll cover it.

We are here for you. Welcome to the kindergarten!