It was 2007 when I got my first Mac.  It was so nice and white, but man was it ever hard to use!  Where was the “Start” menu I thought?  And how the hell are these fold­ers orga­nized?  And what is with this strange track­pad with only one but­ton.… ONE BUTTON!?  How will I right click to solve all my prob­lems!???  It seri­ously took me over a year before I could admit to any­one that i had no clue how to use my shiny new Mac­Book, and even then 95% of my friends had Win­dows machines, and the 5% that used a Mac were embar­rass­ingly in the same boat as me.  Well I’m proud to say that that has now changed.  Today, I’m an edu­cated, happy Mac user, and I’m here to share my find­ings with you.

As I’ve pointed out before, and you can wit­ness first hand in any col­lege class or cof­fee shop (or have a look at the num­bers them­selves) more and more peo­ple are intro­duc­ing Apple prod­ucts into their com­put­ing lives, and for good rea­son.  They’re reli­able, aestet­i­cally pleas­ing and easy to use, thats right, easy to use!

Early last year I added a sec­ond Apple machine to my ros­ter of good­ies, and that’s when I got seri­ous about learn­ing how to use them.  I aban­doned every­thing I knew about Win­dows machines, and OS X Lion had just been released, so I set out on a learn­ing expe­di­tion, and a reward­ing one at that!

On a daily basis I only use a few appli­ca­tions, as a lot of my work is web based, so I had to make sure my browser did every­thing I need.  For as long as I can remem­ber I used Safari.  It has tabbed brows­ing, and a book­mark bar (just drag the url onto it and BAM! It’s now there, wait­ing for your beck­oned call).  But recently I needed some­thing more, so I switched to Chrome.  Now Fire­fox is just as good if not bet­ter, but my pri­mary email is Gmail, and I use Google Reader and some other Google apps, so Chrome suited me well, and I’m using it now to write this post.

Next comes my inspi­ra­tion for this arti­cle, Spot­light searches and Alfred.  The prob­lem with learn­ing Apple is, once you find your way around the desk­top, it all becomes sim­ple and com­fort­able.  You have the Dock, which is always there when you need some­thing, and every­thing else just seems to work, so peo­ple don’t look any fur­ther because they don’t feel they need to, when right there, just below the sur­face, is a realm of good­ies that make it not just eas­ier, but way more FUN as well!

Enter, Spot­light.

I first stum­bled upon this quick launch fea­ture by acci­dent, when I hit the Apple key and space­bar together, and a lit­tle search win­dow appeared in the top right cor­ner of my screen.  I typed inside it, and things started to appear!  I quickly real­ized that I could look for and access any­thing on my com­puter from this lit­tle win­dow, and from then on, my life has been much bet­ter!  Go ahead and try it, you can open a file, pre­view a song, and most impor­tantly, launch any appli­ca­tion on your com­puter from here!  Thank me later.

Next comes Alfred.

I dis­cov­ered Alfred in a post on Lifehacker.com, the logo of a bowlers hat intriqued me.  It made me think of askjeeves.com, an old search engive type web­site that would do its best to answer any­thing you typed in it.  So I Googled Alfred app, and dis­cov­ered a mass of peo­ple who swear by it, and praise it for its time sav­ing abil­i­ties and ease of use, and they’re right!

Down­load Alfred (for free) and within sec­onds you’ll be Alt-Spacebar-ing your way to any­thing around you com­puter.  The free ver­sion offers users a beefed up ver­sion of the Spot­light men­tioned ear­lier, in that it’s a “smart app” and remem­bers what you use and how often, and arranges results accord­ingly.  The inter­face is nice and  user friendly and the results it comes up with seem to appear amaz­ingly quickly!

When it comes to per­son­al­iz­ing Alfred, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less.  With the free ver­sion you can set ip up to search your local fold­ers for apps, fold­ers, and files, plus browse the web for an abun­dance of free exten­sions allow­ing you to tweet right from Alfred, to add cal­en­dar events and so on.  When and if you decide to upgrade to the Power Pack for the $30 or so, you will now be able to con­trol your iTunes, search your pho­tos, con­tacts, the web and so much more with just a cou­ple of clicks!

I’ve just been fid­dling around with Alfred for a day or so, but I’ve already for­got­ten about the Spot­light search just like that!

So to sum it up for any­one who isn’t famil­iar with these awe­some shortcuts;

• Apple key + Space­bar will bring up Apples Spot­light search, help­ing you to open and find things more quickly
• Down­load Alfred App to get a sim­i­lar func­tion as Spot­light, but with more fea­tures and capabilities