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Essential Mac software?
YerMum
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Just got a new MBP after years of windows based machines - does anyone have any software recommendations?
Rugged individualist
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These apps can be found in their own categories but are worth placing here at the beginning too so you know just how worthless your Mac is unless you have all of them installed.
VLC - Plays pretty much any format on Earth.
Quicksilver (info / direct download) - The benchmark keyboard navigation program. Free and open-source, heavily customisable.
INTERNET
Safari - It's on your hard drive and it's pretty good guys.
Camino - If you like the way Firefox renders, Camino is the Mac-native browser that uses Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko.
Firefox - If you can't live without FF, it's OK on Mac, but not native. So you lose niceties like the Cocoa window widgets, and keychain access.
NetNewsWire - The best RSS client
NewsFire - The second best RSS client, if you don't like NNW
Twitterific - If Twitter is the crack, Twitterific is the dealer.
Adium - The only chat client you need...
Colloquy - ...unless you IRC, in which case you need this too
Transmission - Transmission is hands-down the best Mac native BitTorrent app. Download the nightly build, and you'll get blocklist functionality as well.
Azureus - Azureus runs pretty well on Mac OS X, but it's Java code-base does mean it is slow, and just a little bit ugly. The plugins help a lot.
MEDIA / CODECS
VLC - Plays pretty much any format on Earth.
Mplayer - Popular rival to VLC.
Perian - Popular codecs like Xvid packaged as Quicktime components, so you can watch these videos in any Quicktime-enabled program.
Windows Media Components of Quicktime - A set of free Quicktime components to play all non-DRM'd Windows Media formats, including streaming a/v on web pages.
Audio Hijack - Record the sound output from any program on your Mac.
Airfoil - Divert any audio you want to your Airport Express
Handbrake - Handbrake is your one-stop DVD rip shop.
OFFICE
Microsoft Office - Still the best option, but the current version is really expensive. Get a second-hand copy of Office X 2004 off eBay. Solver is back in 2008's Excel but VBA support is still missing. Supposedly VBA is coming back for the next major edition. 2004 has both these features.
NeoOffice - A Mac wrapper for OpenOffice. Much better than wrestling with X11.
iWork '08 - The office suite developed by Apple. Keynote is a PowerPoint killer, Pages is perfectly capable as a Word replacement and Numbers is a good (basic) spreadsheet editor (note that I didn't say Excel replacement)
SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY
MacFuse - MacFuse allows all sort of fancy disk mounting, including drives connected via SSH. Really nifty.
SMCFanControl - A temperature monitor and fan control program that sits in your menu bar. Cool that blistering Macbook Pro. Settings stick after a restart, so it's good for boot camp gaming.
Quicksilver (info / direct download) - The benchmark keyboard navigation program. Free and open-source, heavily customisable.
LaunchBar - A lightweight alternative to Quicksilver. Less features, but noticeably faster.
RCDefaultApp - A Preference Pane for setting default apps (browsers, email, etc), Media actions, URL handlers, hardware actions, and file type associations (extensions, MIME types, and OS 9 resource codes). An indispensable tool. Use it to disable Safari's exploitable RSS reader.
TEXT EDITING
TextMate - A text editor for programmers, amazing functionality, well worth the handful of euros.
Smultron - A great free alternative to TextMate
TextWrangler - A freeware cousin of BBEdit, supports markup and Unixy stuff
TeXShop - If you write papers using LaTeX, this is the best editor to get the job done on Mac OS X. You should also look into BibDesk for your BibTeX repository.
VIRTUALIZATION
VMWare Fusion - Arguably (not really) the best virtualization software for Mac OS X. Faster, more stable, and better integration than the alternatives. Costs $79 monies.
Parallels Desktop - Actually the new Parallels beta (4.0) is WAY faster than VMWare, AND it integrates with Boot Camp MUCH better. Competition = good. Also $79 monies.
VirtualBox - A free, multiplatform virtualization product. Works very well but slower and with fewer features than commercial alternatives. (No bootcamp partition support)
WEB DEVELOPMENT
CSSEdit - The best CSS editor money can buy, on any platform. Saves me hours of time scanning CSS files daily.
MAMP - You could use the built-in server, or you could get MAMP and have an Apache/MySQL/PHP install out of the box.
Sequel Pro - A great GUI to manage MySQL databases.
From the OP of the now-dead Mac thread.
Are there certain tasks you need to perform on this machine?
I've also been using the utorrent beta for OSX. It isn't quite as nice as Transmission yet, and it does have it's issues, but at least it has DHT support (if Transmission gained this recently, hit me up!).
MPlayer Extended - (free) for playing all media types (runs faster than VLC or Perian on my machine)
TextMate - a pretty advanced text editing app. Good if you're a developer.
ExpanDrive - mount FTP drives as a read-write hard drive so apps can save directly to it.
DropBox - File Sync. Good if you run more than one machine. Cross platform.
Sabnzbd+ - (free) news reader, .nzb reader, downloader, unrar, unpar, unzip, categorize, all automatically.
Transmission - (free) torrent app.
iSale - create nice looking eBay postings, and keep track of them automatically. Drag & Drop pictures from iPhoto.
VMWare Fusion - Run windows (or a boot camp instance) as a virtual machine.
Handbrake - a nice anything -> anything video converter. Presets for all devices included.
It's the best free FTP client for the Mac.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
http://www.panic.com/transmit/
Grab these two and install them.
Perian - Popular codecs like Xvid packaged as Quicktime components, so you can watch these videos in any Quicktime-enabled program.
Windows Media Components of Quicktime - A set of free Quicktime components to play all non-DRM'd Windows Media formats, including streaming a/v on web pages.
Once you've done this, Quicktime will read just about anything you throw at it. Use iTunes to make MP3s.