Mac Essentials; Applications for a shiny new mac.

There's probably a hundred of these type posts around telling you get this, it's cool and shiny and such things. Well this will be different. How you ask? Well, because I wrote it, and not the others. I'll be mainly looking at the useful and productive things I've found, though there will be a level of bling-ification in one or two. So, on with the show!

1. Perian + Flip4Mac
These are the two essential codecs (well codec packs) needed for anyone wanting to watch videos on their macs. Flip4Mac is from Microsoft, and encompasses all their WM* codecs and such. Perian, well, it's everything else. Just install both and hey presto, Quicktime will play any of your videos. This means that your videos will also play in FrontRow. If your files aren't stored in the Movies folder then just make an alias to their folder and move it to Movies (Right click > Make alias). Then in FrontRow, select Movies Folder under Movies and it should be there!

2. Adium
This is a free chat client that supports, among others MSN. While microsoft has an official client for the mac, I don't like it, at all. There's a whole load of add-ons and plug-ins on the website, enough to make anyone happy, and the minamalist contact list style looks great, and is really unobtrusive.

3. The GIMP
Wash out that dirty mind of yours! Now! GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, essentially, a free photoshop. If you're used to photoshop, then it can take a little getting used to, but the guides and how-tos are most excellent. You'll also need X11 installed for this, get it either from your installation disks, or an improved version from here.

4. iSquint
Great converter of videos, and will even add them to iTunes for you when done. It has various options, like optimising fro TV or iPod and advanced ones for cropping etc.

5. Movie2iTunes
If your movie collection is rather large, you may not want to convert it all, as it may take weeks. So this little tool lets you drag files onto it, and it creates a reference ".mov" file and adds that to iTunes. These files are only a few kilobytes too.

6. The Unarchiver
Does what it says on the tin. It'll basically expand any archive you throw at it.

7. rEFIt
Wether it's Bootcamp and Windows, or the latest Linux distro, rEFIt will come up on every boot and offer you a choice of what to boot, with OS X defaulting after about 20 seconds. Very handy.

8. GeekTool
This preference pane adds an overlay to the desktop showing various things, e.g the output of "top" to see all the processes running, or a log file to monitor it, even pictures. Great for the geek or programmer wanting an easy way to monitor their system. Personally I have it monitoring top with "top -FR -o cpu -n 27 -l 2 | tail -34" and dmesg with "sudo dmesg | tail" though for that you need to add an entry to the sudoers file. You can have it show to-do files, and even use an actionscript to export iCal entries to text for it to show.

9. Transmission
Great bittorrent client, small and fast. Great for downloading that latest linux distro...


10. Firefox
While theres nothing wrong with safari, I just prefer firefox. Essential add-ons are ad-block plus, firebug, and flashgot.

11. Flock
Firefox for the more social of use. Integrates into many services such as Facebook, youtube, picasa, blogger, digg, twitter, Livejournal and many more. As it is based on Firefox, it can use firefox add-ons too, so all is good.

12. Adobe Flash
So you can play all your favourite online games, and watch all those youTube videos. Install after the browsers, as it'll pick them up and integrate itself.

13. Open Office
With version 3 just around the corner, this project is becoming very mature. It doesn't seem as clunky as Microsoft Office, and is far cheaper, as in free :) .

14. Xcode
Essential for programming on a mac. GUI designer, IDE, command line tools, debugging, all you could possible need, and more. Should be on your install cd, or the newest version is available at the link above.


That's all for now folks. There'll be more eventually, but this is my "clean install" itinery. All my essential apps to feel at home. Any suggestions are much welcomed!