Posted by: Richard in Apple
I’m in the process of loading up my new iMac with all of the must-have applications I’ve come to depend on.
A colleague has also recently purchased an iBook, and - as a Windows user - had asked what useful and good software is out there. I figured my resulting list could be of interest to others. Feel free to submit any of your own.
BitTorrent : - The Mac Client is very good. Note that it does actually support throttling - it’s hidden by the oval window drop-down at the top-right hand corner of the main download panel. uknova.com is a good Torrent site for UK broadcast torrents.
Adium : Integrated messenger (think Trillian for Mac). Cute Duck logo too: http://www.adiumx.com/
Chicken of the VNC : VNC client for Mac : http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ - There are others, but this is the one I’m using a the moment. RealVNC is another.
Firefox : Do I need to say more? Best multi-platform browser there is. I’m seriously tempted to ditch Safari in favour of this, and as you might imagine it wasn’t a hard decision to reach to ditch IE in favour of it too (Given IE hasn’t improved in 3+ years) : http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Handbrake : Back up/rip those DVD’s : http://handbrake.m0k.org/ : Excellent ripping tool for OS X.
Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac : Google on it as the URL is huge. Ah bugger it, here http://tinyurl.com/hjd9
Real player : Useful for BBC and avoiding evil MS player type streams: real.com - top right hand corner for the free player
Thunderbird : X11 : If you’re interested in the Unix side of the Mac, X11 is almost mandatory (certainly for some apps such as MacGimp (see below) : http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/download/
Mac Gimp : mplayer OS X - Mac distro of the Linux mplayer tool. Very handy for checking those DVD backups.
Whilst rumours of virtual desktop support abound for the forthcoming Tiger release, there is actually already a freeware virtual desktop product out for OS X. Desktop manager comes recommended from a colleague, and does exactly what you’d expect: Gives you multiple windows, with all the nice transitions you’ve come to know and love.
Post a comment or drop me an e-mail if you have any others that you think would be useful.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2004 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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October 10th, 2004 at 10:38 pm
Hi, I’ve been reading your posts on macs with interest. I wondered if you or other readers had any advice for someone thinking of switiching to mac from PC. Any tips or pitfalls I should look out for?
Site reccomendations? That kind of thing.
Any help would be gratefully recieved.
October 11th, 2004 at 7:32 pm
Either LaunchBar or the free Quicksilver.
Proteus (alternative to Adium, but not free).
SubEthaEdit 2 for editing (emacs for CLI editing).
If you have a smartphone with bluetooth (prefer Symbian myself), Salling Clicker.
Transmit for http://FTP.
iTerm for OSS tabbed terminal.
Synergy for those little extra iTunes touches.
NetNewsWire (v2 is rocking my socks currently).
VLC for anything MplayerX can’t handle.