Bought a New iMac I need Suggestions

[TDPHunter]

Hello,

I decided not to wait any longer and went ahead and purchased the 27" iMac with 8GB of Ram, and the i7 Processor. I'm still waiting for it to ship. Anyway, I plan on using it for everyday things, video games, and work. I'm thinking of buying a video camera and working with video.

Anyway, I'm just wondering if anyone has any cool ideas on how I should use my iMac? Any awesome applications? It can be anything, I just want my iMac to feel homey with a lot of uses.

[Robert Grant]

I would install Perian, a very useful component for QuickTime to play more file formats.

Link: http://perian.org/

[nj-mac-user]

Well if you're thinking of working with video, depending on what level, I'd get Final Cut Studio 3 or better yet Adobe CS5 if you can afford it (or can acquire by other means ;)). Otherwise I'd at the very least get Final Cut Express 4 since iMovie is sooooo limited.

[pilot1226]

Welcome TDP! OSX is the probably the best OS I've used in recent history, I'm sure you'll love it once you get over the typical "I'm overthinking how to do EVERYTHING because I used Windows for so long".

The best feature to get acquainted with is Spotlight, the little blue thing on the top right corner. You can keyboard-shortcut this by hitting Apple-Spacebar. I like keeping my Dock & Desktop empty, so if I had to use a program like Microsoft Word, I would just type Word, and boom, it's there in 3 seconds. Faster than I can remember doing the whole Start->Programs thing in Windows.

In terms of a productivity suite, I use Office for Mac 04 that I received through my college years ago. You may want to check out OpenOffice for Mac, called Openoffice Aqua.

And for gaming, you're in luck, Valve is supporting the Mac OS now - so check out Steam for Mac and blast away.

[talmy]

Well, I've got a web page listing what I use. System is mainly used for work and my photography hobby. I've got no games for it.http://almy.us/macsoftware.html

[TDPHunter]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the great suggestions! I'm really excited and can't wait. Perian seems really cool and I think it will be useful. I'd like to have CS5 and Final Cut, I'm just not sure if Im ready for that. I'd need to read a book or something on how to use them. Something I found out today is Growl Notifications. Its a really neat addon and Ill def be adding it to my list of stuff to install.

Oh and Talmy, Thanks for sharing that website!

[MathijsDelva]

Download quicksilver! Tons better than Spotlight. I set it to my ctrl-spacebar. You can launch anything withing a matter of milliseconds!