Mac Mini all settled in, now, essential software?

Sir Ruben said:

So can anyone recommend some essential Mac software that will enhance my Mac experience? It doesnt matter what it is, big or small, as long as its useful!

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There are links to app recommendations in the following:

Helpful Information for Any Mac User
Mac Pro & Mac mini Fast Start: The new user's guide to the Mac

- forklift or pathfinder (file copy/move operation)
- pixelmator (budget priced but almost as complete as photoshop)
- transmit (if you need any ftp/sftp transfer), you can even mount remote sites as local virtual drive
- coda2 (any web programming)
- imovie
- garage band
- iwork
- dropbox (free account)
- vlc (to play non supported video files)
- handbrake (video conversion)
- adium (msn/yahoo/... ) messenger
- xmarks for safari (to sync my bookmarks
- utorrent

and probably some more I don't recall.. Ihave one for itunes that download lyrics and missing album artwork.




I usually also set my hot corners (in the preferences): I set one to disable screen saver, one for screen saver, one for sleep.

I could not live without photoshop elements and lightroom. Skype. Spotify. Unrarx for unpackin them there torrents.

Here is some of the apps I am running:

- Tweetbot
- CleanMyMac
- Dropbox
- Filezilla
- Screenflow
- Skype
- uTorrent
- Adobe Photoshop / Fireworks / Dreamweaver
- HandyPrint (airprint enabler)
- Chrome
- Perian Codecs (allows quicktime to play loads more video formats)
- BetterSnapTool
- WinZip Mac

Hope this gives you some ideas

That-Guy said:

- CleanMyMac

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I would not recommend CleanMyMac, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much. While you may not have experienced problems yet, enough people have that it's wise to avoid it, especially since there are free alternatives that have better reputations, such as Onyx.

You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.