Here is list of "10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know" by a guy named Paul Stamatiou.

What can you add to this list of knowledge for new Mac users?

As a licensed religion, you are bound to tithe to Steve Jobs via a new Apple purchase, once per year, 10% of your annual earnings.

You think I'm joking? I'm deadly searious.

Ok, maybe I'm joking.

LOL

11. Apple will introduce a new version of OS X every year to 16 months. You might as well save your money - you'll end up upgrading anyway.

The official, from the Apple Macintosh Bible, book of Steve Jobs, chapter 19, verse 84:

The ten statements
1. "I am Steve Jobs, the one who brought you out of the land of Windows..." - This commandment is to believe in the existence of Jobs.
2. "You shall have no other operating systems besides Mine...Do not make a disc image or any likeness of what is in your system folder..."
3. "You shalt not register falsely your Mac OS installation..."
4. "Remember the clean desktop and to repair permissions" (the version in man pages mentions "Keep" rather than "Remember")
5. "Honor Mac OS 9 and NextSTEP, and remember that the new version is always better..."
6. "You shall not delete the Mac OS from you hard disk and replace it with another operating system." - The Microsoft translation makes a distinction between deleting and appending.
7. "You shall not download My developer releases unless you are a registered developer."
8. "You shall not install the Mac OS from a disc you did not buy." - Some translations include the phrase "pirates will burn in hell".
9. "You shall not be a member of the hacking community, nor shall you be involved with modifying My operating system to work on unclean hardware."
10. "You shall not covet new, unreleased versions of the operating system"

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Ok, enough fun. Seriously, I think the like above contains a lot of good information for new Mac users. Especially the users comments added, as well.

I'd just like to say that, seriously, OS X benefits a lot from 1GB (or more) on both PPC and x86, I personally consider that the minimum (and RAM is cheap now).

Yeah, I need another Gig to assign and play with VMWare

It's also a Really Good Idea to get a copy of Drive Genius (or similar) to defrag your disks every week or so. Despite everything Apple says, if you don't your system gets slower ... and .... s.l.o.w.e.r.. and s...l...

Defragging the system drive needs to be offline so you have to boot with the DG disc or do it from another system-capable partition. Several tools let you set up a special rescue boot partition to do this.

Here's the catch with using boot CDs. You set the system to boot from CD and restart. That bit's fine. If the Boot CD allows you to set the next boot to HD, that's also fine. But Drive Genius doesn't, and if you have a real Mac and a third-party wireless keyboard you have to find some mechanical way to open the DVD drive during the next boot because the system will try to boot from the CD again. OSX doesn't load the wireless USB driver until it's too late so you can't hold down F12 or any other key combination to fix it. I have a springy bit of metal that presses the real eject button on the DVD drive and I can yank the DG disc out as soon as the drive gets power.

Or you could just hold Option while booting and select your Hard Drive.

Ari

Just in case anything happens to the page in the years our forum is up I'm reproducing the list from the first post here.

I’ve compiled a list of 10 things every first time Mac owner, particularly Mac Mini owner, should know about their new computer and operating system. This article should answer some burning questions, enlighten you about some features you did not know about OS X and just all around be helpful. Enjoy. Any questions can be directed towards me here. I wrote this for 123MacMini.

256 Won’t Cut It

Upgrading to 512MB of DDR RAM is suggested and will get you off to using a Mac on the right foot while an upgrade to 1GB will really unleash some speed. More RAM means you can have more applications open at the same time and decreased boot times. I recommend 1GB for photoshop or other intensive application users. Any memory rated DDR333 or higher will suffice. If you can find one with a CAS latency of 2 or 2.5, get that over one with a CAS of 3. If you’re not sure to go Crucial’s Mac section should be just what the doctor ordered.

No Need to Defrag

Whenever a PC is acting sluggish the first thing you hear people ask is “Have you tried defragging the hard drive?” However, this is not the case with Macs. Based on the proven and reliable Unix architecture with a Mac OS Extended Journaled file system, you don’t have to worry about defragmenting your hard drive to boost access/reading/writing times; it is done for you automatically. (Technically, it is not being defragged but things are just put in their place with journaling) Whenever your mac detects that it is fairly idle or you attempt to use a heavily fragmented file, it will start fixing up your filesystem. This might explain some noises coming from your computer in the middle of the night (assuming you left it on).

Closing Unresponsive Applications

The Mac equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up a system tasks profiler for force quitting unresponsive tasks is CMD-OPTION-ESC (or Windows-ALT-ESC if you are using a PC keyboard). Just select the frozen application and hit Force Quit. If a program is completely frozen, it will appear in red text.

Where Did That Window Go?

You will quickly learn that when you minimize your applications, they go to the dock. Specifically the items to the right of the bar in the dock menu are open finder windows or applications. This is similar to the area where minimized applications go in the windows task bar. Also, if a finder window is not minimized, but behind another open window you can bring it up by clicking on the finder icon in the dock.

Updates

You will want to occasionally check for updates from Apple by accessing the Apple menu and clicking on Software Update. I recommend heading over to Apple > System Preferences > Software Update and setting your Mac to automatically check for software updates weekly and download important updates in the background.

System Profiler

The System Profiler, accessible via Apple > About This Mac > More Info, is the one stop shop for finding out anything about your Mac. Similar to Windows XP’s Administrative tasks and Device Manager, the System Profiler is easy to navigate and offers you a plethora of system information from application versions to the MAC address of your ethernet card.

Expose

Apple introduced Expose to OS X to make your life easier, so go ahead and use it to your heart’s content. Go to Apple > System Preferences > Dashboard & Expose and play with some of the settings to make those menial tasks more convienient to execute. My favorite Expose tip is setting an active corner to open up Dashboard. One simple mouse movement and Dashboard launches.

Login Items

A major annoyance with some applications is that upon installation they will automatically set themselves to run when you boot your computer. For Windows XP, you would usually run msconfig to remedy this problem. However in OS X you can access a similar menu in Apple > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. From here you can add, remove and hide items that launch when you login.

Eject Optical Media

This is probably only a problem for those that are using non-Apple keyboards, that lack a CD Eject key. Press and Hold F12 for 2 seconds to eject any CD or DVD. An alternate method is dragging the CD icon on the desktop to the trash. This will not delete it. You can also use the Command-E keystroke.

Keyboard Shortcuts

If saving time and being productive is the name of the game, then keyboard shortcuts are for you. The next time you are browsing around the menus of your favorite applications, take a glance at the right side of the menu to see if you find any shortcuts that can help you out. Here are a few to get you started.

Command-? Mac Help
Command-A Select All
Command-C Copy
Command-D Duplicates current item
Command-E Ejects selected volume, media, or server
Command-F Find
Command-H Hide current application
Command-I Opens Get Info dialog for selected item
Command-J Toggles View Options Open & Closed
Command-K Connect to server
Command-L Creates Alias for selected item
Command-M Minimize a Finder-folder to Dock
Command-Option-M Save as above but minimizes all open Finder-folders
Command-N Opens up new Finder window
Command-O Opens selected item
Command-Q Quits active application
Command-V Paste
Command-W Closes Finder-folder window
Command-Option-W Same as above but closes all Finder-folders
Command-X Cut
Command-Z Undo
Command-Del Moves selected item to Trash
Command-Shift-A Opens the applications folder
Command-Shift-N Creates a new folder in the selected workspace
Command-Shift-Del Empty Trash
Command-Tab Rotate through open applications and switch to highlighted app
Command-~ Same as above but only flips through open windows in the selected application

most important thing to say to a NEW mac owner:

"you just made a mistake..."

vi, old unix and linux users know about vi but some noobs don't. There are ways getting arround it, like some people I think edit kext by opening them with some other editer, but it is good to learn anyway and some people prefer it over anything else, because it's a cool editer and it's already there.

I learned it from a book called "Sam's Teach Yourself Fedora in 24 Hrs" which was from when Fedora 3 was new, but I'm sure it's available for fedora 4 or 5 and he may have one for mac I don't know. (the 24 hrs is bs but he is a good teacher and makes learning the basics of the shell and vi easy).

I recently had to break it out and look stuff up because I had not used vi much and had to relearn the commands. It's was also a great book for learning other commands and using the terminal, but surely there is an equivelent mac for dummies that should be posted for noobs. IMO the terminal and vi probably deserves it own sticky.

HiFi:
Why do you say that?

Another list... this time, one geared just for "switchers."

http://plasticbugs.com/?p=312

12. No Real Mac users actually use the 1 button mouse.

Actually, I know plenty of real mac users who use their silly single button mice, I just think of them as kinda slow to catching on that more buttons is easier and more productive Silly sheep following their Steve Jobs...

I bought a mightymouse, how was I to know the darn thing would have only one clicker? I'm going to have to drill a few holes in it, i guess, to install some buttons and maybe route a slot on the top for a wheel.

I find it pretty funny that there are people out there still using the single button mouse, only way that news could be even more funny is to find out they are using the puck mouse that came with the early iMacs and G3s.

I've been a Mac User all my life and as soon as they dropped the ADB port and started using USB I stopped using a one button mouse. Every Mac user I know hasn't used a single button mouse since the Blue & White G3. To this day I'm still surprised Apple hasn't moved on to a 2+ button mouse, heck even OSX is built around the idea that you have a 2 button mouse.

I know, right? I usually move around the desktop too fast to wait for the contextual menus to come up by holding down the left button... The thing that drives me nuts is in Safari for example, if you right click on the back button you only get the menu for the toolbar. You have to hold down the left button and WAIT for the list of previous pages to come up. And god forbid your system is multi-tasking, that wait could be a few seconds! I know apple is 'Think Different' but c'mon, lets try to think sensibly as well... /rant

Actually, it's more productive to learn keyboard shortcuts and work with them.

here's another newbie tips-list, I found this one really good:

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2003-12-21

Here's a good one--learn the little things in your system. You have an extremely powerful productivity and virus making tool in AppleScript. Learning just a tiny bit of that deceptively simple language will give you nearly everything you ever wanted.

Another fairly good list for switchers:

http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/...a=176527,00.asp

every mac owner should install x11 as soon as possible. it enables me to use the GIMP and openoffice, as well as many other programs. suport for x11=very good.

An irreverant list:

http://www.edwardthomson.com/blog/2006/04/...e_monsters.html

They all get really hot. Get ready to turn on the air conditioner.

did anybody know shortcut for rename .. like F2 in windoze ?

Enter key works for me. (Hackintosh)

Just press enter

in finder YES,
but what's about iTunes? or Exel ? or any other app?

I want to know how to create the little dock in the middle of the screen that the Apple stores have for Concierge and the Events Calendar

Big Kahuna is this what you're looking for?

you're talking about widgets, right?

That looks like it!! If you go into an Apple Store, they have that in the middle of the screen, so you can easily access Concierge, News & Events, Shopping the retail store online, and ... and.. something else

it's pretty slick.


Okay, next task.. does iCal allow me to show a calendar on the desktop??? like as my wallpaper?

The vast majority of Mac notebooks have the keyboard touching the screen somehow, leaving regular shiny marks on matte screens and crud on glossy ones over time. If this concerns you, you might want to consider getting some sort of soft cloth to protect your screen (and maybe even wipe it).

glossy ones are more resilient to cleaning products. Matt can absorbe the finger grease over time, so keep them clean. The glossy ones are less absorbant, so use some screen wipes every week or too.

Just click and hold you mouse over the name for like a second. Or in iTunes for more advanced editing, hit Cmd+I to bring up the Get info screen where you can edit the title and stuff.

Experimenting with this i found that if you hit Cmd+R with a song selected in iTunes, it reveals the file for that song in Finder!

Also, don't forget that Cmd+space to quickly access Spotlight, it makes searches so much faster!

How do I execute the 'spinning cube effect' and what is it useful for?

i wish to find how to set up VPN AUto reconnect...

The spinning cube effect is used when "Fast switching" between user accounts. If you go to 'System Preferences' -> 'Users' and click on 'Logon Options' (I think) you can enable that option. It's usefulness? It just looks cool.

haha silly rabbit, mighty mouse does have a right click button (well you just have to push on the right side), found this out by accident while i was at my local Fry's. but from the date of this post, i'm sure you've probably found out by now

how did you guys not know that, i knew that before i even got one, it's so awesome

my maw waisted $50 on anti virus software, dont buy it, it has no use in mac.

what antivirus, if you need one, just get a torrent. ur maw has a mac?

it was at her old office, imac g3 500mhz purple

nice, does she still have it?

it was owned by the office

sucks, it would be cool to still have it

go buy one, ebay is like cheap as hell

yeah life 50-100!

life?