Comments on: Essential Apps for a new Mac

By: pic.micro23

pic.micro23 — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:17:30 +0000

Hi – I’m a convert… I used windows for several years, then Linux and now Mac (Every OS sucks

But what I found out is that I and a lot of people don’t care about the OS BUT we care about our APPS… so now I only use APPS that are cross platform apps and specially that my info is not hostage of any app or OS.

I would add add OpenOffice to your list.

By: Jon Gretar

Jon Gretar — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:46:28 +0000

I prefer Butler to Quicksilver. Butler does a lot fewer things but when it comes just to launching application i prefer Butler. QS’s powers seem more to be in the document area.

I loved iTerm in Tiger. But now I just use the built in Terminal in Leopard. What I was mostly going for in iTerm was tabbing and such. And Terminal just seems to have a lot fewer problems.

By: Ryan Eibling

Ryan Eibling — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:09:18 +0000

I second the VLC recommendation, but I have to recommend Parallels Desktop over VMWare Fusion. I used Fusion for a month after reading many positive comments about it, but I found the integration features lacking. With Parallels you could forget you’re running a VM if it weren’t for the distinctly different window frames.

By: James Hawes

James Hawes — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:50:24 +0000

FUGU is an excellent FREE FTP client I use on my Mac.

By: Chad Udell

Chad Udell — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:32:00 +0000

Don’t forget the following:
VLC for media playback
VMWare Fusion for windows/linux virtualization
OmniGraffle for flowcharts/wireframes
I also second using Transmit for FTP
A couple Dashboard widgets I like: Dashalytics and Dolor Sit Amet (A Greek text generator)
WhatSize will help keep you HD clean by letting you know where all your disk space is going.

By: Alex Miller

Alex Miller — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 03:37:11 +0000

Glad my list helped. For FTP, I happily use FireFTP (FireFox addon) instead of Cyberduck. I like iStats a lot for system resources – goes in the menu bar, very configurable.

I use iTerm although I started using it in Tiger where Terminal didn’t have tabbed terms. Terminal in Leopard meets the minimum bar (although I’m still partial to some details of iTerm).

TextWrangler is a decent free alternative to TextMate if you just want to do basic text editing stuff.