Chris L

Having just ordered my first Mac today (MacBook ), I'm looking for some ideas on the best software to have. So all ideas are welcome.

Thanks
Chris

Blackscooby

Just done exactly the same this afternoon. MacBook 2Ghz, 1Gb ram 100Gb HD.
Looking forward to it turning up

Chris L

Same spec too!

Markus

Chris,
What type of software? The new machine should come with iLife which has a few fairly nice things in it. Add iWork to that and you've got a nice basic suite.

After that, well as said, depends on what you're using the machine for.

AllanB

Hope you get them form MacWarehouse !!

What are you looking to do on your machines so we can guide you to the software you need ?


AllanB

Chris L

Yeah, OK it was a bit of a wide ranging title

Going to be some work use, so I will need some sort of virtual PC app - I'd prefer that to dual boot XP.

Out and about - photography. I haven't played around with the iLife software much so I'm not sure how much that will give me.

Anything nice, cool and flash really

lightning101

Windows XP

Markus

Right, for virtualization, I would suggest Parallels Desktop for Mac. It's very good. Still in beta, but it's close to completion. I've got a copy (and also pre-ordered) and it works like a charm. Apart from that there is the free application Q (based on QEMU). It's ok, but I'd go for Parallels over it any day.

Photography, well, iPhoto might do what you want, if not then you have Graphic Convertor, or the big boy, Photoshop.

JackClark

Cyberduck for FTP, OSX comes with command line only FTP Upload. Oh and Automator is your friend.

Welcome aboard by the way.

Markus

Interarchy is also another good FTP client, with a few other tricks up it's sleeve.

For IM I use iChat along with Adium, which is a multi-protocol chat client.

Spamsieve is good for spam filtering. Mail.app's Junk mail facility is pretty good, but I've been using SS for a few months now and it's better than mail's filter was (though that could simply be poor setup on my part)

VLC (Video Lan Client), will allow you to view most media. One big thing to note, windows media player isn't Intel compatible and I think they have said they won't be doing one, or not for some time.

Stuffit Deluxe for all your compression and decompression needs. Though the build in .zip archiving of OS X should be more than adequate for your needs.

Podworks, if you have an iPod then this is a great little utility allowing you copy music from your iPod to your hard drive.

Max is great at converting audio files into various formats, for example, flac into m4a. Ovolab AAChoo is good for AAC encoding as well. EasyWMA will allow you to convert WMA files into a different format.

Colloquy is a pretty good IRC client.

If you have a Bluetooth phone or PDA then Salling Clicker is a rather neat utility, allows you to remote control various things on your mac from the Phone/PDA. For example, I can use my iPaq to launch iTunes and select a specific album, and due to the AirTunes setup I've got, it plays through my AV setup, so there's no need to do something as low tech as get up and put a CD in the CD player

AllanB

Last fm is dead good internet radio programme.

Another vote for Graphic converter.

VLC is an excellent media player especially when Quicktime deosn't like certain AVI files.

Personally I also think Firefox is a better browser than Safari, much quicker.

iDefrag has been pretty handy when i filled my numerous hard disk up and my machine slowed right down. Took a while to defrag but performance was right back up there after.

Oh if you like to make your own ringtones from your own music files mp3 trimmer is quite snazzy too.

Wiretap is another great utility as it lets you save files being played on your computer to an aiff file that you can convert to an mp3. It basically means if you wanted to you could record from an internet radio station, DVD or the TV if you had a TV tuner like the Formac Watch and Go.


AllanB

AllanB

Oh and if you like Photography you can download the beta of Adobe Lightroom. Bit more sophisticated than iPhoto.



AllanB

Markus

I might have to peek at iDefrag.

As well as wiretap look at Audio Hijack, does a similar thing. Used it before the remote speakers facility in iTunes allowed you to broadcast music to multiple remote speakers.

Markus

Allan,
One thing about iDefrag, it doesn't seem to support Intel Macs right now, guessing it's not yet been updated to deal with the new partition map type (GUID?) that they use.

Blackscooby

Is there any media player out there for the latest gen. of Macs that supports xvid ?

I haven't looked yet... but just wondered if anyone knew.

Ta

365

Take a look at macupdate.com or versiontracker.com

mattbeef

and no one has mentioned toast 7 yet tut tut tut

Markus

Looking at the VLC site it states the OS X version does have support for xvid, and 0.8.5 is a universal binary and runs well on my intel mac, so that's worth a shot.

this is meant to allow you to convert xvid to other things. Also, this could do something similar.

Matt - good call on Toast. I totally forgot about it, very good application.

Chris L

Thanks all - just what I was looking for It's a whole new world and quite odd, having been fixed into Windows and PCs for more time than I care to remember!

What about the security side? I know that Mac's aren't quite in the same league of problems that Window's machines are liable to, but I've seen more than a few things coming through that are aimed at Apples recently (working in IT security tends to make you a little paranoid!).

Chris

ScoobyDoo555

Other recommendations -

I-Life
Quicktime Pro
Photoshop (of course!)
Adobe After-effects (IIRC)
Toast
Final Cut Pro
DVD Studio Pro
Adobe Acrobat
Microsoft Office
Windows Media Player

Music software is a different matter all together PM me if you want recommendations.

Dan

Markus

OS X has a built in firewall, so you can turn that on, though I'll admit I've never done that and haven't had a problem. If you want to monitor/stop connections then Little Snitch is pretty good.

As for AntiVirus software, it mainly exists on the Mac to prevent Mac users from forwarding on viruses they have received to PC users. Excluding word Macro viruses I've not seen a mac bases virus for at least 8 years, possibly longer.

jowl

I have only ever seen 1 mac virus - on an OS 7.X machine a long time ago.

ScoobyDoo555

OH yeh - I remember one from back then - on my old SE30

Kept keeping floppy disks and I'd get the "sad Mac" on bootup

Dan

JackClark

There was a new threat this year, but you had to give it your password. No user would ever do that... would they??

Markus

True, there have been a few trojan's, one being a jpeg file that when opened asked for your admin password, which, one would have thought, may alert you to something a little fishy.

I do agree that mac users can be very complacent when it comes to antivirus protection and it'll probably bite us in the **** one day.

corradoboy

With the firewall active and logged in as a none admin user you have little to fear at the mo'. That could change as the platform grows in popularity which it seems to be doing now (at last, people are realising ). As for the recommendations of WMP/V, MS ceased support of these for Mac some time ago and now provide Flip4Mac as a Quicktime add-on. Still struggle with some AVI's though but VLC plays many that QT won't. Other worthwhile apps are Limewire, Serial Box/Surfer, iSerialReader, esellerate (cracked ), Little Snitch, MacPilot, Yahoo Messenger and Skype.

JackClark

Not a trojan, a virus. OSX/Leap infects files and self propagates via iChat. It could infect files on the Intel Mac but couldn't spread further. It turned up a day or two after my Mac! Still nothing to panic about, but more than a simple trojan.

JackClark

I'm using Microsoft Media Player on my Intel Mac without issue. Flip4Mac is not available for the Intel Mac yet, although you can install it in a round about way.

Markus

ok, my mistake. I can't recall, was Leap the one that used the jpeg file (pictures of 10.5 if I recall)?

As for Flip4Mac, don't you have to tell Quicktime player to open in rosetta for the plugins to load? Does that effect QT's performance that much? What about browser based files, does the workaround take care of that, if so then I'll give it a shot.

corradoboy

I'm not on Intel, so don't need Rosetta. When in Safari, WMV files open in a QT window and can be enlarged etc. I wish QT (mpeg, mpg, mp4) files did too, but they open in a browser window at size