Help Session #1, Meet Mr. MacBook

I spent a few hours with my Aunt and her new black MacBook tonight passing on some of my newly aquired knowledge :) If you’ve been reading Keynote 2 Keynote for a while you’ll know that she’s my first Mac convert. The day her MacBook first arrived I told her to just play with it for a few days and write down any questions that popped up. When I stopped by to check on her I was surprised to find that she had learned how to change her desktop background and was getting fairly comfortable with the new interface. After taking a minute or two wireless networking our laptops we got started. Here’s a summary of what she wanted/needed help with in case you are ever in the position of helping a new convert.

• E-Mail: She uses AOL for her email and wanted to know how she could access her email without having to go to AOL’s site. I showed her Mail.app and set it up to retrieve her mail. I also walked her through checking her email, making mailboxes, and sending new email.
• Address Book: As I was walking her through composing a new message I showed her how she can get addresses out of the Address Book. This led to the creation of new cards and editing the data.
• Safari: Next up was surfing. She had already figured out how to access the internet on her own. I taught her how to make and use bookmarks. After showing her this site she wanted to know how to subscribe and got her set up with the built in Safari RSS reader.
• Dashboard: A few weeks back when I was showing off my MacBook Pro she was really impressed with the dashboard and all the widgets that I had installed. So I showed her how to add widgets to the dashboard and search for them at Apple.com. I installed RADMovieTimes for her so she could quickly check when the latests flicks were playing at the cinema.
• Software Install: I installed MS Office and QuickBooks for her. She was amazed how easy it was to just drag and drop new programs into the Applications folder to install them. This simple feat got her to yell out “I love my Mac!” She’s really happy that her MacBook is so much easier to use than her old Windows based laptop.
• iPhoto: She was recently in New York and wanted to put all her nice Statue of Liberty pics on her computer. After plugging her digital camera into her MacBook iPhoto fired right up quickly imported her images. “Thats it? I can’t believe how easy this is.” She proclaimed. Once we had imported all her images I helped her sort them into Albums and showed her how to play slideshows. I showed her how to use the simple editing features of iPhoto to rotate and enhance images.

You can’t imagine how impressed, amazed, and happy she is with her new MacBook. She was really excited when she ordered her computer, but I think also a bit aprehensive about throwing years of experience with windows out the… window, LOL. I’m sure that she’ll have more questions in the coming weeks, but think she’ll be a bit astonished at how fast she’s going to become proficient with OS X.