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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Location
    Ohio
    Posts
    8,535

    Mac Users Unite!?

    Lame thread title. It's all I have in me.

    I just got in a new iMac. I'm in love. This is the first time that I have used a Mac since the 5th grade though, so I'm a little out of touch.

    Share the love! What are some good FREE downloads? What should I get no matter what the cost?

    Any other tricks you would like to share?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2004
    Location
    U.S.A
    Posts
    1,464
    Gotta love a Mac!

    I'd suggest downloading Adium, its a customizable messenger client and its pretty cool.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Posts
    1,025
    Adium is great stuff for sure.

    Here is some programs you may want to poke around with:

    http://www.freemacware.com/some-of-our-favorites/

    Also, I would look at TextWranger, CyberDuck, and Colloquy just to name a few.

    Edit-

    I almost forgot, if you are looking to get the most out of the mac and do not want to mess with boot camp parallels is very good to work with. It is not free but has a free trial and depending on how much windows software you need can work wonders. Outside of enterprise stuff I think you will find that you don't need windows at all once you get settled.
    Matt Armour
    OpenReaction

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    Under Your Skin
    Posts
    5,904
    Quote Originally Posted by inogenius View Post
    What should I get no matter what the cost?
    Microsoft Office for mac.

    If you find yourself needing parallels and bootcamp, I'd recommend keeping the box to your mac and switching back to a pc... or doing like another guy and only using vista on a mac... don't know if he uninstalled os x, but he never uses it.
    Windows 10 to Linux and Mac OSX: I'm PARSECs better than you. Eat my dust!!!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2004
    Location
    San Francisco, CA
    Posts
    2,455
    Some of the applications that I use on a daily basis:

    • Adium
    • Cyberduck
    • Firefox
    • NeoOffice
    • Skype
    • SmartSVN
    • Smultron
    • SpamSieve (not free, but well worth it)
    • Thunderbird
    • VLC
    • X-Chat Aqua
    • XAMPP


    I chose VMWare Fusion over Parallels for the Unity function. Basically it will make Windows (or many other OSes) look like they run natively on your Mac. So no start bar or anything like that if you desire so. My favorite aspect of it is that it maps all Ctrl + hotkey to Cmd + hotkey. That may sound trivial to you now, but give it some time and you realize how much of a headache that becomes. Also choose it because they've been in the desktop virtualization for years. Same price, try them both out and decide yourself.

    Quote Originally Posted by hekwu View Post
    Microsoft Office for mac.
    I would suggest to try out NeoOffice before you purchase Office. NeoOffice is a ported version of OpenOffice to the Mac. It does all of the major things that Office does, but it's free. Does a great job for me, but then again, I don't need everything. I just need a word processor with Office formats that I can save to.


    Quote Originally Posted by hekwu View Post
    If you find yourself needing parallels and bootcamp, I'd recommend keeping the box to your mac and switching back to a pc... or doing like another guy and only using vista on a mac... don't know if he uninstalled os x, but he never uses it.
    For some people, there's always that one pesky application that refuses to build a Mac version of it. I actually went ahead and bought VMWare just to run two of those Windows-only applications. It was well worth it, and I have never had a problem with it.
    Last edited by Tyler; 04-05-2008 at 05:13 PM.
    Tyler Cole
    Eeek, a Blog

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