Essential Mac software

[JonnyFive]

System Memory?

2gb

Free; 157.6mb
Wired; 587.8mb
Active; 943.3mb
Inactive; 355.2mb
Used; 1.84gb

It's actually not too slow now I've restarted the Mac, just think it must have been as I had been watching quite a lot of music on YT the past few days?

[TheTardis]

Just popped into Comet, and they are selling iWork '09 (disc in sealed box)for £9.99

[LordGrover]

TheTardis said:

Just popped into Comet, and they are selling iWork '09 (disc in sealed box)for £9.99

Buggeration. Bought pages and numbers separately in app store two weeks ago @ £13.99 each.

[NIIKME]

Hi guys, very useful thread coming from a year old mac user with no regrets whatsoever. Do any of you use your machines for home movies? Ive made do with imovie til now but its awful if you ask me and i am ready to bin it....Can anyone recommend a more intuitive program? Im not into movie making just want something with a nice tree so i can store movies of the kids in a sensible manner!

[TheHeretic]

iMovie is as good as you will get for free, I reckon. Still has lots of options, and effects you can utilize. Final cut has a free trial if you want to give that a go.

[CommanderJameson]

There are no intuitive video editing programs. If iMovie proves difficult to use, anything else will just seem even harder.

[tog]

NIIKME said:

Im not into movie making just want something with a nice tree so i can store movies of the kids in a sensible manner!

There is Usher, which bils itself as an iTunes for movies. I haven't used it myself, but window resizing app Moom from the same company is excellent, and certainly worthy of inclusion in an "Essential Mac Software" thread.

[JonnyFive]

Is there anything for the Mac like.. CCleaner for Windows?

I've seen theres a Beta of it, has anyone tried it..

[TheHeretic]

OnyX... Does all that cleaning caches, history, and so on.

[CommanderJameson]

JonnyFive said:

Is there anything for the Mac like.. CCleaner for Windows?

I've seen theres a Beta of it, has anyone tried it..

There's AppCleaner, which tidies up preferences and other doodads installed by applications; handy for apps that install frameworks, which get left behind when you drag the application to the trash. There's also AppleJack, which provides an automated script for tidying things up from the single-user prompt (i.e. starting up your Mac and not running any of the graphical wossnames, so you can do low-level system stuff; hold down ⌘-S when the system starts to access it, type CTRL-D to exit it and start your Mac normally).

Other than that, all you really need are the following commands, which, in order do:

1. Runs the regular maintenance scripts to tidy up system logs etc
2. Deletes the contents of the current user's Caches directory
3. Repairs permissions - the way some Mac sites go on about this, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a magic bullet that fixes all ills. Whilst it can fix some bizarre application behaviour, its most usual effect is to soothe one's OCD

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly 
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

Edited by CommanderJameson on Sunday 1st January 09:20

[JonnyFive]

Thanks for all of that, Cmd Jameson & Heretic.

Will give one of those a go

[PJ S]

http://www.macdentro.com/ - IceClean
DiskSweeper is another useful freebie, from OmniSoft.
Secrets Preference panel is another if you want to (de)activate hidden functions or change certain parameters.

[CommanderJameson]

Here's a nifty one. It's like Disk Inventory X, but with a much more OS X-ified interface.

GrandPerspective: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

[LordGrover]

Xcode: click, available from the AppStore.
A very nifty development suite - FOC.