Well, that's good news.
Of course you have to start with the company itself. The headquarters of Apple Corporation are located in Cupertino, California, and you can order product directly from their Apple Store. Apple Canada doesn't have an Apple Store, but they can point you to dealers in your area who can give you that test drive I spoke of earlier.
I'm not one to tell you which software you should use, but since you asked so nicely, I'll admit that I use Microsoft Word and Excel. They are available at computer stores worldwide. For mail, I use Eudora Light. It's free, it's easy, I love it. Same with Netscape, which I prefer to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape is a space and memory hog, but for reasons I can't explain, I think web pages look better when you use it. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois have another browser named Mosaic, which was around before Netscape and IE became the standards. NCSA is also home to a terrific list of html resources which I've found invaluable in learning html.
If your computer has the space, I'd recommend having a copy of each browser available. When you're creating your own web pages, it helps to look at them in all formats to get some idea of how others will see your pages. And don't forget to make your pages friendly to people who don't use high-end equipment. As I've discovered since I've been working on the Time Limits Task Force at the National Capital FreeNet, blind persons are especially appreciative of easy to read web pages that their special reading machines find easy to translate.
But of course!
The care and feeding of your Mac may same like a Herculean task at times. They can be intermittently as stubborn as Windows machines. But there are a lot of great people out there as devoted to their Macintoshes as I am to mine. And they've helped turn the web into a long list of resources for the Macintosh owner.
First on my list is MacAddict Magazine. These brave souls started their magazine less than four years ago, at a time when many computer industry pundits were predicting the imminent demise of Apple. Then Steve Jobs returned and the world is a much brighter place for it. MacAddict is a little more expensive than other computer magazines, but each issue includes a cd of freebies and demos of all kinds of software, and their enthusiasm for all things Apple is infectious. Do check it out.
If you want the tried-and-true, take a look at MacWorld Magazine, which took over MacUser in 1997. The sponsors of the Macintosh tradeshows around North America, MacWorld is as serious in its approach to the Apple line as MacAddict is irreverant in its approach. Good, solid reporting and terrific lab testing of the latest products.
It happens to the best of us! But problems are easy to solve when you're a Mac user.
As with any computer system, use the latest operating system [currently Mac OS 9] and have as much memory as you can afford in your machine. Memory is inexpensive right now, and new versions of programs use so much of it, more is better! And if anything goes wrong, some of these people may have the answers for you:
MacFixitAnd don't forget to visit the newsgroups in the comp.sys.mac.* hierarchy in Usenet. Chances are you're not the only person who had that specific problem and you can find discussion about it in one of these groups.
The Mac Orchard sets the standard for collecting shareware, freeware and demos. This honour used to belong to Tucows [of course, their logo consists of two cows!], but lately I have found that their Macintosh links simply don't work. However, if you are one of the delusional who uses some other type of hardware and software, I will admit that their Windows links are quite good.
Todd Frazier, another Mac devotee, has another site of shareware, freeware and demos that he himself has found to be useful. Read his reviews to see if the products will work for you.
For games The Mac Game Gate is a good place to stop for a visit. And I recommend the BrowserWatch Plug-In Plaza for software that will make your web browser play music and movies, among other things.
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