Mon, Jan 05, 2009

CPMH Tips: June 10, 2001

Simple Mac Tricks for Windows Users

By David L. Hart
From Chapter 7 of the Cross-Platform Mac Handbook

Sometimes the problem that Windows users have with the Mac has less to do with a visceral dislike for the Mac than the learning curve associated with moving from a familiar interface to one they don’t know. As a result, you hear gripes about how "The Mac can’t do this" or "Windows does it this way." With some basic instruction and a few pieces of shareware, it’s possible to make Windows users more comfortable in front of a Mac.

GUI Orientation

I won’t get into the argument of which graphical user interface (GUI) is best. We all know whose was first (Xerox PARC). What does matter is helping a Windows user mentally adjust from one to the other. Figures 7-1 and 7-2 show Mac and Windows screen shots with labels indicating roughly comparable elements of the interfaces.


Figure 7-1. Mac OS interface

Figure 7-2. Windows NT interface
  1. The Mac OS "Apple" menu (upper left corner) is roughly equivalent to the Windows "Start" menu (lower left corner by default). You can make the Apple menu more familiar with a few basic additions, described below.
  2. The Mac OS menu bar (across the top of the screen) is context sensitive and provides the menu commands for the active application, including the Finder. Windows application menus are contained within the main application window.
  3. The Mac clock and other system indicators appear in the upper right, while the Windows equivalents appear at the lower right.
  4. The Mac application menu (upper right corner) shows the current application and lets you switch among open applications. The closest Windows equivalent is the task bar (bottom of the screen), which shows all of the open application windows. The Mac’s pop-up folders (bottom) also provide some functionality similar to the Windows task bar.
  5. The Mac desktop icons line up along the right side of the screen, from top to bottom. Overflow columns are added from right to left. Windows desktop icons line up along the left side of the screen, from top to bottom. Overflow columns are added from left to right.
  6. A basic Mac OS window has the title centered and three buttons in the title bar: close (left), resize (second from right), and window shade (right). A basic Windows window has the title at the left and three buttons at the right end of the title bar: minimize (leftmost), maximize (center), and close (right). Mac "window shade" and Windows "minimize" are roughly comparable, as are Mac "resize" and Windows "maximize."

GUI Adjustments

While there are similarities between the Mac OS and the Windows interfaces, it’s possible to make the Mac OS look even more like Windows. You may be asking yourself, "Why would anyone want to tamper with the perfection that is the Mac OS 8 ‘platinum’ appearance and make it look like Windows?"

I can give you one scenario that happened to me. My wife left her job at a Windows software developer, where–obviously–Windows computers were the standard. From there she moved to a Mac-based public relations firm. She was cut off from PCs and found herself forced into Macs, both at work and at home, where I had a Mac. No matter how pleasant the Mac interface, being forced into it is awkward at best. A few adjustments helped make her transition easier.

Apple Menu. With the basic Mac OS installation, the Apple Menu has a mish-mash of items–including the occasionally handy Key Caps and Calculator and the almost-never-used Jigsaw Puzzle and NotePad. Other key items are missing. You can fix this easily enough.

  • Open your System Folder and locate a folder called Apple Menu Items. Whatever is inside this folder appears in the Apple Menu.
  • Open the Apple Menu Items folder and, from the View menu at the top of the screen, choose "as List." This is just to make the folder contents look more like the actual Apple Menu.
  • Make a New Folder (command-N), and change its name to Accessories. Put all those random little applications inside, except for perhaps Chooser, Network Browser, and Sherlock (or Find File). Your Apple Menu looks better already.
  • Create another New Folder, and name it Applications. Inside this folder, place aliases for all your commonly used applications.
  • Finally, add an alias of your main hard drive. (Click once on the hard drive icon and type Command-M, or Option-Command-click on the icon and drag it into the folder.) Another tip: Change the alias name by inserting a space at the beginning. This will make the hard drive alias be alphabetized first.
  • Done. Close the Apple Menu Items folder, and check out your new Apple Menu. It now very closely approximates the Windows Start menu, with access to your hard drive, major programs, control panels, and recently used items.

Makeshift Task Bar. Windows users get addicted to the Windows task bar, and there are a few ways to approximate this feature on the Mac. Option 1 is to use the Launcher control panel. You can add applications to the Launcher and move it to the bottom of the screen. However, I don’t like the way that the Launcher clutters up the screen, so I made my own in Mac OS 8.

  • Open the Apple Menu Items folder (inside the System Folder).
  • Open the Applications folder that you created above (with all your most common application aliases), and from the View menu, choose "as Icons" if it’s not that way already. Select "View Options…" to choose the larger icon size.
  • Resize this window to be very wide and flat, and arrange all of the icons, single-file, in one (or possibly two) horizontal rows. To get them close together, you might want to shorten the names.
  • Click on the window’s resize button (upper right) to fit the window around your icons.
  • From the View menu (at the top of your screen), choose "as Buttons." Select "View Options…" to choose the smaller icon size. (You can use large buttons if you like.)
  • Click on the title bar of the Applications folder window and drag it to the bottom of your screen until it becomes a pop-up tab.

Now you have a basic application launcher. Mine is shown in Figure 7-3. You click the tab to pop it up for launching or switching between applications, but it stays out of the way when you’re not using it. You can also drag files and folders onto the tab to pop it up. Note that you don’t have to use the Applications folder from the Apple Menu Items folder; you could create another. I just use the same one so I only have to update one folder if I want to add a new application.


Figure 7-3. Makeshift Windows "task bar"

I should also mention that there are various shareware utilities that do all this and more, including the popular DragThing shareware by James Thomson, listed in Table 7-1.

Actual Task Bar. If jury-rigging the Apple Menu and task bar isn’t enough, you can add an actual Start button and task bar to the Mac OS with the GoMac utility from ACTION Utilities. GoMac replicates quite closely the Windows Start menu, task bar, and even keyboard application switching–pressing command-tab (like Windows alt-tab) brings up a dialog that lets you switch between applications with the arrow keys.

The keyboard application switching by itself is also available in the LiteSwitch freeware from Proteron (the original developer of GoMac).

Ultimate Windows Camouflage. For the most complete Windows camouflage without actually running a Windows emulator, get the Kaleidoscope shareware that lets you redesign the look of the Mac OS interface, as shown in Figure 7-4. A predefined scheme will eerily reproduce the Windows look. Combine this with the GoMac utility and only the Mac OS menu at the top of the screen will remind you that you’re using a Mac.