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

[mbarr.livejournal.com]

Synergy is helpful for this- you can run 2 monitors, one keyboard, if you like..

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.

[lady-eclectic.livejournal.com]

Sweet!

Enjoy your Mac :)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Run the "Terminal" app...Unix. (You probably knew that, but at least one Mac/Linux crossover user I knew did not, and spent a long time griping about how there was this darn Unix under there somewhere if only they could get to it.) For an upgraded replacement, try iTerm.

I really like TextMate for editing, partly because I have a custom bundle which does things like highlight quoted text (i.e does syntax highlighting for my *stories*).

I like "Chicken of the VNC"; dunno what you're using.

Delicious Library is a lot of fun for managing collections of books/videos/etc.

Transmission is a decent Bittorrent client.

For news, http://macintouch.com is still my favorite after a decade or more.

Apps

[laurabee.livejournal.com]

I am totally in love with these apps:
- Things (by Cultured Code, otherwise very difficult to google for)
- 1Password
- Quicksilver

And the Linux cross-overs:
- Gimp
- Inkscape

I use Aquamacs to get my emacs fix. Otherwise, the builtin apps do pretty much what I want. Have fun!

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if these are the kind of tips you're looking for, but for me the biggest adjustment to Mac OS X has been the organization of all open windows by application, and the fact that an application can be running without any open windows (running in the sense that you can command-tab to the application to access its menu bar at the top of the screen). The single feature of OS X that I use most often is Exposé (System Preferences -> Exposé and Spaces), which allows you to "zoom out" and see all of your open windows (either across all applications or within the currently active application), so you can click on the one you want. Exposé has replaced alt-tab for me, except in those cases when I am just switching back and forth between two applications (more generally, when I don't have to look at the list of applications while switching). Particularly nice for me is having Exposé mapped to a corner of my screen, so now I can effectively "alt-tab" using just my mouse hand. Another nice touch about Exposé is that it allows you easily to bring only one window to the front, in contrast to command-tab, which brings all windows for that application to the front.