Interesting, useful applications for MacOS X?

In My Humble Opinion
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After months of deliberations, I finally bought a Mac Mini for Mrs. Aruns, and I’m happy to say that she likes it, at least up to now. The only little problem is that we don’t know the software scene, so to speak, so we don’t know many interesting applications, apart from the usual biggies that are available under Windows, such as Adobe Photoshop or Dreamweaver or MS Office.

So of course I thought of getting the advice of those smart fellas the Dopers (captatio benevolentiae): what are your favourite programs for the Mac?

In addition to that, what are your reference websites when you look for software? Of course I tried to google something, but I am concerned of unwittingly using dodgy software laden with spyware, viruses and such.

And since we’re speaking of malware, I know that the threat is supposed to be much smaller than under Windows, but is there any scanning software I could install?

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A small note: Mods, I started this thread here because it is a poll of sorts, but feel free to move it to a more appropriate section if you feel it should be.

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Email: most of the big players on Windows are available on OS X too (Eudora, Thunderbird; Entourage is the OS X equivalent of Outlook Express); and OS X comes with Apple’s Mail. You can use your OS X box as its own SMTP server using Postfix — download the free Postfix Enabler from versiontracker.com.

Browsers: boy do we ever have browsers. Firefox, Camino, Opera, OmniWeb, iCab, Mozilla, Safari, Shiira, Netscape, … there’s even a somewhat out-of-date version of Internet Explorer (does it still get installed by default with OS X?) although MS isn’t developing it any more.

Word Processors: AppleWorks, Apple Pages, NeoOfficeJ (a Java variant on OpenOffice), OpenOffice itself, Nisus Express, AbiWord, Easy Word, Mariner Write, …let’s see, am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, Word :wink:

Audio and MP3: iTunes, Audion, QuickTime Player, RealPlayer, xACT, Peak

Graphics, Photo Editing, Art, etc: Adobe CS, Macromedia Freehand and Dreamweaver, QuarkXPress, GraphicConverter (really nice shareware).

Text Editor: BBEdit rules

Widgets and Tweaks: FruitMenu, X-Assist, WeatherPop, iClock, Snapz Pro or FreeSnap, Default Folder, More Internet, WindowShade X, PullTab, Window Dragon, MacLink Plus, XRay, QuicKeys, Remember?, Fracture

Networking stuff: Timbuktu, VNC, Sharepoints

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I just discovered Quicksilver, which is a really spiffy application launcher (and so much more!)

But, really, in order to suggest software, we have to know what you want to do with your Mac. Most any basic stuff you’d want to do with it, it probably comes with software for that.

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Internet Messaging: Adium - freeware multiple network client that can handle AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Jabber and more.

Security/System Maintenance: Brickhouse and MacJanitor

Text Editor: BBEdit is the best, jEdit and EthaSubEdit are also highly recommended

If you’re a LiveJournal user: iJournal is an excellent LJ client.

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For finding Mac software, bookmark VersionTracker and MacUpdate. If a title isn’t listed in one (if not both) of these sites, it probably doesn’t exist.

You may also find this thread (on a different message board) useful: Just bought a Mac mini? New to Macs? This thread is for you!

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While it’s pretty specialized, if you use Netflix, I recommend Netflix Freak. I just found it this weekend. They have free trial for 30 days but the licenced version is only $15. It has so many cool features, I went ahead and bought it.

The company that makes Netflix Freak - The Little App Factory, also makes some other applications as well. I haven’t tried those out but might be interesting to you.

I always check out MacWorld. They’re a good source of freeware and demos. I’ve found quite a few little programs that were at least worth checking out. Check out their Web Gems weblog.

Here’s one of MacWorld’s Software bargains lists. It’s a few years old but it’ll give you a taste of what they review.

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Whe you’re done with all the usual stuff listed here and want to REALLY do something different, Go get Fink and FinkCommander.

Then you can use the Mac to do Mac-like things AND have access to THOUSANDS of Open Source Software applications. http://finkcommander.sourceforge.net/

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There is a fairly comprehensive list of useful shareware/freeware/demo programs here organized by category.

I’ll throw out a mac only app that I’v enjoyed the past few days…

Delicious Library allows you to import, browse and share your books, CDs and videos. It uses either an iSight webcam or digital video camera (or some webcams from logitech) to scan in bar codes or ISDNs from these items…and then retrieves the info (including a thumbnail pic of said item) from amazon.com.

You can synch it with an iPod (so if you’re at Borders or BestBuy you can instantly look up what you have on your iPod). You can get suggestions based on your current titles…you can use it as a “library” to check out items to friends. I was able to scan in my book and CD collection in a fairly short order, just by passing the bar code in front of the scanner for a second or so (it even beeps…heh)

Anyway…it’s fun.

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Some of my most-used programs:

DragThing - This is the OS X Dock on steroids. Actually, it precedes the Dock by several years - it’s been around since at least Mac OS 8. It works like a charm - I’ve found no bugs over the years I’ve been using it. The author is cool, too - he had removed a feature that I liked, and put it back in when I asked for it.

TexEdit Plus - A great little text editor. Considerably less expensive than BBEdit (though I own both). TE+ has all the text-handling features that most people (i.e. non-programmers) are going to need. Another cool author - when I suggested some features to perform a couple very specific tasks, he wrote me a pair of scripts to accomplish what I wanted, and then added the features in the next version of the program.

For E-mail, I use PowerMail. Apple’s Mail program just didn’t do it for me.

I also eliminate spam by using a program called SpamFire. It filters my mail, downloads and deletes all the spam, and then cues PowerMail (or whatever mail client you use) to download the good stuff.

You can find all of these programs by searching at VersionTracker

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BBedit also has a “lite” version, TextWrangler, which is freeware. Can’t beat that price if you don’t need the full feature set (which I don’t.)

Ulysses is a pretty neat text editor with a lot of features useful for writers - it organizes your work into a project that has all your notes attached in an easily navigable format. So you can have a main ‘chapter’ you’re working on, and just off to the side are tabs for your character workups or plot outline. I’ve really enjoyed using it.

Notational Velocity is a handy little text pad for notes on the fly that is also searchable so you can find anything you made a note about really easily.

CandyBar is a handy system interface for changing icons on your computer.

Colloquy is my favourite IRC client for OS X

And finally, my husband lives or dies by Tinderbox but don’t ask me what it does because I can’t get a straight answer. Apparently it’s very adaptable to the user’s personal style and needs and a lot of people are using it for a lot of different things. He uses it to maintain all of his blog content for one thing, but also uses it in entirely different ways related to work. (He’s a contracting web developer.)

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Oh, just one more thing (I feel like Columbo) Transmit is my favourite FTP client. It’s really slick and easy to use.

I’d also like to second the QuickSilver love from further up the thread. Mmm. I don’t know what I’d do without it!

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Wow, lots of great suggestions! I like Quicksilver too, and Adium looks really nice. I particularly appreciated the websites, so we can catch up.

BTW, quite naturally in the applications we use there’s the odd feature here and there that does not exactly map to something obvious on the Mac. Mrs Aruns in particular has one, a complex one available in the latest versions of ACDSee, that doesn’t seem to be available in iPhoto.

She can join together a set of pictures in a larger one, in such a way to have some white space around each composing picture as a frame; she can also specify the pattern to lay the pictures in the larger one, so that she can, say, have a larger one in the centre and two smaller ones on each side; or maybe a 3x3 grid, or a long banner on top and three on the bottom, or whatever takes your fancy. I am at a loss to describe it, it’s not something really easy to convey, isn’t it?

Unfortunately my suggestion of using cut-and-paste by hand was not appreciated :slight_smile: , or she could have pulled it off in any decent image editing program, but spending much more time on it.

Any ideas?

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Well iPhoto does have several different choices for layouts including contact sheets, N-Up etc… Not sure if that is exactly what you’re looking for

Portraits & Prints might fit your bill…lots of templates and formatting options.

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Well, apparently that’s not exactly what the wife was looking for, because this idea (like the one for iPhoto) is for printing, while she would like to create new images from the old ones, but the idea is there. Is there something that offers some kind of template-based (like this ) tool that creates a new image rather than a printout?

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Not an exact fit, but Jalbum builds web albums and has many different templates (though not exactly what you’re asking for.)

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for photo massaging that iPhoto can’t do. I got it when buying the $99 Wacom Tablet, along with Corel Painter Essentials 2. Both do some pretty nifty stuff withouth having to choke up $XXX for a full version.

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I feel kinda dumb at this point (since I’ve never heard of or used it)…but if ACDSee is what you want…get the Mac version. :smiley:

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Well, this may be more hassle than it’s worth, but: iPhoto will let you “print” to a PDF file instead of actual hardcopy. Once you’ve got a PDF file, there are utilities that will let you turn the PDF back into an image.

This page shows how to make a photomosaic from iPhoto, output it to PDF, and then use Photoshop to convert the PDF to TIFF (image) format.

There are cheaper utilities than Photoshop to convert PDFs to image files: just go to VersionTracker and search on “PDF convert.”

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I was once in a Multimedia class where I wrote, produced, and edited a movie on a Mac. Final Cut Pro and After Effects were a dream. Of course, they’re not of much use unless you’re the movie-making sort. Unfortunately I don’t know much else about the Mac software scene.