NCD! iMac i7

[chipbutty24]

Hi all. New here and new to Macs. I have an iPhone but that's the only Apple product I own...until today.

I decided I'd finally had enough of M$ and took the plunge. Just got the call from my wife that the nice FedEx truck just dropped off my new iMac 3.4Ghz i7 27".

Very excited albeit a bit nervous about the switch. I am trying to break into web design/dev which is my primary reason for the switch (that's how I justified the expense anyway).

Any apps I need right off the hop? I've heard Dropbox is a good one as well as VLC and App Cleaner. Any other recommends for an Applenoob?

Thanks.

BTW: Very impressed with FedEx. It left California on Wednesday with a projected delivery time of noon today. It arrived at my door at 11:26AM. Not bad.

 

[jononon]

Mplayer is a great player (I prefer it over VLC), it's free on the mac app store.

Also, Logitech Touch Mouse is a great free app on your iphone, you will also need to download the app to your computer, but works as a great touch mouse if you're sitting away from your computer.

If you're doing web design, you'll need an FTP app, if you haven't already, I've been using Fetch for the last 5 years or so, cost is $20 after free trial ends but easier than using a web browser.

 

[Hellhammer]

Depends if there is something special you want to do. I prefer Chrome over Safari. iWork or Office for Mac might come handy too.

 

[obsidian1200]

If you use internet chatting a lot, I'd recommend Adium.

I highly recommend the program Jumpcut, as it saves the entries you've copied or cut on a clipboard.

If you plan on editing/sharing Microsoft documents, I'd say to go ahead and buy Office 2011 over iWork. Office 2011 preserves the formatting of Microsoft documents more effectively than iWork does, in my experience. If you're fine with just sharing .pdf's, exporting to office, or exporting to a movie in the case of Keynote, then by all means go with the iWork apps via the Mac App Store.

I'd also download Growl (for notifications), Perian (for video codecs), and you'll need to download flash if you plan on viewing websites (such as hulu) that only host flash content (you can get away with an html5 plugin for youtube videos).

Those are the bare basics I can think to recommend for new users.