Everyone Mac user and their dog who’s somewhat technical has either put a list like this on their ‘blog’, or at least thought about compiling one. Here’s my version to help out the 2 people who read this thing with a useful list of programs to help get them started.
Most of the apps have been ported over to Universal Binary, which is important to note as I find stuff running under Rosetta painfully slow (but perhaps that could be due to my measly 512 MB of RAM).
Can’t-live-without-utilities
Quicksilver - No Mac is useable without this keyboard launcher. It makes Windows look like the crap it is, and I don’t know now people use computers in general without an application like this. The absolute first program I install.
Sidetrack - Not as necessary with the new enhancements made to the trackpad for OSX with the new generation of laptops, this utility still however has some of the best enhancements to your laptop-scrolling around. I use it for vertical and horizontal scrolling, as well as two of of the corners set for Exposé — show all apps and show desktop.
Communications
Adium - This free instant messaging program interfaces with ‘em all - MSN, AOL, iChat, ICQ, etc. Plus it has a nice duck as it’s logo. What’s not to like? (oh yeah, apparently voice and video support are coming soon)
Skype - Skype is now fully supported on OSX and they even have a quick-use widget. Great for quickly placing long distance calls, however SkypeIn numbers are not yet available for Canada so you cannot receive calls. On a side note, what’s really slick is the sheer ease of integration bluetooth has with OSX. It took me all of 1 minute to get my cell phone’s bluetooth headset paired with the MacBook. Then, go into System Prefs -> Sound, and change the input to Bluetooth Headset, and the output to Bluetooth Headset, and just like that you’re using your headset to place phone calls through your laptop to Skype. The built-in laptop microphone is only useful if you plug-in headphones; otherwise the person you’re speaknig to will hear their own voice through your speakers, rendering conversation impossible.
Hard Drive Space Saving Utilities
Monolingual - Most of the languages installed with OSX are unused, so why keep ‘em? Running Monolingual will free up about 2.5 GB’s on your Mac (assuming you keep English only)
Appdelete - Installing apps on OSX is typically a drag-and-drop affair. It still bewilders me how easy it is to add and remove apps, and even moving what volumes they’re in doesn’t affect their functionality (wanna run a program off of an external drive a few months after you install it? No problem! Just drag-n-drop and 99% of the time you won’t run into any issues) What people don’t realize is that there are some preferences files stored in personal folders for some programs, and that they’ll be orphaned if you delete the app and not the pref files. The free Appdelete will delete both the application and its associated pref files if any exist.
Disk Inventory X - Great utility to help you visualize where and how the space on your drive is being eaten up.
Virtualization
Parallels Desktop - Supposed to be virtualization at it’s finest, utilizing the Intel Duo Core’s built-in virtual engine technology. I’ll be reporting on this more when I get some more RAM.
Apple Boot Camp - Haven’t used it, but it’s supposed to work like a charm. Create a new partition, install Windows XP SP2, and choose your environment on boot-up. Of course, you then have two options: Boot into Windows and slit wrists, or boot into OSX and live happily ever after.
Photo Editing
Adobe Photoshop CS2 - The best photo editing program, hands down. However, they are not releasing a Universal Binary version for CS2 — so running Photoshop is emulated through Rosetta. They haven’t set a date just yet for a new version, but typically Adobe releases a new version every 18-24 months.
iPhotoToGallery - Indispensable plug-in for iPhoto 5 and 6 that lets you export albums directly to your Gallery 1 or 2 installation. Makes putting photos online an absolute cinch.
HTML Editing
Smultron - Great program for composing and previewing HTML pages.
File Transfer
Cyberduck FTP - More ducks! Excellent free FTP program.
Fugu - Good for SCP / SFTP transfers.
File Sharng / Leeching
Unison - Hands-down the best usenet application ever. EVER
Cabos - Erm…for downloading songs and stuff. Legally. From gnutella. Legally. Yeah.
Transmission - Azeueus is good, but clunky and more than most people need for downloading torrents. This is clean, quick, and doesn’t eat tons of memory.
The All-Important Backups
Super Duper! - Fantastic backup application — consistently ranks at the top of the charts for functionality, yet very easy to use. A must have. I have an Ubuntu server set up with a 200GB hard drive that Super-Duper backs up to every night on both laptops. Should a hard-drive crash, all I’d have to do is hook the drive up through fire-wire, boot off of the image, and transfer away.
Media Players
VLC - Great open-source media player. Handles most types of video and audio in a nice interface.
Flip4Mac - Microsoft has dropped support for Windows Media Player for OSX, and handed off all future WMV decoding development to Flip4Mac. A universal binary release is in beta as we speak, and I’ll update this when a prod version comes in. In the meantime, you can download the beta from here: http://nicklin.us/Flip4Mac_WMV_v2_1_0_24.dmg
Remote Management
Chicken of the VNC - Good open-source VNC client, great application name.
OSXVnc - Good open-source VNC server. Fairly standard featureset for those familiar with VNC.
Network Discovery
iStumbler - A handy wireless discovery tool that lists off all of the wireless networks in range (be in WiFi or Bluetooth), plus it tells you their respective signal strengh and if they’re open or closed networks. Not that you should hop onto open networks…because I’d never do that. Um…ever. On an unrelated note, on a bus once coming in from Calgary back to Edmonton, I was able to hop onto open networks all the way from the ‘City of Champions’ sign to home, minus a small gap when you cross the bridge. This tool helped determine which networks to jump on.
SSH
SSHKeychain - Manages your private keys for making password-free SSH connections a cinch. Nice interface, but can be a bit buggy when it comes to port tunneling.
Mapping
Google Earth - Released for OSX, this program is fun for touring around the world. Google *must* continue to support OSX and Safari.
System Maintenance
Rember - A GUI front-end for Memtest, this simple utility lets you test your RAM out. I’ve recently upgraded to 2G of RAM and immediately tested it using this free utility. A simple tool like this could save you lots of troubleshooting heartache if you find your machine getting ‘kernel panics’ after a memory upgrade.
Repair File Permissions - I typically do this once a week. Good maintenance task to ensure UNIX file permissions are not comprimised or corrupted. I usually just let Super-Duper repair the permissions before a backup, however you can also run it directly from the Disk Utility included in OSX.
File Recovery
EXIF Untrasher - Essential free tool for recovering digital photos deleted off of your memory card by mistake. Excellent.
File Compression
MacPAR deluxe - Clean interface and automatically un-RARs an archive after checking a set of PARs.
UnRarX - Good RAR archive program.
iLife Enhancements
iPhoto Buddy - By default, iPhoto sticks all photos in one Library. With over 15,000 photos, this tends to bog my iPhoto down (in version 4, to the point of being unusable). iPhoto Buddy lets you setup various libraries, and choose
the one you want to use on start-up. It’s fantastic, and should be built in to iPhoto.
Libra - Similar to iPhoto Buddy above, Libra lets you manage seperate libraries for iTunes. While iTunes doesn’t have the problems I’ve seen with iPhoto in regards of large locations, I don’t like having 10 GB of hard drive space eaten up by music I don’t need locally. I’ve used Libra to setup another iTunes library residing on my Ubuntu server. When I want to listen to something of of that library, I simply map a network drive using Samba (built in to OSX), pop-up Libra, choose my remote library, and off I go.
Absolutely Useless but Fun for 5 Minutes
MacSaber - Make your Mac sound like a light-saber! Kick ass! Uses the built-in motion-sensor on laptops and makes dueling sounds.
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