Comments | edge_of

edge_of_within

Mac

Sep 10, 2009 10:44

I bought a Mac.
I'm excited to transition away from Windows as my primary machine, but I certainly don't have as much experience in OSX.
So I ask you, faithful readers who already run OSX - what should I install?
What apps do you love and/or use often?
I've upgraded to Snow Leopard & installed iWork.
IM Aggregator? (I use Digsby on Windows)

EDIT ( Read more... )

Comments 25

eric here! anonymous September 10 2009, 22:20:59 UTC

Adium is supposed to be good, but I have no idea why people use it, I guess they are on ICQ or something. iChat / gmail fills my needs but i freakin hate pidgin on windows, what can I use there ( ... )

Re: eric here! edge_of_within September 10 2009, 22:45:48 UTC

I'll check out Adium and report back ( ... )

eric again anonymous September 10 2009, 22:25:44 UTC

torrent tracker? can't help you there, isn't that evil or something?

Mac The Ripper will rip DVDs... but it's slowly getting dated. you also need something like Popcorn (commercial) to compress and burn. it's suboptimal ($$) but a reliable combo.

Handbrake is a MUST HAVE for DVD's also. It will let you rip DVD's to Ipod / Itunes / whatever format. Also there is iSquint. that will convert just about anything to anything video-wise, especially for ipoditunes formats. great for cramming "torrents" into your device.

I've always wanted "delicious library" but never bought it. dunno what else I have. will check out. I also have some libraries of old software but a lot of it is pre-intel days (but OSX)

onece again anonymous September 10 2009, 22:26:39 UTC

and yes, you pretty much never have to close anything ever.

except firefox from time to time

ziibminthalij September 11 2009, 01:08:38 UTC

I have nothing much to add; I most commonly use Firefox, Photoshop, iTunes, etc. I still prefer Microsoft Office over any Mac equivalent, although sometimes I must revert to Mac's TextEdit when Word decides to loathe documents with IPA in them. Which is probably not a problem you'll run into. So yeah - welcome to Mac! Yay.

edge_of_within September 11 2009, 01:44:15 UTC

Thanks!

I just installed (am installing, if we count the big fat update it's downloading) Office 2008 too. I'd like to attempt to stick with iWork as much as possible, to see how much I like it, and because I really hate Excel, and I've heard great things about Keynote.
I'm pretty content with Word (and of course .doc is the standard), so I may not bother much with Pages.

I assume Apple has a (very) basic image editor too, like MS Paint?
I never really need Photoshop, but I use Paint for small things - file conversions, compression, etc.

ziibminthalij September 11 2009, 02:09:53 UTC

I've been doing a lot of work with spreadsheets lately, and haven't liked what I've seen of Numbers. Mostly, it has been crap for integrating with Excel, while Excel swings both ways fine. I've heard Keynote is pretty awesome though.

Basic image editor - hm, not as far as I know. You can do some things (rotating, resizing) with Preview, and you can do color changes and other such things with iPhoto, but nothing like unto Paint.

edge_of_within September 11 2009, 01:44:53 UTC

Candice Achenbach made a comment about your note "Mac":

I switched 1.5 years ago and the only app. I'm still absolutely in love with is called Quicksilver (although I hear there is another program that does the same/similar ) all it does is allow me to open programs with key commands instead of pointing and clicking or going through menus.