dear mac fanatics.

Oct 3, 2007 at 11:28 AM
13 comments

Music to my ears: a new MacBook Pro. While the boy has always had Mac stuff around to borrow, I haven't used a Mac full-time in about 4 years. Tell me what I need to know - do you have programs you can't live without? Navigation tips? Anything besides "the new iPhone update breaks everything"?

Share your cult-like love and advice, please.

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Adium if you use more than one IM client.

Well I have yahoo /aol/ and msn those along with firefox and you're set!

As raf said, Adium is the better choice for chatting. Pixelmator is an up and coming image editor that is still a little buggy but has HUGE potential. Comic Life is a lot of fun. I like iStumbler for finding open networks. If you are a productivity freak and want to do as much as you can without touching your mouse or touch pad, check out QuickSilver. It takes some getting used to but once you get into it, you will never want to use anything else. LifeHacker has some great tutorials for it. There are some things that I am missing but I am on a PC at work at the moment. If I think of anything, I will come back and follow up.

iusethis is pretty awesome for finding Mac software. I use these.

Twitterific!

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yall are awesome. Adium I have, Quicksilver I'd been wondering about, and iusethis looks awesome. Mmm geekness.

Here's the list of apps that I use. Note that I use my Mac (mini) as a home theater PC and not for work/coding stuff yet and I still use my ThinkPad as my main communication device.

I like NetNewsWire for feeds. For text editing I actually use TextWrangler, though everyone else at Six Apart seems to swear by TextMate, which I've never been able to make much headway with.

The one app I need which I haven't been able to find a good solution for is image editing. I don't really want to spend a lot of money, since my image editing needs are infrequent and primitive, but it would be handy to have something.

Yeah, I use TextMate but readily admit it's overkill for normal people. I know Walt uses BBEdit (TextWrangler Pro). A few times when I've been writing something on the train I've used WriteRoom, which turns your expensive awesome MacBook into an old school singletasking word processor.

I found the same thing about image editing--there's not been a Paint Shop Pro equivalent for Mac--and apparently so did everyone else, because there are a bunch of new ones just coming out. I've only spent a little time with Pixelmator (which Potty Mouth mentioned above), but so far I prefer Acorn (though not enough to buy it yet). Iris is another, but it isn't even available as a demo/beta yet.

In non-software tips, MacBreak Weekly is one of the few podcasts I actually listen to all of; and unlike Windows, ⌘-tab switches between applications—to switch between windows of a single application, use ⌘-tilde.

I'm a fan of SubEthaEdit, VLC, FFView, ImageWell, and Nocturne.

The emperor replied to The emperor’s comment:
Oct 4, 2007
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Forgot to mention ControllerMate should you get a mouse or other such peripheral with many buttons.

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congrats

For image editing I like <a href="http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/263/graphicconverter-x">GraphicConverter</a> Nice for simple image manipulation and reasonably priced.

dear mac fanatics.

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