So, I wrote this up in an email for Jason and I realized that I might as well post it since I had typed it up anyway…
I’ve been playing with stuff the last week to get all of my good software and such installed on the Mac, and here’s the list of what I would call essential:
- NewsFire – best RSS reader in life… SO GOOD! It’s really simple and it makes life pretty easy for me since it’s not integrated and messy like some other RSS readers. I should have gone with something like this a while ago.
- Transmission – super simple and nice BitTorrent client. Azureus had me messing with settings for at least 30 minutes to get all the encryption and everything I wanted setup, this came with the best setting pre-done and without all the stupid bloated code in the program. Simple and clean!
- Adium – THE best chat client I’ve ever used – ever! The only thing it lacks is video chat capability, which I can load iChat up for on the random occasions when I want to do that. Seriously though, it incorporates every other chat protocol I have ever heard of with the exception of Skype, which I hate anyway. I need to figure out some of the plug-ins and such (haven’t messed with it yet), but it’s great already… AND they’ll be adding Facebook Chat support in the next release (doesn’t quite work in the beta), which I think is hilarious and cool.
- Camino – kills Firefox in almost all respects other than themes and add-ons (which I really didn’t use other than IE tab, which doesn’t matter on a mac) – I do have firefox for a couple random BYU sites that don’t render in Camino (which makes NO sense but I just didn’t bother uninstalling firefox before I went with Camino, so I just use it since it’s there). Anyway, I really like it for it’s clean look and OS X keychain support.
- AppDelete – Most effective uninstall prog I’ve seen. I know you just need to delete the executable, but this deletes any random settings or libraries that install with your install prog. I was suprised when I used it the first time to see what I was missing in my normal uninstalls. (There is a $5 donation required after you use it a certain number of times – but it’s definitely worth the $5)
- Caffeine – makes me happy because I can avoid my computer going to sleep when it should be downloading. Plus, it runs on the tray (top of the screen) and makes turning it on and off pretty easy.
- Cyberduck – I like it for ftp, cause it’s pretty simple and easy to use… You may have another preference, but it makes me happy that it is simple.
- Handbrake – great for ripping movies to the iPod, PSP, or other things. Pretty fast actually!
- Jomic – BEST comic reader other than CDisplay, but CDisplay is windows only (sadness of my life, trust me).
- Alarm Clock 2 – I have my computer in my room (I’m at college and can’t do much else since everyone else will complain I’m taking over the living area), and I thought having an alarm clock that would bring my computer out of sleep and play some wake up music would be GREAT – thus Alarm Clock 2.
- VLC – goes without saying, but it’s a million times better than Quicktime. Besides, I swore off Quicktime in the 90′s, and I don’t wanna disappoint myself at this age.
Anyway, there are a ton of others that are “required” such as VMWare Fusion and a Boot Camp partition of Windows, but those should go without saying. Let me know if you’ve got something else I should try!
