Learning to use my mac better

I have to say, that when Windows 8 came out, I swore I would never own one.  Where to go? What to do?  I love my iPhone.  It would be very difficult to convince me to move to another phone than iPhone I love it so much.  As a result, I decided to invest in a Mac as my replacement for my PC.  I so enjoy my Mac.  It does a lot. I have my issues with it like any other computer I have owned, but I get around them fairly easily at this point. In point of fact, I am sitting here writing this on my Mac, rather than my PC.  My PC is for work now. I don't use it for anything else (if I can help it).

One of the things I LOVE about my Mac is the ability to take movies from the video cam or my regular camera and get it setup into an actual movie that can be placed on a DVD.  I am a such a novice though. I poke around and see what I can do. This weekend I was asked to actually combine and edit work for a set of classroom plays for a family member of mine.  I thought this would be fine. I can figure this out.  I soon felt over my head.  I didn't know what I was doing.

My ultimate answer to anything that I do, when I don't know what I am doing, is to use Google Search.  It is my very best friend when it comes to technology.  I know for a fact that 9 times out of 10, someone out there has already done what I want/need to do. I just need to find the right page.  This was no different.  I also thought it would be helpful if there just happened to be a tutorial on YouTube.  That has also been a great tool for me.  So I searched. I found an awesome tutorial.  Oddly enough it is from a company called PCClassesOnline.com.  PC has so been coined for Microsoft Windows OS that I had to rethink the term. If you look at the website, you'll see it is a bunch of tutorials and classes for the Mac.  Go Figure. I finally altered my thinking.   PC  really stands for Personal Computer.  A Mac is a personal computer - just better ;).  I had to mention this because I found my brain was twisted so much by this thought...funny huh?

Back to the original point here.  If you're looking for a good introduction to iMovie on the mac, I found this particular tutorial.  I really loved it!  I hope you do too!

iMovie 2013 Class - By PCClassesOnline.com

Tweaking Win 8.1 to return to our favorite Desktop (Using Classic Shell to make life a bit better)

Windows 8.1.  What can I saw.  Being a power user I have come to truly find this OS to be my worst nightmare. I have my particular issues starting with "Windows Store" as they like to call Metro now because Microsoft can't be think up a better name. Seriously.  It's the friggen start menu blown up to take up all your screen so that you have to scroll for ages gone by to find what you need.

I find Win 8 and Win 8.1 so distasteful that I have told my household we will not have it in our house.  You heard me right.  No Win 8/Win 8.1 in the house.  I've been more of a Mac user for the last 5 years or so than a PC user when it comes to home life.  I have an iPad, an iPHone and a Macbook Pro.  My daughter currently uses my hand-me-down iPad Gen 1 to do what she needs to.  My husband and I do still have PC's but both are Windows 7.  I'll be damned if I buy another PC to do my job in the future.  Will continue to factory restore my Win 7 as long as the hardware holds out.  Same for my husband.  Once either one of them dies we will find the replacement software so things work on Linux or on Mac.  Period.

You say, "Well that is all well and good but what about the family outside the current household? What about the grandparents etc?"  Well I have to begrudgingly say that I am having to face this now. *sigh*.  My father's machine took a deep 6 and he bought a new machine. *sigh* Then he came to me saying "What is this and how do I use it?"  To which I responded, "I warned you."  I am now having to make his machine more familiar to him. I spent about 3 hours last night uninstalling stuff and putting his stuff on.  To the credit of Best Buy where he had taken his old machine, they put all his data onto the new machine and I didn't have to do nearly as much as I thought I would have to.  So the first thing I did was to return the good ol' start menu back where it belongs.  If you don't know about Classic Shell ( http://www.classicshell.net/), you need to look into this.  It literally brings back your Start Menu the way you remember it:





You can then move forward with your life pretty easily from there. The Shell in the lower left corner can be changed to show the image with "Start" next to it to make it more obvious.  I did this for my Dad.  Now with Win 8.1 not yet out to the general public, I'll have to teach Dad to get to the desktop but I feel confident he can get that far for now.

I did find through a co-worker an additional article from ZDNet  that I am going to work on tonight to make things a little bit better, however.  The article focus' more so on Win 8.1 it the new tweaks Microsoft gave in to in order to make things more palatable. But some still can be utilized with Win 8.0.  The only thing it doesn't cover is utilizing Classic Shell which is why I am posting here.

So if you're like me and you refuse to allow the beast in your home but it's swarming nearby, perhaps these recommendations will make look a bit more like an old friend than a rabid dog.