If you’re new to the Mac, welcome. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d like to point you to some resources to help you get started. Apple, of course, provides some help itself. The Mac comes with a useful but often forgotten Help menu. Apple provides a support site, AppleCare phone number, and genius bars at their retail stores where you can go to ask questions. Then, of course, there’s Google. Let’s move beyond those, though.

Even in the age of the Internet, there’s nothing quite like a book to give you a nice starting point. David Pogue has written some excellent books, such as Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard edition and Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. Reading either of those from start to finish would get you off to a great start.

Popular Mac magazines include MacWorld and Mac|Life, but frankly I’ve come to prefer the Internet because it’s so much more up-to-date.  Don McAllister has a video tutorial podcast named ScreenCastsOnline, which has both free and paid lessons. Victor Cajiao has a free audio podcast called Typical Mac User. For Mac news, there’s Adam Christianson’s MacCast and the TWiT network’s MacBreak Weekly. As for regular websites, you can try TUAW and Mac Forums.

The best places for finding software are IUseThis, MacUpdate, and VersionTracker. Each are directories of Mac software from all over the web, but IUseThis puts an interesting twist on that. People can register on IUseThis and tell it what software they actually use. Not just have, but actually use. IUseThis then ranks all apps based on number of users or recent spikes in interest. It’s a great way to discover new apps, and I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s worth pointing out that many of the best Mac apps are either freeware or inexpensive shareware.

Hopefully this helps. If you’ve got any further suggestions, please share them in the comments. Also, notice the “Share” link below for passing this on to someone you know.

Introduction to smart playlists

iTunes has a feature called smart playlists. Unlike manually populated regular playlists, smart playlists are automatically populated by iTunes based on criteria that you specify. Also, they can automatically update as content is added to your library, or as information about an item changes. For example, you can make a smart playlist for a particular decade, or for songs with particular ratings. As you add more music from that decade, or as you change the ratings of your music, those smart playlists will automatically reflect those changes.

You create a smart playlist by choosing “File” -> “New Smart Playlist…” For more information, see the iLounge.com article, “How to create smart playlists.”

How this will work

Smart playlists can work together with each other by requiring their items to be in a particular playlist or not be in a particular playlist. This very powerful feature is critical to this guide: four playlists will be working together to produce a single playlist, which we’ll call “Balanced.” That may sound complicated, but you only have to set it up once, and the results are absolutely worth it.

Playlist 1: “Blocklist”

You might have some content you don’t want coming up on shuffle. Create a smart playlist called “Blocklist” of items which meet “any” of your unwanted criteria. Give it some thought. Some examples: Christmas music, videos, items below a certain rating or above/below a certain length, and spoken word like podcasts or audiobooks.

Once you have a playlist containing everything you don’t want, other smart playlists will be able to exclude anything found in that playlist. By doing it this way, you can block unwanted items in multiple smart playlists without unnecessary duplication of rules.

Playlists 2 & 3: “Been a while” & “Forgotten”

Half of “Balanced” is going to be the least often played of the least recently played music in your library. You will need two playlists to accomplish this. You will also need to decide how much content you ultimately want in your “Balanced” playlist, in terms of either time, file size (MB/GB), or number of items. You might want to base it on, for example, the size of an audio CD (80 minutes) or MP3 CD (X number of MB) for easy burning.

Create a smart playlist called “Been a while” with this rule: “Playlist” “is not” “Blocklist.” Below that, tell it to “limit to” your desired limit (see previous paragraph), selected by “least recently played.”

Next, create a smart playlist called “Forgotten” with this rule: “Playlist” “is” “Been a while.” Give it half the limit you set for “Been a while,” selected by “least often played.”

Playlist 4: “Randomness”

The other half of the Balanced playlist is made up of just one playlist. If “Balanced” was purely made up of the previous playlists, then over time your content would keep playing in a similar order. To mix things up, you still need some true randomness.

Create a smart playlist called “Randomness.” Tell it to match “all” of the following three rules: (1) “Playlist” “is not” “Blocklist,” (2) “Playlist” “is not” “Forgotten,” and (3) “Last played” “is not in the last” [some threshold]. I personally chose two weeks as my threshold. Give “Randomness” the same limit as “Forgotten,” but make it selected by “random.”

Finally, “Balanced”

The  “Balanced” playlist itself is very simple. Tell it to match “any” of the following two rules: (1) “Playlist” “is” “Forgotten” or (2) “Playlist” “is” “Randomness” and press “OK.” Choose “File” -> “New Playlist Folder” and create a folder that you can tuck the other playlists into. You’re done! Now sit back, relax, and enjoy a library that is always fresh!

1. First and foremost, the iPhone uses Safari, and the only way for third party developers to develop for the iPhone is through web apps. Having Safari on Windows helps more people develop for the iPhone, which makes for happier iPhone users and perhaps more iPhone sales.
2. Apple makes millions of dollars from people using the search box in the browser’s toolbar. I believe that Mozilla made something like $50 million dollars last year from the Google search in Firefox. It’s very profitable, and with version 3 they’re also adding Yahoo.
3. Bookmark syncing between Safari on OS X and Safari on Windows (Bootcamp, work computer, multiple computers, etc.) is another incentive for people to pay $100 a year for .Mac.
4. Simplifying development of the iTunes Store.
   • In Mac OS X, the Safari rendering engine is actually separated from Safari itself into a framework called WebKit that’s used by many different OS X apps, third party software included.
   • Apple wants the iTunes store to look identical in both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes.
   • The KHTML rendering engine for the longest time could not be used on Windows because it required certain Unix roots. This has only fairly recently been resolved.

   For these reasons, Apple has had to maintain two separate rendering engines: one for WebKit and one for iTunes. Apple has always bundled QuickTime with iTunes because it’s what handles the actual grunt work of media playback. They’ll be bundling Safari with iTunes for Windows, and I think that in the future iTunes may use the Safari rendering engine for the iTunes store. That would simplify things for Apple.

5. From a fairly long term point of view, this is also about ensuring Apple’s relevance. In the future, it may very well be the case that the web browser becomes your real platform for your apps, and your OS may not matter as much. Apple will be able to offer web apps to Mac users and Windows users. Also, because the KHTML rendering engine used by Safari comes from Konqueror (a browser/file manager for the popular KDE desktop environment for Linux), users of all three major OSes could be potential customers. .Mac could even be the way to access these web apps.
6. More exposure to Apple products to Windows users mean more potential switchers, although obviously Apple has to be careful about what they make available so as to not diminish the point of switching entirely.
7. More web site compatibility with Safari.
8. No need to promote a competitor (Firefox) to Windows users wanting to develop for the iPhone.
9. The Apple employees may have wanted Safari for themselves for when they have to use PCs. They are a major Windows software developer after all.

If you’ve thought of some reasons as well, I’d love to hear them.