Episode #160
Three weeks ago I bought a MacBook. I love it but I have never owned one before and I was never very ‘techy’ even with a PC. I would like to know about anti-virus software for Macs. I am also unclear on compatibility issues with hardware such as printers. On the same thought, I would also like to know if Pages, Numbers and Keynote are compatible with Word, Excel and Powerpoint respectively. For example can I open a document created in Pages on a PC at my university? Finally I am having one small issue. I am running Firefox in Leopard. The issues is that I can't always type, select drop boxes or click on buttons that should take me other places. For example drop boxes e.g. in internet banking when selecting accounts doesn't always work or the address bar sometimes completely freezes out so I cannot type or drop down my book marks. Sometimes I have the same problem with text input boxes like the one I am typing in right now. My computer is not frozen and I can do anything else I want just not that and it does not matter how long you wait because it hasn’t even registered that you have clicked anything. It is stuck in the blinking 'I' or '|' symbol, not the pointer. I have reinstalled firefox and Leopard but it has made no difference. I have checked the trouble shooting on the apple website but it didn’t help. Any help with be much appreciated.
Nicola, Brisbane, QLD
Sean’s note: First, you can get anti-virus protection for the Mac, but the main effect it will have is to use up your system resources in the aid of removing Windows viruses from your machine…which wouldn’t have hurt your machine anyhow. If you absolutely feel you need AV for your Mac (for piece of mind), ClamAV is one solution that you can use, and it has a relatively light touch.
Second, while all of the programs in Apple’s iWork suite will read Microsoft’s document formats, the file format they save to by default is specific to Pages, Numbers and Keynote. You can save to Microsoft-readable formats so your files will be readable by people using those programs, but it’s a manual save every time, and some of the more Apple-centric features you’ve incorporated into your files may not translate well into the Microsoft formats. For files with pretty basic formatting there should be no issues whatsoever.
Third, that’s a known issue with Firefox — I get that all the time and it drives me nuts….since the move to Firefox 2.0 there have been a number of frustrating little quirks like this. Hopefully the move to Firefox 3.0 will eliminate those things. Our producer Matt Harris has been using the Firefox 3.0 beta and says he hasn’t run across the keyboard issue yet, which he did repeatedly under the previous version.