new iMac

It seems macnn is a little busy so here's an alternative look.

It also looks like a lamp. The ben elton mugshot does not help.

Now all I need for complete happiness is to see one of these anglepoise Macs having sex with Bjork in a video by Chris Cunningham.

Yo.

I have just spent much money (although not as much as if I didn't work in education) on a new iMac to replace our 3 & 1/2 year old 17" Intel iMac, which is still working fine and dandy but which is pretty much full of photos. We'd talked about getting a new one next year, but I thought fuck it. The new one is 20", and I went for 4gb RAM, and a 640gb HD. I ordered the (nearly free) iPod Touch too, which I'll sell on to part finance the iMac itself (selling the old iMac will also help with this, and the amount we'd get for it now as opposed to in another year is part of the reason for buying now).

What I want from you lot is hints and tips on stuff to use and take advantage of. For instance, I've never used iCal or GarageBand or AddressBook or Mail, really; we should totally use these, right? We're pretty luddite computer users - we use iTunes & Safari and Aperture and MS Office and that's about it, but there's FUCK LOADS of funky potential right there in every brand new iMac that we ought to take advantage of, right? I think all the funky apps you can download onto the iPhone (TVGuide! Worms! Decibel-meter!) has given me a little bit of thirst for actually using a computer to enhance my life properly rather than just use the internet for talking shit at people.

So, what stuff should I download? What stuff should I use? How can I hook stuff up to the iPhone? Is Mail good and what's the point in using it (I've always used web-based mail clients before)? Please give me ideas.

Mail's not great but you should definitely be using an application for your email rather than the web. (I do use Mail myself.)

For instance, Spotlight searches will trawl through every email!

your favorite little computer program hoonja-doonja (mac version)

I'm curious too about software recommendations, as I'm awaiting arrival of a G4 Powerbook in the next day or two, which I picked up cheap from someone at my work. More importantly, do I need to start dressing trendily now?

What other advantages does using an application over a webclient have? I've just started using Entourage at work, hooked up to our Exchange server - I could use that at home if it's better than Mail?

One thing I think is the syncing of contacts/calendar with whatever solution you're using, if just local it's iCal and Address Book (I do use these), but if you're syncing with Exchange it would be even more useful. Of course all the google stuff is doing that too in the same place, though it take some more effort if you want it to sync locally with the those apps. This is if you decided you wouldn't just rather forgo them and do everything through the web browser. It's also good to have a local backup on your HD of your gmail, though the tagging system makes it a bit wonky. Those apps also sync nicely with your iPhone/iPod.

Sicky, there's just more options and customization available on a dedicated email client. How your mail displays, how you organize and archive it, signatures, attachment behavior, etc. And you can get into automation as well (i.e. all image attachments get sent automatically to a certain folder on your iMac, etc)

Though it's true there's no "tea house" theme.

hate to say it, and I'm a huge Mac fan for many years, but I use yahoo mail and google calender. I sorta use Mail but once or twice I've had hard drive failures so I felt it's in my best interest to keep everything like that online. I do have me.com, which I like for the ease of idisk and file sharing, but since my email accounts are POP accounts it's a pain to use it for email because nothing syncs up with the home application.

I used iCal for a while and it's fine and looks nicer then google calender, but it's just easier and quicker to work with google.

I have Gmail and (work) Outlook email accounts; I don't understand what POP etc means? Please explain to a luddite...

dan are you saying you didn't back up your mac?

POP (or POP3) is a method of fetching email from your mail server. it's the old-school standard and works fine. there's also IMAP which has some niftier options and is more modern.

FWIW i read my gmail via Mail, which fetches it from Google's servers. so it's both always accessible via the Google web interface and searchable/accessibile on my home machine.

Same as TH. I check one gmail acc with Mail. It has its drawbacks but goddamn it's so much better than Outlook. The latter has ALWAYS failed me (sooner or later).

What's Spaces do?

It gives you several "virtual desktops" that you can switch between. i.e. you can keep all the application windows associated with a certain project or type of activity in one "Space" without cluttering up others.

So like having multiple monitors with all your graphics stuff on one, word processing on another, music & web on another?

Yep. Or however you want to organize it.

What are Hot Corners good for?

Also, is there any kidn of index anywhere of all the funky little keyboard shortcuts? Like the option-command-8 thing that inverts the screen (or is shift in there too?), and the two different screenshot things, and all the other funky stuff? Like just highlighting text and dragging it onto the desktop where it saves as a file?

hot corners are good: I have my bottom right corner set to reveal desktop; moving the mouse into the bottom right corner is easier than hunting around the row of f keys for the right button to do the same

spaces is good in theory but crap in practice because it has a lot of inconsistencies w/the way it handles different applications and windows

or it did when it shipped, I'm not sure now cos I don't use it

Sicky you can probably Google that stuff. I don't know off-hand.

I don't use Spaces either but I've always sort of felt that I should.

hot corners let you take advantage of Expose - I set mine up so the top right corner shows all my windows open, bottom right shows all windows within the application I'm using (all my browser windows in firefox for example), etc.

keyboard index - not sure if it lists the funky ones but system prefs -> keyboard & mouse -> keyboard shortcuts has a long list I've never gotten through

this is good:

http://www.danrodney.com/mac/

I do backup my mac, but the whole process of restoring can be a pain, and while the mac is down I can't search that mail, and I want to be able to search it from anywhere. Mail gets my gmail, but when I respond from Mail, the "sent" isn't saved by gmail. And then I find I'm always clicking on the email in mail, then 20 minutes later getting a gmail notifier messsage that my gmail just got the same message. I know, it's stupid, I'd like to have the convenience of Mail working better with my gmail and yahoo mail.

http://www.silvermac.com/mac-os-x-keyboard-shortcuts/

Cool; thanks people!

I have my Mail synced to Gmail using IMAP, it's good because changes you make in the Mail app itself are reflected on the Gmail server, whereas POP3 is one-way communication only - also deleting messages in Mail seems to be the only way you can actually delete messages from Gmail!

mail is super, super useful if you use more than one email account regularly, otherwise im not sure if it makes a huge difference

i have like 5 difft email accts that i use with varying degrees of frequency, all of them on gmail or gmail tools or whatever its called, so itd be a pain to have several difft browser instances, plus sometimes i get an email to one address but i want to reply with another etc etc

or if i get an email to one account but i want to put it in another folders account

Aye; I can see the good points here.

I have several email addresses, and believe that most of them at various times get stuck behind people's spam filters. I tried setting up an imap address at some point but it didn't work the way I hoped.

maybe? but its more so i can check all of my accounts at once than so i can send emails from a ton of difft accts

Here's some really good tips on syncing Gmail with Mail:

http://5thirtyone.com/archives/862

Yeah sometimes I forget that I have like 5 accounts cause it all gets whapped into my inbox.

Separate mail client is the way to go and Mail is the best thing going in the mac world, entourage is a dog and eudora never kept up well. Gmail for me is just a store for mail, calendar and contacts which I access from Mail.app and my blackberry. There is a useful little hoonja doonja to help you configure iCal sync with google, but I need to be looking at my computer to tell you what it is. The only thing missing is a sync of tasks from mail and ical to google, but I hope that is coming soon. Mail.app can do exchange too, but support is not great.

Can you hook up iCal to Exchange (to get my work appointments) without using Entourage? I guess I have OWA.

I think I remember reading something about being able to enter Exchange server details under "Preferences > Accounts" in iCal. But now that I think about it a little more I'm not sure how that would work since they're very different formats.

I think Snow Leopard is supposed to remedy all this (it's due in a month or so).

That link Tracer posted to link to syncing Gmail-Mail needs some updating now that Gmail allows for separate IMAP folders based on labels.

I have the ical/gcalendar sync, but I find it's just easiest to stick with google calendar.

I'm pretty sure you can now (post-10.5.x) subscribe to GCal in iCal without any add-ons.

I am posting from our new iMac!