Essential Mac software

[prelude4ws]

Well I finally took the plunge a brought a shiny new Mac book pro at the weekend, not really had much chance to use it in anger yet mostly just uploading music and photos from my old laptop.

I was wondering what people consider to be essential Mac software, preferably freeware? I had some neat freeware programs on the old pc such CDburnerXP and AVG etc.

Perhaps there should be a list of PH preferred apps for Mac and Windows!

[Strangely Brown]

prelude4ws said:

I was wondering what people consider to be essential Mac software, preferably freeware?

OK, I'll throw the first one in...

Go and get yourself a copy of Flip4Mac.

You don't want to miss out on all those .wmv hooning clips now.

[CommanderJameson]

For instant messaging, Adium (free)
For IRC, Colloquy (free)
For web, Camino (if you don't like Safari) (free)
For converting things, Switch (free)
For torrent stuff, XTorrent (not free)
For playing around with other operating systems, Parallels (not free)
For searching in Safari, Inquisitor (free)
For USENET, Panic (not free)

I'll have a look at what else I've got when I get home.

ETA: right, I'm home.

Here's the rest of it:

IM Clients: Psi, Fire, Proteus (all free)
For SCP: Fugu (free)
For BitTorrent: Bits On Wheels (free)
For mapping: Google Earth (free)
For SoulSeek: SolarSeek (free)
For basic graphics: Seashore (free)
For farting around with launchd: Lingon (free)
For squashing things: 7zX (free)
For clearing out loads of disk space: Disk Inventory X, Monolingual (free)
For CD/DVD burninisation: Toast Titanium (not free)
For twiddling iTunes: YouControl Tunes (free)
For twiddling iTunes: Aqua4iTunes (free)
Multimedia Things: DivX codec, Realplayer (OS X version isn't crap), Switch, VLC, Flip4Mac (all free)

Edited by CommanderJameson on Tuesday 17th April 17:45

[Leithen]

Have a look at I Use This

[maddog-uk]

I prefer vmware’s fusion instead of parallels. Beta 3 is out now, you can switch off debugging and its very fast. www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/

But like any virtual operating system you need a valid OS license.

I must say I am mightily impressed with the MAC, its so much faster than my windows laptop at startup and recovery from sleep, all the things you want on the move.

[tog]

Strangely Brown said:

prelude4ws said:

I was wondering what people consider to be essential Mac software, preferably freeware?

OK, I'll throw the first one in...

Go and get yourself a copy of Flip4Mac.

You don't want to miss out on all those .wmv hooning clips now.

You also want a copy of Perian, another QuickTime component. Between that and Flip4Mac you'll be able to play back most video directly within QuickTime itself. VLC is useful to have for anything else that you need to play back. Depending on what you do with videos, QuickTime Pro might be a useful upgrade, about £30 IIRC.

TinkerTool and OnyX (both free) are useful for tweaking OS X in little ways. For more adanced disc burning than the system level burner, try Toast or Disco, but neither are free. Cyberduck is a decent free FTP app, but I prefer Panic's Transmit which is not free but very good. Camino is a nicer web browser than Firefox if you don't like Safari.

A couple of useful sites are MacOSXHints.com for general hints and tips, and MacZot that does one-day-only special offers on assorted cheapish Mac apps with very heavy discounts. Sometimes they have extra special offers - last Friday the 13th they sold 13 apps for $13, with well over $100 worth of apps for a buck each! They also have free offers sometimes too.

[Zod]

Camino as an alternative browser - Mozilla-based like Firefox, but much better Mac integration.

[RoadRailer]

Quicksilver - IMO THE killer app for my macs.
Some HowTo's/Guides to help you get started.

Menu Meters - system performance monitors in the menu bar.

Growl - system and application event notification.

[tog]

RoadRailer said:

Quicksilver - IMO THE killer app for my macs.

Quite true - forgot about that one!

[RoadRailer]

tog said:

RoadRailer said:

Quicksilver - IMO THE killer app for my macs.

Quite true - forgot about that one!

I take it for granted now,

ctrl+ space>>P>>I>>enter and Camino opens on PH.

or

ctrl+ space>>r>>e>>enter and remote desktop opens.

etc etc.

Camino user should take a peek at PimpMyCamino for some extensions. (although for some reason the site is throwing up a forbidden page this afternoon??)

[prelude4ws]

Cool thanks for those I will try them when I get home tonight

[PJR]

I don't have much to add, as everyone has already chipped in with the essentials.
Toast is handy to have though.. Its very good disc burning software (Not free, unless you are resourceful). But for basic burning, the OS will do fine.
www.macupdate.com is a good site for numerous apps. If you take a look at their 'weekly popular' and 'hot picks' list you'll get a good idea of whats worth having..

P,

[cjs]

'Mac the Ripper' is great for ripping DVD's and is free......somewhere!

Also Roxio 'Toast' is great for Burning and copying stuff, its not free but worth paying for.

[robbieduncan]

[url=www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html]SuperDuper[/url] and an external harddrive. Quick, painless backups that you can boot from to recover. Awesome.

[HiRich]

Leithen said:

Have a look at I Use This

That's a good list I haven't seen before. A browse of my Applications Folder suggests:
- Maintenance: OnyX (free)
- Anti-virus: ClamXaV (free), just in case, and for the occasional scan-through
- Graphics: Graphic Converter (shareware, but can be used free if you accept the 30" launch delay)
- Firefox (or another) as an emergency alternative to Safari for those now-rare niggly sites. Or maybe you just prefer the functionaility.
- NetNewsWire Lite (free): as a standalone RSS aggregator.
- TextWrangler (free): can occasionally let you into a document that nothing else will read.
- Usual Suspects: Acrobat Reader (occasionally more useful than Preview), Flash, Stuffit Expander, RealPlayer.

You may want to consider a major utility app like Norton or TechTool for more serious maintenance and in case of a disk collaps, but i haven't bought them.

The only irritating area is video and to a lesser extent audio. Flip4Mac's free version allows you to watch some Windows Media in QuickTime, but the upgrade is probably worth it (as is the upgrade to QuickTime Pro). The trick is finding the relevant codec or converter app - I recall Switch, iSquint and VideoLan client (VLC) are useful additions.

[Strangely Brown]

robbieduncan said:

www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and an external harddrive. Quick, painless backups that you can boot from to recover. Awesome.

I'll second that one. "SuperDuper" is by far the easiest way of making a complete backup that I have found.

"AppZapper" is worth a look. Whilst Mac apps are generally as easy to uninstall as dragging to the trash you will probably want to make sure that prefs and support files get removed too. I have been using it for a while and have yet to fault it.

My own preference for torrents is "Bits On Wheels" and "Acqlite" for the other P2P stuff.

Once your disk starts filling up you'll want to know where all your space has gone. "Disk Inventory X" will show you at a glance.

"Pacifist" is useful for pulling individual parts out of packages.

My what fun you're going to have trying it all out

[HiRich]

I'm looking for something that will help me create pdfs, without purchasing Acrobat. What I have is a series of scans (e.g. pages of a race programme). I'd prefer to compile them into a single document.
- Preview allows me to open them "as if" but only lets me save them as single-page pdf files.
- Word (and the "Save As pdf" print function) sort of achieves it, but leaves significant borders, and a lot of trouble trying to get the correct (non-A4) page size.
- Safari & Print/Save As pdf doesn't allow for page breaks
So does anyone know of a simpler method, free or shareware or trick?

[tog]

What format are the scans in already?

You could try CombinePDFs, which I've not used, but found by searching macosxhints.com for "combine pdfs". If the scans are not pdfs already, then you'll need to crop them as you want in any photo editor like Photoshop, Elements, iPhoto, then print them straight to PDF, then combine the resulting pdfs.

[kiwisr]

A good MSN messenger client is aMSN. (mainly because everyone I know uses MSN), supports virtually all the same features as the Windows MSN clients - webcam etc, which Adium et al don't do.

[HiRich]

tog said:

What format are the scans in already?

jpegs, but I can convert them to single-page pdfs in Preview. I'll give it a try, thanks.
ETA: has done a decent basic job (although I can't control page size, each scan is a slightly different size), and it can work straight from jpegs. Certainly better than what I had. Thanks again

Edited by HiRich on Wednesday 18th April 14:55