I'll be giving my personal experiences as an OU student in Shanghai who uses mac computers to access and use OU resources.

First, a bit about my mac setup. When at home, I typically use a Mac Mini bought in 2007, with 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and upgraded to 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, running OSX Leopard 10.5.5. On my commute to and from work I use an iBook bought in 2002, with a 600MHz PowerPC G3 processor, and upgraded to 640MB SDRAM, running OSX Tiger 10.4.11.

I've designated the iBook as the principal machine where OU work is concerned; it holds the OU working files and folders. When at home I connect the iBook to my ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) via a TL-R402 DSL router. The use of Bonjour simplifies my mac to mac connections and I can then use my Mac Mini to work on the files stored on the iBook - so both machines use the same files. This effectively avoids having to synchronise data (I'm refusing to spend money on a synchronisation solution).

I hold current backup files on both machines in locked folders that I've set Spotlight to ignore. This means that when I do OU related searches the only file/folders searched are the current working OU file/folders on the iBook. I also keep a backup folder of all my OU backups on an external hard drive. When I remember, I also replace the current OU backup folder I keep on my mp4 player (an Archos 604).

I typically use Safari (3.1.2) as my web browser of choice for most things, but for the OU I need to share the workload with Firefox (3.0.3). For simply accessing/reading OU webpages, I'll use Safari, but for editing I'll typically use Firefox. For the blogs - posts and comments - I need to use Firefox or formatting will be ignored.  For editing "notes" in MyStuff, I again need to use Firefox because of formatting issues, but to upload files, Safari seems to work better and I recently found out I can write comments while using Safari and formatting is kept intact. For the wiki, it seems that editing can be done from Safari but can't while in Firefox or at least is inconsistent from Firefox. I'm new to the wiki so I haven't had a chance to investigate this further.

Regarding FirstClass, I haven't used their web version since I installed the Mac FirstClass Client (9.106) application in my first week of study. I can't remember much about FC web version, but I know I hated it; it was slow and simply didn't work properly. The desktop version is clearly the superior product and, while not perfect, it is perfectly stable, useful and even has some nice (far more Mac-like than Window-ly) graphics.

Another word about the blogs. I want to browse my fellow students' blogs from time to time, but it's tedious and can be very time consuming having to go to each blog to find out if there have been new postings. So I subscribed to the RSS feeds for each blog. Each blog has a feed for posts and another feed for comments. You need to open the blogs from Safari and click directly on "RSS" (not "Atom" right next to it) - I prefer to right-click to open links in a new tab, but sometimes it seems that these RSS pages only open properly when you left-click directly. When the RSS page opens, left-click on the "Subscribe in Mail" link. If you then go to Mail you'll find an RSS feed that you can rename and that contains the posts or comments of the blog you subscribed to. The blog posts will have the blog poster's name - under the title - when you open each post, but the comments won't tell you where they come from. To find out whose blog the comments belong to you need to click on "Read more..." to be taken to the blog itself, and then rename the feed in Mail. If there is no feed in Mail, check your Mail preferences.