If you’re looking to create an online store for your product, what better way to do it than by using one of the most popular and robust Content Management Systems available; WordPress! There are several different eCommerce plugins available now for use with WordPress and one of the more recent arrivals on the scene is WooCommerce by WooThemes.

Back on August 25 2011, WooThemes announced that they were about to release a new eCommerce WordPress plugin called WooCommerce. They did this by forking the JigoShop eCommerce plugin from Jigowatt, which was licensed under GPL. You’ll find numerous comments from within the WordPress community both for and against this and Jigowattt also posted their own views the day after the announcement. It’s eight months down the track now though and going on peoples reactions, it seems that WooCommerce is definitely making their mark in this field. After numerous updates, tweaks & bugfixes, the current stable version (as of this writing) is Version 1.5.4.

Features

The basic WooCommerce plugin is completely free to download and use. It’s built on top of standard WordPress Custom Post Types and straight out of the box, is extremely powerful with a lot of functionality. WooCommerce comes with all the standard features that you’d expect within an eCommerce plugin such as;

• Various types of reporting on sales, customers and stock
• Dashboard widgets that allow you to keep an eye on various aspects of your store from the main WordPress dashboard page
• Shipping & Tax settings
• Customers & Orders
• Product & Inventory
• Marketing & Promotions including the ability to add “coupons”
• And most importantly, various Payment Gateways & payment methods

There is also a wide selection of “extensions” that can be downloaded from the WooThemes website. Some of these are free, but most will set you back a small fee. There are several notable ones specifically for the Australian market such as the NAB Transact payment gateway, Australia Post Shipping Calculator and the Australian eWay payment gateway. Other useful extensions include;

• Dynamic Pricing – Gives you a powerful system for creating four different types of bulk discounts and price adjustments
• Gravity Forms Add-ons – Provides advanced product configuration forms that contain conditional logic, pricing fields, user input prices, conditional-pricing fields and conditional submit button logic
• Per Product Shipping – Allows your store admins to define a separate shipping cost for each individual product
• Table Rate Shipping – Extends WooCommerce’ default shipping options giving you highly customisable shipping options including the ability to define shipping rates location, price, weight, or item count

One other extension that I think is worth mentioning is one that I found on the IgniteWoo website. WooCommerce Wholesale Pricing creates a “Wholesale Buyer” user role and adds a wholesale price field to all of your products. This allows you to create users that can view seperate “Wholesale” prices for each of your products, once they’re logged in to their account.

Getting started

The WooCommerce plugin installs like any other WordPress plugin. Upon activation, you’re prompted to let the plugin create a number of default WordPress Pages. These include account admin, shopping cart and checkout pages, among others. These default pages include the necessary WooCommerce shortcodes relevant to each page. Of course, if you don’t want to install these default pages, then you can simply skip this step.

After the plugin is activated, two new menus are added to the left hand navigation in the WordPress dashboard, WooCommerce and Products. The WooCommerce menu provides you with the various options for configuring your store;

• Settings – Allows you to configure all the default settings for your shop such as country & currency types, tax settings, payment gateways and numerous others
• Reports – A number of reports can be produced on sales, customers and stock
• Orders – Allows you to view all the orders made through your online store
• Coupons – Allows you to add coupons which can be redeemed by your customers

WooCommerce Settings

Prior to adding all your products to your store, there are a number of settings that need to be configured. All these settings can be accessed through the WooCommerce > Settings menu option.

General

The General settings tab allows you to configure the base Country/Region for your shop as well as the currency and the countries that you’ll ship to and various other settings. WooCommerce also comes with some default styling. You can enable or disable this CSS stylesheet here.

Catalog

The Catalog tab allows you to confgure your product data such as where Category information is shown, the units of measurement for products that specify the weight and dimensions, currency specifics and whether to allow product reviews. You can also specify the dimensions for catalog images, single product images and product thumbnails.

Pages

The Pages tab allows you to configure which of your WordPress pages are used for each of the main pages within your shop such as displaying your list of products, customer shopping cart information, account information pages and checkout pages. Most of the pages defined here will be set to the default pages created during the plugin activation process, if you chose to allow WooCommerce to automatically create those pages for you.

Inventory

The Inventory tab allows you to define whether you keep track of stock. If you do, you can enable low or out of stock notifications and even stop out of stock products from displaying.

Tax

The Tax tab allows you to configure tax rates, if required, including the ability to specify different rates based on the Country/State or a local Postcode/Zipcode.

Shipping

The Shipping tab allows you to specify the various shipping options available to your customers. You have the choice of Flat Rate, International Delivery, Free Shipping, Local Delivery & Local Pickup.

Each shipping method also it’s own options that can be configured, based on the particular method. Shown below is the Flat Rate shipping page where you can specify the type of shipping calculation (ie. Per order, Per Item or Per Class), you can specify the default cost & handling fees along with any extra shipping options and rates.

Payment Gateways

The Payment Gateways tab allows you to specify the different options for collecting payments from your customers. There are four default options available; Direct Bank Transfer, Checque Payment, PayPal and Cash on Delivery. As mentioned earlier, there are also numerous payment gateway extensions that can be downloaded from the WooThemes website. You’ll find that these will be specific to particular countries.

Each payment method has it’s own settings page that can be configured. The options available will vary according to the payment gateway. Shown below is the PayPal settings screen that allow you to define your PayPal email address and a description to show your customers on checkout, among other settings. You also have the option to enable the PayPal developer sandbox which is extremely useful for testing payments when setting up your online store.

Emails

The Emails tab allows you to configure email settings for administrators (eg. New order notifications or Inventory notifications) and customers. You can use the default email template and specify your own colours and header image or if you’d like more advanced control you can copy the email template and make modifications to that.

Integration

The Integration tab lets you configure social media sharing options either via ShareThis or ShareDaddy, which is a sharing plugin bundled with JetPack. You can also add in your Google Analytics ID.

Adding your content

The next task after configuring all your store settings, is to start adding your products. Thankfully WooCommerce makes this a fairly painless process. Simply select the Add Product option from the Products menu.

Since WooCommmerce uses standard Custom Post Types, the Add New Product page looks just like any other WordPress Post or Page edit screen, with the addition of some extra fields.

When adding a product, you have the choice of four options; Simple product, Grouped product, External/Affiliate product or Variable product. You can also specify if the product is virtual or downloadable. When adding downloadable products, you are given the option to upload the file and specify download and expiry limits.

• Simple product  – Will usually cover the majority of products. Simple products are shipped and have no options
• Grouped product – A collection of related products which can be purchased individually. For example, a PS3 could be a grouped product as there are 80GB, 120GB and 200GB variations of that same parent product
• External/Affiliate product – A product you list and describe on your site, but is sold elsewhere
• Variable product – A product which has several different variations, each of which may have a different SKU, price, stock options etc. For example a tshirt that is available in several different colours and/or sizes

As you’d expect, you can specify all the usual infomation when adding a product such as price (regular & sale), tax, weight & dimensions. You can also specify and track the stock quantity, if so desired along with other “related” products that you wish to up-sell/cross-sell. It’s here that you also specify each option for your variable or grouped products.

If you’re interested in providing discounts for your customers, WooCommerce also allows you to create coupons. Coupons can be used to provide your customers a cart discount, a cart % discount, a product discount or a product % discount. Coupons can be configured to expire after a certain usage limit, a certain date or even to never expire. You can also apply/exclude them to/from a certain product or product category.

Browsing your store

Since the WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it can be implemented in any theme you want, however if you’re not wanting to performing any extra styling yourself, then you’re best to implement the plugin on a site that has been optimised for WooCoomerce. The WooThemes site has a number of ready made themes that are styled specifically for the WooCommerce plugin. You can also find a number of other sites such as Themeforest or Mojo Themes that have various WooCommerce styled themes. One of the themes that I tested the plugin on was the Wootique theme. This is a premium theme that’s available for free from the WooThemes website. The WooThemes website also has  a demo of Wootique using the WooCommerce plugin.

I also tested the plugin using the standard Twenty Eleven WordPress theme. Although WooCommerce comes packaged with a default stylesheet which does look reasonably good (and can be disabled within the General settings page), you’ll find it’s not styled quite as nice as some of the ready-made WooCommerce themes that are available.

If you’re interested in testing out the WooCommerce plugin, it comes with a dummy_data.xml file that you can import to populate your site with dummy data. Alternatively, you can also download this file from the WooCommerce GitHub site.

As mentioned earlier, when first activating the plugin, WooCommerce will create some default pages for you. To display other content within your theme, WooCommerce provides quite a number of different shortcodes. They also provide quite a few different Widgets that can be added to your site for searching, displaying ‘Featured’ products, displaying product categories & tags and displaying recent reviews, just to name a few.

Viewing Reports and Orders

Like all good shop owners, you’ll want to keep track of all your product sales and orders. There are anumber of built in reports that allow you to do just that. There are reports for Sales (Incl. Overiew, Sales by day, Sales by month, Product sales, Top Sellers and Top earners), Customers and Stock.

Using the Orders menu option you’re also able to view a list of all the orders made. Clicking the Order # displays the order in full including all the products for that particular order (& variations if appropriate), the customers details and total costs (incl. discounts & tax).

Conclusion

Overall, I think WooCommerce is an extremely solid eCommerce plugin. It has a wealth of standard features and is fairly straight forward to setup, no matter whether you’re using a WooCommerce optimised theme like Wootique, or your own custom theme.

The interface is very easy to use and will be very familiar to anyone who’s used the WordPress Dashboard. The settings pages has the familiar WordPress layout, utilising the tabs across the top of the page. It’s good to see this standard WordPress layout, unlike some theme or plugins that opt to style their settings pages completely differently.

Adding products into your store is also very straightforward. It also provides quite a few choices, as standard, allowing you to setup various types of products.

The WooCommerce site also provides some decent documentation if you need to use it and although I didn’t look through it all, the pages I did look at were well written and easy to follow.

Overall, if you’re looking to implement an eCommerce solution using WordPress, you’d be wise to checkout what WooCommerce can do for you.

When CPTs are stored within the WordPress database, the CPT name (ie. the first parameter used within the register_post_type() function) is stored along with the rest of the Post data. If, for some reason, you need to change your CPT name, any data that you currently have stored for that Custom Post will disappear from with the WordPress Dashboard after the name change. In actual fact, the data is still obviously in the database, it’s just assigned to a Custom Post that no longer exists. Getting your data back is a fairly easy process but you do need to be confident with using phpMyAdmin and as a precaution, you should definitely make a backup of your database prior to making any changes.

Within phpMyAdmin, run the following SQL command on your database, replacing custom-post-type-name with the actual name of your Custom Post Type…

SELECT * FROM wp_posts where post_type = 'custom-post-type-name'

After running the above SQL, you should be displayed with a list of your Custom Posts. There are two fields that need to be updated within each Post. The guid field and the post_type field. The guid field contains the URL of your post and as part of this URL, the CPT name is included. The post_type field simply contains the actual name of the Post Type. Simply edit each row of data, carefully replacing the Post Type name in both the guid field and the post_type field. After making the changes, log back into your WordPress Dashboard and you should find that all your Posts are listed once again.

One last important point to remember when creating CPTs, is that the Post Type parameter that you use within the register_post_type() function must be a maximum of 20 characters and cannot contain capital letters or spaces.

I hope you find this useful and if so, feel free to leave a comment

During our discussion we also touched on topics such as GeoTagging networks like Foursquare, (the recently bought out) Gowalla and Path.

The MotleyCrue Cast is a podcast for creative individuals both freelance and professional in any field, hosted by Joshua Rapp of Rappsody Studios and Jane Clark of Teakettica, and produced by Pablo Lara in association with The Motley Design Crue.

You can listen to the podcast on the Motley Design Crew site or you can even subscribe via iTunes. Go check it out. You know you want to!

WordCamps are conferences that focus on everything WordPress. They’re informal, community-organised events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas and get to know each other.

The Gold Coast WordCamp consisted of two tracks. A high Tech Track and a Low Tech Track. This meant that there was something for everyone, no matter what your WordPress experience.

I’ll briefly go through the sessions that I attended but if you’re interested in reviewing the full schedule for the weekend, you can find it on the WordCamp Gold Coast website.

Saturday November 5

Kate Swaffer — Using WordPress to capture memories
The day started off with a moving talk by Kate Swaffer. Kate was diagnosed with a rare younger onset dementia when she was 49. She spoke and presented a video about her life, living with dementia and how she uses WordPress as a personal journal. As it’s getting harder and harder for her to recall past events, blogging helps her to remember her life.

There are over 1500 cases of dementia diagnosed each week and as yet, there is still no cure.

Kate’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/using-wordpress-to-capture-memories-by-kate-swaffer

Dan Milward — How to facilitate and Build an open Source Community
Dan is the man behind the wildly popular WP e-Commerce plugin, which at last count, has over 1.7 million downloads. He spoke about what you can do to create a successful open source community. Key points included finding a niche market and how important it is to be innovative rather than simply copying where others have been.

John Ford — How Automattic works across 20 countries with 95 employees
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet and numerous other popular tools . It’s founder, Matt Mullenweg, is the man behind WordPress.

John gave us a really interesting talk on what it’s like to work for Automattic and their culture. He also spoke about how they manage to operate with staff residing all around the world and some of the tools he uses in his day to day activities. John currently heads up the VaultPress team.

Some of the tools used by John and his team include:

• Jabber – used for chat/forum notifications
• Skype – used for voice chats
• Kickoff – collaboration tool for small groups
• Optimizely – A/B testing
• Kissmetrics – Web analytics
• P2 WordPress theme – used for blogging

Stew Heckenberg — Freelance FTW (Strategies for Success, Pitfalls to avoid)
Stew lead off his talk with a great quote from his father. “The world runs on 98% bullshit and 2% brains”. Using this “philosophy”, Stew outlined some simple steps to take to accomplish your goal of working from home (or wherever you like), while still keeping hours that suit your lifestyle.

Dee Teal — Getting to Grips with Genesis (A WordPress Framework)
Starting the afternoon sessions off was Dee with a really interesting discussion on the Genesis WordPress Framework. The Genesis Framework is one of the more popular WordPress frameworks that are around. Dee discussed the benefits of using a framework like Genesis and also briefly outlined its use of Hooks, Actions & Filters.

Dee’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/word-camp-twp4by3

Japh Thomson — Code quality standards and best practices
Japh gave a fantastic talk on the importance of coding standards and the use of best practices. Not only is this going to help yourself, but in the long run, it’ll also help your users, clients, the community in general and potential employers. Japh provided some great links that are a “must read” if you plan on developing any WordPress themes, plugins or getting involved with core updates.

• WordPress Coding Standards
• CSS Coding Standards
• Site Design and Layout
• Theme Review
• WordPress API’s
• Creating Tables with Plugins

Japh’s presentation can be found at http://japh.com.au/wcgc2011/

Anthony Cole — WordPress Plugin Development 101
Anthony shared his extensive knowledge in developing WordPress plugins. It was a great presentation if you’ve not yet begun to develop plugins. As part of his presentation, he briefly discussed WordPress Actions & Filters along with the various API’s that are available for use within WordPress.

John O’Nolan —
Designing Emotion – Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience
The first day ended with one of, if not THE highlight of the weekend, listening to John’s session on Designing Emotion. John is an extremely talented user interface and user experience designer out of the UK. Lucky for us, Australia is the first leg of his newly embarked world travels. He’s packed his bags and is travelling around the world for an indefinite period, working, blogging & taking photos. You can follow his adventures on his website.

John has worked with the likes of Virgin, Microsoft & Google and is also a WordPress Core UI group contributor. His talk centered around how design evokes an emotional response. It makes users feel an emotion and great design creates an awesome experience.

John’s presentation can be found at
http://speakerdeck.com/u/johnonolan/p/designing-emotion-1

Sunday November 6

Troy Dean – Running a Small Business as a WordPress Developer
Sunday started off a little later than the previous day. The first talk I attended was a really interesting one on running a small business as a WordPress Developer. Troy had some fantastic tips on running your business efficiently and I think they apply to any small business, not just WordPress developers specifically. Some of the points he specifically mentioned were:

• Use templates for proposals. No need to re-write everything, everytime
• Follow up proposals with a phone call, 5 days later
• Payment terms – 40% Deposit, 30% Design pmt (after completed design), 30% Final pmt (prior to “go live”)
• Limit your number of design revisions to two
• Feature creep – Quote only after payment has been made for website
• Follow up client 1 month after release/training. Use this opportunity to ask if there’s anything else they require, such as email marketing or a social media strategy. You can also ask for a testimonial.

Some of the useful sites that Troy mentioned were:

• Andy Clarke’s Contract killer
• Wireframe Sketcher
• Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me.

Troy’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/word-camp-gold-coast-notes

Dion Hulse, John O’Nolan, John Ford & Dan Milward — Live Panel
Originally this was just going to be a session with Dion on What I’ve Learnt From Working In Open-Source but it was then decided, since there were so many talented people from other countries who had come over, why not take advantage of it. It was turned into a live panel discussion on not only the Open-Source environment of WordPress but on all sorts of other topics, offered up from audience questions. It was awesome to hear the thoughts of these guys who are so involved with WordPress one way or another.

One of the points that really stood out and agreed upon among all the panel, was the benefit in getting more involved in the WordPress community, whether that’s through core commits, UI design, testing beta releases or even just helping people on the WordPress forums. If you’re interested in following along with development updates, check out the official blog for the core development team.

Stephen Cronin — WordPress and Government – The Australian Perspective
Stephen gave a really interesting perspective on what it’s like to work in an Australian Government environment and how and where they’re using WordPress. He spoke about some of the challenges of working in such an environment, such as their prolific use of IE6 (Eeek!). He also touched on some of the other government sites in other countries that are using WordPress, including:

• alpha.gov.uk blog – An experimental prototype (an ‘alpha’) of a new, single website for UK Government
• The Official site for the British Prime Minister’s Office
• Library of Congress blog

Stephen’s presentation (minus the images) can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/sjcronin99/stephen-cronin-wordpress-and-government

Bronson Quick — Supercharging WordPress with BuddyPress!
The last session for the weekend was from Bronson on implementing BuddyPress. BuddyPress can turn your site into a complete social network. It comes with activity streams, forums, mentions (ala Twitter), friending and private messaging. This was a live demo of setting up a BuddyPress site and so was a great insight into just how easy it is to get the default site working. Bronson also mentioned some of the great plugins that are available for increasing user engagement and just generally improving your site:

• BuddyPress Default Data plugin – Populate your site with a bunch of test users, friends, messages, etc.
• Achievements plugin – Adds awards/badges onto Buddypress
• BuddyPress Likes plugin – Gives users the ability to ‘like’ content across your site
• Welcome Pack – Automatically send friend/group invites and a welcome message to new users
• BuddyPress Activity Plus – Gives your social network all the features and ease of Facebook when it comes to uploading and sharing media
• BP Labs – Among other things, provides autosuggest for usernames

Bronson’s presentation can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/supercharging-wordpress-with-buddypress

Presentations for the other speakers not listed, can be found at
http://www.slideshare.net/wordcampgc/presentations

Conclusion…

WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 was Awesome!! This was the very first WordCamp that I’ve been to and I had a fantastic time. As well as getting the chance to hear some extremely talented people discussing various topics, it was a great opportunity to network and meet folks who I’ve only ever “talked to” online, as well as meet lots of new friends. I know it definitely wont be my last WordCamp!

Did you manage to make it up to this one or have you been to other WordCamps? Leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to hear

Just over two years ago now I wrote a post giving 13 Reasons Why Vista Is Crap. In it I mentioned that I couldn’t wait for Windows 7 to be officially released later that year, and at the time, I couldn’t! Vista really is the biggest piece of shit out there! Well, after running Windows 7 for almost 2 years, I’m ready to kick this OS to the curb as well. It’s definitely nowhere near as bad as Vista, but it’s still crap.

So what wrong with Windows 7?

Well, for starters, it’s memory management sucks ass. I’m talkin’ serious suckage! I got so sick of applications constantly displaying “Not Responding” whenever you had more than one app open! God forbid you have multiple apps running in a multitasking Operating System!

Both Vista and Windows 7 run SuperFetch technology. It basically fills up your RAM with what it thinks you’ll need. This is why, if you look in Task Manager on the Performance tab, you’ll see your Free memory usually sitting around the low teens or single digits. Personally, I don’t think it does a very good job of working out what I want running. In previous OS’s such as XP, it simply loaded the application into memory when requested and dumped it when finished. WinXP would occasionally freeze for a second or two but nowhere near as often as Vista or Windows 7.

Other things on my long list of annoyances are…

Icons in the System Tray constantly disappear, even when they’re set to “Display all the time”. This is really frustrating when you have an application running and the only way to bring it into view is by clicking on the System Tracy icon!

Device drivers constantly reinstall. I would plug my iPhone into the same cable, which in turn is plugged into the same USB port, everyday. I can’t tell you how many times Windows would popup a message saying “Installing device driver”. Aaargh! FFS! It’s the same fkn device I had plugged in yesterday! And, if you dared change the device to use another USB port, well… you’d definitely get the “Installing device driver” message then!

Network drives would constantly disappear. Up until recently I was running a Windows Server on a standalone PC as a development web server. It was never turned off and sits on the same subnet on my network yet somehow Windows 7 would just occasionally forget about it and I couldn’t access my development files.

Devices plugged into USB Hubs would frequently not work after booting up. At least a couple times a week I would have to unplug my Wacom tablet and plug it back in just so Windows would see it after booting up in the morning. I even had a batch file in my Startup Folder that would Stop and Restart the Tablet drivers as suggested by Microsoft Australia.

Windows would constantly lock files and folders even when they’re not being used. I’ve lost count how many times Windows told me that I can’t delete a folder because it says it’s “in use”, even when there are no files open in any application. So many times I would have to close down Windows Explorer and then reopen it before it would let me delete a folder.

And do I even need to mention how slow it is to boot up!? Yeah, the desktop and icons display within a couple of minutes, but big woop! The hard drive is still beating itself to death and you can’t start any applications because the system is still loading all it’s files and drivers.

Are Mac’s really that good?

As much as some of the Apple Fanboys will tell you otherwise, Mac’s aren’t perfect. I ordered my new iMac online and after having it for only 3 days, it got sent back as it was having problems. It wouldn’t wake from sleep. The only way to power it up was to physically unplug the power cord, wait a few seconds and then plug it back in and turn it on. After making an appointment at my local Apple Genius Bar, they recommended that I return it for a refund and then order a new one from them. Several weeks later, here I am am with my brand new iMac. One of the truly great things about Apple products though is their support. It really is second to none!

Technically, my PC was quite powerful. It was running an Intel Quad Core i7 @ 2.6Ghz. My new iMac is also running an Intel Quad Core i7. It’s obviously a newer generation chip and it’s also running slightly faster @ 3.4Ghz. The speed difference between the two is amazing though. No longer am I sitting, waiting for an application to start loading. I’ll click on an app and a couple of seconds later it’s up & running. I really do feel a lot more productive as I’m not waiting for the OS all the time, like I was in Windows.

I’ve found with the majority of the Mac applications I’ve run that they never seem to have as many options or preferences as Window applications. This has it’s pros and cons. Too many options can make applications confusing but too few, obviously means sometimes there’s “features” or settings that can’t be changed or are missing.

Apple hardware tends to be a bit pickier when it comes to accessories. On a PC you can plug pretty much any device in and it’ll work. Not so on a Mac. I’ve got a USB hub and an external drive, both of with worked fine on my PC but have problems on the Mac.

One of the things that I find really annoying is the Apple Finder application. It’s basically Apples equivalent to the Windows Explorer app. Within Windows Explorer, say you’re copying a series of folders and files from one location to another, if the destination location has folders or files that have the same name as the ones you’re copying it gives you the option to “Move & Replace” the files/folders in the destination location or “Don’t Move” the files/folders, leaving the original intact. You can also have it keep both versions, whereby it will rename the file(s) your copying by appending a number on the end (eg. mydoc (2).txt). If you’re moving a lot of files, you can apply your selection to “all files” in the case of multiple duplicates. Using the Apple finder application, when you’re copying files and it finds duplicates, the only options you’re given are to replace the duplicate files, keep both files (by renaming one) or stop, which cancels the copy. What’s worse is that if you are copying folders, then the “Replace” command will do just that. It won’t merge the files you’re copying with the target location, it will actually remove the target location and replace it with the folder you’re copying. What this means is that if there are files in the target location that are different from the ones you’re copying, they’ll actually get deleted since the whole folder is replaced! That’s ridiculous! I can see it being quite easy to lose files when you’re using the Finder app to move files and folders around.

It’s only since owning a Mac that I’ve found out that they don’t have anything like the System Registry on Windows machines. This is awesome news! The Registry is where Windows keeps all it’s application configuration settings and options. It’s also one of the main causes when applications stop working or don’t work properly. You’ll also find that a huge amount of applications never delete all their information when the application is uninstalled so you end up with all these “orphaned” settings for applications that no longer exist. To uninstall an application in Windows you have to run an application within the Windows Control Panel. When you choose an application to uninstall, this will then run that particular applications uninstaller. To uninstall on a Mac, you simply drag the application from the Applications folder to the Trash. So simple!! All Mac applications are bundled together in a special “package” unlike Windows apps that can put files in numerous locations and settings all throughout the System Registry.

There are obviously lots of other little differences between a PC and a Mac, which you’d expect, but most of it just comes down to getting used to how it works. The Home & End keys are a good example. Within Windows, pressing the Home key will place the cursor at the beginning of the current line and pressing End will put the cursor at the end of the line. On a Mac, pressing Home will place the cursor at the beginning of the application and End will place it at the end. So, if you’re writing up a document for example, pressing Home takes you to the beginning of the document and pressing End will take you to the end of the document. This I don’t think I could ever get used to and thankfully I found a cool little app called DoubleCommand that allows me to easily remap these two keys so they work the way I’m used to.

You’ll quite often hear Apple users boast they they don’t need to run anti-virus software like you do (or should) on a PC. This may be true but it’s not because Macs are immune to getting viruses or malware. What a lot of Apple folk don’t seem to realise is that the main reason that they don’t need anti-virus is because the majority of viruses are developed for Windows based PC’s. A-holes who write viruses aim to do as much harm to as many people as they can and since Window PC’s have the greater market share, this is who they target. If this market share ever starts to even out, I’m sure you’ll see viruses targeted for Macs.

So what’s the verdict?

Overall, I love my new iMac. It’s extremely fast and responsive and the new version of their Operating System, OSX Lion, has some really great features and, with all the touch gestures, really is a joy to use. The display is amazingly crisp and vibrant and being a 27″ iMac, is HUGE!

It will be interesting to compare  Microsofts implementation of gesture control when they officially release Windows 8. I doubt they’ve put as much time and effort into perfecting them as Apple have. I think Apple have successfully integrated their iOS gestures into a desktop Operating System. From all the videos I’ve watched regarding Windows 8, Microsoft seem to be more concerned with making their OS work on tablets and seem to be forgetting about all the people who’ll actually be using a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.

</end rant>

Have you switched from using a PC to using a Mac? Leave a comment and let me know, I’d love to hear how your experience was.