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Honestly, I would hold off installing a bunch of software until you have a need for it – or at least until you can appreciate the problem it solves. OS X comes
by bouncingsoul 19y ago
Honestly, I would hold off installing a bunch of software until you have a need for it – or at least until you can appreciate the problem it solves.
OS X comes with a lot of tools out of the box, and I think it'd be better to stick with that stuff until you outgrow it or are no longer satisfied with it.
For example, people will recommend the VLC player, but QuickTime with the Perian plugin is what I use: more stable than VLC and plays all the formats. And it's one less app.
I didn't use Quicksilver for much more than a launcher when I had it. The Spotlight menu in OS X 10.5 is pretty much as fast as Quicksilver for launching apps. So maybe wait to install Quicksilver.
Same with Adium: iChat is good enough for me.
And people recommend Growl, but I found it more annoying than helpful. Pretty much every third party app registers itself, which means seeing tons of alerts I don't care about. (Unless you go into the Growl preference pane and unregister everything, which made Growl too high maintenance for me.)
The only essential things I'd recommend (again, only get them if they make sense to you):
TinkerTool http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
– Gives easy access to hidden system preferences.
Perian http://perian.org/ http://perian.org/ –
A plugin for QuickTime that lets it play all the formats it doesn't play.
Paparazzi! http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/ http://www.derailer.org/paparazzi/ –
Makes taking webpage screenshots easy.
Service Scrubber http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/ http://www.manytricks.com/servicescrubber/ – Lets you prune the Services menu. (Don't worry about installing this until you see a need for it.)
TextWrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/ – Free text editor with terminal integration and excellent file search capabilities.
Transmission http://www.transmissionbt.com/ http://www.transmissionbt.com/ –
My favorite bittorrent client.
- brianloveswords 19y agoOh I completely disagree about the Spotlight menu being as fast as Quicksilver for launching apps but even besides that Quicksilver can do so much more. You can: set global shortcuts for damn near anything you'd want to do; add a line to a text file (for quick note taking); send a quick email; move files... And for the Quicktime+Perian vs VLC thing, Quicktime will be decent enough for xvid or divx (though you'll take a small performance hit for it), but if you use MKV you will definitely want to use VLC -- Quicktime doesn't give you the option of switching languages or embeded subtitles, and the performance is awful. But I do agree with the Transmission recommendation, it's really a great BT client: clean, not nearly as bloated as Azureus. Unless you really need some of Azureus' more advanced functions, you'll find Transmission can cover everything you want.
- far33d 19y agoI hated spotlight on 10.4, but with my new machine with 10.5 I've found spotlight good enough that I haven't bothered downloading QS.
- bouncingsoul 19y agoWell, my main suggestion was to use the tools that satisfy the needs you have. Spotlight app launching is fast enough for me. Maybe someday with a larger index it won't be, but that isn't the case right now. I've never encountered an mkv file, so that Perian doesn't add support for it doesn't bother me. If Spotlight is slow for you and you need to play mkv files then use the tools you need. But I don't think it's necessary to recommend an M24 tank because it can handle off-road and take out enemy road blocks to someone who'd be perfectly satisfied with a normal sedan for their morning commute.
- scorxn 19y agoTotally agree with the "wait til you need it" philosophy, otherwise you waste time configuring and updating software you never use. That said, http://opensourcemac.org/ http://opensourcemac.org/ is a nice resource. And http://opensourcewindows.org/ http://opensourcewindows.org/ for that matter.
- tx 19y agoHow did you get away with iChat? I don't know a single person on AIM account, everybody is either on Yahoo/MSN or even ICQ.
- koolmoe 19y agoYou can do GoogleTalk on iChat as a Jabber account.
- curi 19y agoweird. i don't know anyone on yahoo. msn only warcraft III players. AIM everyone else.
- rms 19y agoAre you or your friends from outside of the USA? Seems like AIM is only really popular in the USA.
- tx 19y agoHm... some of them are (ICQ users), but the American portion of my contact list is split between Yahoo and MSN. For some of them those messengers are "corporate standard", i.e. everybody at work is running one of those two. Another sizeable group of corporate IM contacts is on Skype, and growing fast, due to the encryption I suppose. Frankly, I've never heard of AIM until I bought a Mac last month. Am I on an island? :-)