mike1210

Hi all,
My dad has decided to go to the dark side and buy an iMac. 24-inch with the RAM from crucial re: a previous thread on there. I use them at my Uni where I work but not at home so was wondering what apps people use them for certain tasks listed below, I have put down what I currently use in Uni running 10.5 but what do you Mac guys use?

CD Burning: Toast

Email client: Apple Mail or Entourage

Web Browser: Firefox

Office Type suites: Office 2008 (flame suit zipped up )

Instant Messaging: MSN Messenger is all I've used

Photo Editing: Photshop CS3

P2P: Azeurus (legitamte purposes )

Media Player: VLC?

Remote Access? ARD 3 Mac to Mac works Ace , anyone access via PC? Tunell via SSH?

Remote File transfer over Internet

Also any free tools and the like that people have found really useful?

BuRR

Try this site for a starter: Top 100 Mac Apps ~ Chris Pirillo

mike1210

Tidy cheers

Markus

Remote File Transfer: I guess you mean FTP, in which case Interarchy or Transmit are rather good clients

IM: I'd recommend Adium as it's a multi protocol IM client, it'll handle MSN and iChat/AIM quite happily. It will NOT do video though. It does support skinning, so you can have a nice small buddy list, as opposed to the official MSN Messenger client's huge ugly interface.

Email: Stick with Apple's Mail.app

Web: I mainly use Safari, but if I have a problem with a site I'll switch to Firefox.

Office Type Apps: Obviously Office 2008, or try OpenOffice/NeoOffice which is a free Office suite.

Photo Editing: I agree with PS3, but GraphicConvertor is certainly worth a look as is Photoshop Elements, which is basically a cut down version of Photoshop.

Media Player: Quicktime plus Flip4Mac, which provides WMV support for Quicktime, plus throw in VLC for good measure

Remote Access: If you're using 10.5 then there is built in screen sharing. The app to connect to other machines can be found here (/System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSharing.app). You turn on screensharing for your machine in the Sharing Pref Pane in System Preferences, or you could use a VNC client such as OSXVNC. As for other VNC clients, I use Chicken of the VNC (don't ask ) and that certainly does work via VPN.

P2P: Well, Azeurus is pretty good, also have a look at Transmission.

As for other apps, 1Password is handy for password management, BBEdit for Text Editing. PureFTPManager if you want to run a decent FTP Server. Flying Buttress is a nice GUI to the built in Firewall. Little Snitch is great for monitoring what is trying to open a network connection from your machine.

KiwiGTI

CD Burning: Toast, although you may not need it, you can burn most stuff natively

Email client: Apple Mail - It's pretty good

Web Browser: Firefox or Safari 3.0

Office Type suites: Office 2008 , iWork is excellent too

Instant Messaging: MSN or aMSN is very good

Photo Editing: Photshop CS3

P2P: Transmission

Media Player: VLC? - or iTunes/Quicktime, Flip4Mac for Windows Media

Remote Access? ARD 3 Mac to Mac works Ace , anyone access via PC? Tunell via SSH? - SSH is fine, built in obviously. Or can use Transmit. Also Microsoft RDP client is available.

Remote File transfer over Internet: Transmit

Also any free tools and the like that people have found really useful?
Not free , but :
VMWare Fusion - better than Parallels
Omnigraffle Professional - better than Visio
Textmate - Text Editor
Skype

mike1210

Great stuff guys many thanks

Simon C

FTP: Yummy FTP

Photo editing: Lightroom

PS: I use both and no problems yet.

Ian Cook

FTP : Cyberduck works fine

RDP : CoRD again works fine

Office : NeoOffice

ScoobyDoo555

FTP - Fetch is good, plus their license for education is free

NeoOffice is good.

Wouldn't necessary bother with Toast - OSX does pretty much all of it.
Install the XII stuff off the installer disc, and then put on "Ink" and "Image Tricks" - 2 fantastic packages that are free

DAn

druddle

Arkaos and Final Cut.

AlexJReid

The latest beta of Microsoft's own RDP client for the Mac is also pretty good!

Agree with TextMate for text editing and VMWare Fusion for running Windows/Linux VMs.