Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

introduction

If you’re not so much a switcher as an adder (you’re getting a Mac but keeping the

PC around), you’ll be happy to hear that Macs and Windows PCs can “see” each

other on a network automatically, too. As a result, you can open, copy, and work

on files on each other’s machines as though the religious war between Macs and

PCs had never even existed.

• Voice control, keyboard control. You can operate almost every aspect of every

program entirely from the keyboard—or even by voice. These are terrific timesavers

for efficiency freaks. In fact, the Mac can also read aloud any text in any program,

including Web pages, email, your novel, you name it. You can even turn the Mac’s

spoken performance into an MP3 file, ready to transfer to a CD or a music player

to enjoy on the road.

• Full buzzword compliance. You can’t read an article about Mac OS X without hear-

ing certain technical buzzwords that were once exclusively the domain of computer

engineers: preemptive multitasking, multithreading, symmetrical multiprocessing,

dynamic memory allocation, and memory protection, for example.

What it all adds up to is that Mac OS X is very stable; that a crashy program can’t

crash the whole machine; that the Macintosh can exploit multiple processors; and

that the Mac can easily do more than one thing at once—downloading files, playing

music, and opening a program, for example—all simultaneously ...