Cool Mac Things

Here are some cools things I’ve been able to easily do with my Mac this week that would have been more difficult, or in some cases impossible, using my PC:

1. I wanted to copy 4GB of files from my iBook to Catherine’s iMac quickly. I connected the two computer together using my iPod’s firewire cable, and my iBook became a disk drive on Catherine’s desktop. Copied the files by drag-and-drop. Blammo.

2. I wanted to run the GnuCash open-source personal finance program. I simply installed XDarwin and ran the program from the Linux server in my basement (the same one that serves this website). The program “ran” on the server, but all of the windows, dialog boxes, etc. were “on” my computer, so it seemed like a local program.

3. Catherine wanted all of the addresses from my Address Book in her Address Book. I used iSync to sync my Address Book with our .Mac account, then did the same on Catherine’s computer. Blammo.

4. I wanted to take a bunch of data files from Elections PEI, process with with Perl, then produce a report as PDF file of the results. A combination of Perl (built-in to OS X), AppleWorks (included with my iBook) and OS X’s built-in ability to print to a PDF file from any application made this quick and easy.

As I’ve written in this space before, I moved my old PC into the basement, and have been using my iBook as my work machine since September. I placed an order for a new iMac, with a 17” screen, this morning because this trial period has gone so well. I guess I’m a Mac user now.