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Must Have Programs for New Macbook Pro owners?

xact is great as is audacity. iStat was free, but I think it costs now, but it is a great program. iTunes Statistician is cool, as is Coconut Battery.
 
Caffeine
MPlayer OSX Extended is better than VLC in my opinion
Carbon Copy Cloner (great alternative to Time Machine)
 
Cinch, Alfred, Perian plugins for QuickTime, MPEGStreamclip are just the few ones I use that haven't been mentioned previously. It kind of depends though on what you use your computer for normally. Cinch is a must have in my opinion for a smaller screen laptop since it's great at resizing the applications to fullscreen or half screen so you can quickly put a PDF and word document side by side.
 
BetterTouchTool - enables Windows 7 like snapping and allows you to increase the tracking speed on your trackpad.

MagicPrefs - allows you to customize the actions and gestures of your trackpad.

Both applications are FREE!
 
Charlie Sheen said:
handbrake if yo have an ipad or iphone. its great for converting videos into the ipad format.
Click to expand...

For what do u need handbrake?

AVPlayer and VLC both can handle DIVX, mpeg2, XVID.
AVPlayer can use x264 (transcodet with ffmpeg in 2 minuten) to real h264 Header, and the iPhone play 720 / 1080p in Realtime whitout shuttering (Hardware Decoded).
 
Evernote - best note taking application I've used. It's also compatible with the iPhone for syncing information, really cool and useful if you know how to take advantage of it.

AppZapper - uninstalls applications with related files that may be left behind, really good for keeping computer clean.

Hulu Desktop - who needs cable? Hulu offers free TV, aside from commercials here and there, they're not that bad compared to actual cable. But you are limited in choosing what to watch, I can't complain since its free.

Onyx - helpes maintain computer and keeps it running smooth, I also recommend looking at MacKeeper.

Dropbox - great for sharing files/documents/pictures/videos, anything. All by just using the WiFi, no cables needed to transfer files with this app.

VLC player - plays any media file, very important to have

Virtual DJ - says it all in its name, it allows you to mix and mash up your iTunes library. Fun and its free

iWork or Microsoft Office - its pretty much standard applications to have if you go to work or school to study.

+1 on Handbrake

I also recommend looking at Firefox or Google Chrome. Firefox is more customizable, Chrome is really simple and solely based on necessities on your web browser.
 
Angry Birds!!!!!!!!! :D

Seriously though I also recommend carbon copy cloner, Perian QuickTime plugin, grand perspective, spotify, radium, pages, magicprefs, growl amongst others.

Despite the general consensus amongst windows and Linux users that us mac owners dont have any decent software there's plenty of great software out out there to enjoy trying out! Have fun!
 
Try alternativeto.net It's a handy website that allows you to find alternatives to any program, even cross-platform such as (Windows to OS X) it helped me find sooooo many great apps for OS X (many of them mentioned above) :)cheers!:)
 
Cool thread! Buying first MBP here in the next month, and I've written all of these down. Thanks!
 
Alfred
ANGRY BIRDS!!
Coconut battery
drop box
Fastest Free Youtube Downloader
Handbrake
Onyx
Ripit
VLC

I wouldn't use any apps like Clean my Mac or App Zapper. They tend to "Zap and clean" too much which always causes problems.
 
Insomnia - Makes it so you can close the lid of your MacBook without it sleeping. Trust me very useful, lets say you need to walk accross the room to show someone something, its not as clumsy to carrying the computer with the lid open. Or if you just want to close the lid of your computer while it runs programs its nice. You can set it to automatically turn on when you plug your charger in too or not. Worth a try.

Caffeine - Others have mentioned it. Very useful.
 
Captain Dynamo said:
Could you say more re why you prefer Libre Office over Open Office? I've had the latter for years, haven't used it a lot.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Open Office is dead due to greedy Oracle trying to commercialize it..

The original team behind Open Office started another project to continue Open Office legacy, which is call Libre Office..
 
There are several threads already on this, but I personally do enjoy posting in them so here are my recommendations:

Opera: by far the most feature rich "out of the box" web browser. I prefer it to all others, but there is a bit of a learning curve. However, once you learn it and use the features I think there's no going back to other browsers.

Firefox: another great browser, I use it for sites that don't support Opera. It has an amazing list of cross platform compatible addons and has a few neat features I haven't been able to duplicate in Opera, like Tab Candy.

TextMate: a great text editor. It has a ridiculous amount of features for all sorts of programming languages, mark up languages, and general writing. It's fast and expandable.

Textual: a pretty IRC client.

Thunderbird: a functional replacement for Mail.app.

Cyberduck: an easy to use FTP client. I've heard good things about Fugu, too.

SYMBL: extends the power of Mac OS X with all sorts of great plugins. My favorite is Visor, it makes a terminal window drop down from the edge of your screen with a hotkey combo. It's really slick. :cool:

Spirited Away: a tiny menubar application that allows you to hide windows after a set amount of inactivity. It's great for small screens, or just to keep your desktop from getting cluttered.


I highly recommend picking a web browser besides Safari as it seems to hang constantly ( for short amounts of time, but it's still annoying) and really isn't anywhere near other browsers as far as features go. I personally don't like Chrome, and I don't like how ubiquitous it's becoming, but a lot of people seem to like it.
 
+1 for alfred(no more point and clicking to launch app and fumbling through your app folders; IN fact, you can launch and do pretty much everything from there)

streamtome client(while waiting for air video client to be made for mbp but works well as music streaming client).

p vs z mac version(do i need to say more?)

eclipse(if you are into that sort of thing)
textwrangler(notepad++ replacement on osx for me)
 
jvmxtra said:
+1 for alfred(no more point and clicking to launch app and fumbling through your app folders; IN fact, you can launch and do pretty much everything from there)

streamtome client(while waiting for air video client to be made for mbp but works well as music streaming client).

p vs z mac version(do i need to say more?)

eclipse(if you are into that sort of thing)
textwrangler(notepad++ replacement on osx for me)
Click to expand...

ECUpirate44 said:
Alfred
ANGRY BIRDS!!
Coconut battery
drop box
Fastest Free Youtube Downloader
Handbrake
Onyx
Ripit
VLC

I wouldn't use any apps like Clean my Mac or App Zapper. They tend to "Zap and clean" too much which always causes problems.
Click to expand...

First I've heard of Alfred and, after looking at it, why would I want to use it over spotlight as a launcher? Maybe their site is just underselling it.
 
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