Mac

[cellio]

My Mac Mini arrived Friday, faster than I expected. In an act of will I did not punt my congregation's Friday-evening services, attendance at which required starting Shabbat two hours early, to play with it (and go somewhere else later). I did verify that a VNC server is running on my PC and reachable from my laptop, so I can skip the dual-monitor/keyboard/mouse-on-one-desk setup. So now, off to rearrange bunches of hardware and load up a new machine.

If you've got favorite Mac tips & tricks, sites, software, etc, please feel free to share. I've used an iBook (running Tiger) casually, but as a main machine it's new to me.

Comments

mac tools

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

Excuse the poor organization, but as I look through my Applications folder, some useful stuff:

Adium handles IM duties for multiple services. It doesn't do audio or video, so you might want to keep service-specific clients (or iChat).

Growl is a notification system that can be installed alone, or it may be installed by some other apps (like Adium). It gives pop-up notifications for whatever you'd like -- new mail, new IMs, downloads completed, etc. It has become the standard way to do pop-ups on the mac. It's reasonably non-intrusive, given what it does.

Cyberduck is a decent graphical FTP client.

Flip4Mac will give you access to Windows audio and video codecs. There's a free version, but they try to hide it behind the pay versions.

Xmarks handles bookmark merging across browsers and platforms. Very handy for moving between machines.

Mozy will back up 2GB of data for free.

Disk Inventory X will show you which files are eating all of your disk space.

NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to OSX that works better than the official port.

Gimp.app is a port of GIMP to OSX that uses the native tools pretty well. One trick: you have to have the Apple version of X11 installed.

Handbrake handles video conversions well. Max does audio transcoding pretty well. Both are GUIs on top of existing open source tools.

The Macam drivers will let you use most PC USB webcams with the mac.

Quicksilver is a really handy app that gives you a pseudo-command-line. Basically, you hit a hotkey, then type the name of an app or filename. It brings up a list of matching apps/files.

Shrook is a decent RSS reader if you have a widescreen monitor. If not, NetNewsWire Lite does a decent job for free.

If you want Emacs, it's complicated. Best overview I've seen: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

If you're really pining for Unix, MacPorts is an easy way to build Unix apps. Fink is also available.

Re: mac tools

[cellio]

Thanks for all the info! (I had your recent post about Moxy still in a tab, by the way -- sounds useful!)

Long shot, but any wisdom to offer on printer sharing? I don't care whether my HP LaserJet stays attached to a PC or moves to the Mac, but I need to be able to print to it from both, and so far the obvious isn't working and Google tells me lots of people have this problem. :-( ("The obvious" meaning share from PC, verify no firewall issues, try to add from Mac.)

Re: mac tools

[(Anonymous)]

I managed to get that working a while ago, but I don't have that setup any more. All I remember for certain was that there was a slightly stupid trick involved. I think we had fewer problems attaching the printer to a Mac with a static address then telling the PC to connect by IP address.

You may need to ensure that Windows file sharing is working for your account (including setting up Windows login credentials). That's just a guess, though.