If you have less than 16 MB video RAM. Blender only runs OK when you set your display on "thousands of colors" (16 bits). Systems with fewer than 8 MB won't even run Blender, for that we have provided a warning message at startup per Blender version 2.34.
If other applications use OpenGL, or when you have a very large deskop resolution, or use 2 monitors, you might run into troubles as well.
You can do tests with a small Blender window size though. Do this by starting Blender from a Terminal. Type here the full path to the Blender.app and add to that;
<path_to_blender.app>/Contents/MacOS/blender -p 100 100 700 500
This opens a small 700x500 pixel Blender window, offset 100 pixels from the bottom-left corner.
OSX Aqua uses OpenGL extensively for drawing, so it might happen your 3d card doesn't have sufficient memory to draw accellerated with a larger window size. A solution that works well, is switching to less screen colors: set the menu in "System Preferences -> Displays -> colors" at "thousands of colors".
Another common issue is with using the Dock on top of the Blender window. This kind of transparent blending takes a lot of 3d card drawing powers, and can better be avoided by setting the Dock to become auto-hide.
We received a report that this card, needed for 30 inch monitors, does not support the standard bitmap font Blender uses by default.
You can bypass that by setting the UI to use antialiased fonts, which looks much better anyway. This is an option in the "user menu", part of the "Info Window" in blender; just pull down the top header to reveil this menu and set the "Internation Fonts" option.
You can make such settings become default by saving it with the CTRL+U command. Please note this saves the entire GUI as it is, including objects, materials, etc.
Blender is programmed to be used with a 3 button mouse. When you are using the standard 1 button Apple mouse this functionality can be accessed by keeping keyboard keys pressed while pressing the mouse button.
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With the left mouse button you can activate on screen menus and buttons, resize sub-windows and set the 3D view cursor. In the Mac version this is the default behaviour when you press the mouse button.
With the middle mouse button you can move, rotate and zoom the 3D view or other views. Keep the Alt key pressed in combination with the Shift and Ctrl keys to get this behaviour when you press the mouse button.
With the right mouse button you can select 3D objects. Keep the Apple (aka Command) key on your keyboard pressed when pressing the mouse button.
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If you have a three button mouse, or a mousewheel as 3rd button, you might have configured the 3rd button to another action like "double click". Blender can only detect the middle-mouse button if you configure your mouse device correctly.
Check the "Other" category in "System Preferences". For a Logitech mouse, you can assign it "Advanced Click" and with Device Button Number "3".
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If you want to render an image with Blender Creator on other platforms you would normaly press the F12 key. On some machines this ejects the CD from your CDROM ;-). To render the current image with Blender on Mac OS X press Ctrl-F12 or Alt-F12.
The Mac OS X version has different cursor shapes.
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Blender runs at many different platforms, and all versions are utilizing OpenGL to draw the entire interface. This keeps the program portable, and makes it easier to maintain.
This is the reason why the look and feel of Blender is quite different from standard Aqua applications. Attempts to integrate Blender better with the OSX desktop are being in process. However, for the short term we don't expect a full Aqua version of Blender.