For those of you not familiar with Macintosh computers, you should know that they come pre-installed with a good collection of software applications. And unlike the freebies that are often thrown in with other computers, these bundled software applications are actually very good, often among the best in their class, anywhere. They are the full, complete versions of the applications (not just stripped down demo or lite versions), and you get these at no additional charge, ready to go as soon as you turn on your new Mac.
These programs will have you doing just about every basic computer task you can think of (and maybe a few you haven’t thought of), such as:
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email; -
the web;
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chatting & video conferencing with friends;
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photo organizing, touch-up & sharing;
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music ripping, burning, buying, making, organizing, playing;
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watching DVDs, videos, downloaded TV shows and movies;
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editing your own videos;
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creating a personal web site or blog;
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posting any of the other stuff you make to that web site;
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creating CDs or DVDs;
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saving almost anything as a PDF file;
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opening and saving Word files;
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and other things I’ve yet to bother or need doing myself.
Maybe the most common question people have about Macs is: can I run Microsoft Word on it? The answer is absolutely yes. In fact, Microsoft Word was first written for the Mac. If you think you need or prefer Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office, Microsoft makes a very good Mac version. (Which is to say, it's about as good as or better than most things that Microsoft publishes.)
Apple also publishes the reasonably priced and easier to use iWork. This includes Pages, a word processor that is also an easy to use basic desktop publishing program. You can use it for documents that you print, to make professional looking PDF files, or even to make web pages -- or you can make one document, then save and publish it all three ways. iWork also includes Keynote, the presentation program that Al Gore used to create his good looking and now famous presentation on global warming.
BTW, every Mac comes with a basic word processing program, which can open and save documents in Word and RTF and text formats. Honestly, for most things that average people write (especially if you don’t write large documents or everyday), it probably does all you need. (Hell, more and more people only write using their email program or a blog.)
And there are assorted other word processing programs and office suite collections available on the Mac (or on Windows, for that matter).
Beyond that, almost every well known software application from a major publisher comes in a Mac version. And file formats -- like Photoshop (.PSD), Excel (.XCL), Acrobat (.PDF), to name just a few -- are platform agnostic; that means that Photoshop file saved on a Mac can also be opened by Photoshop on Windows (or by any other program that can read PSD files). So sharing files between a Mac and Windows is no harder than sharing them between one Windows computer and another.
Finally, on all new Macs (made with Intel processors) you can actually install and run Windows -- and therefore any program that runs in Windows. If, for some reason, you wanted to.
5 March 2007
