Let me show-off and announce that I am recently the proud owner of a new Black MacBook 2.2Ghz, Intel Core 2 Duo, running Leopard *bliss!*
The “old machine”, a 12″ titanium PowerBook has been barely hanging on by a thread byte. The slot-loading CD drive got damaged a couple of years ago, so when the machine began refusing to mount installers it was impossible for me to reinstall the OS using CDs. (Note! A crappy OS update was the reason for this installer issue!) Hence, poor ole PowerBook has not seen a software/firmware/OS update since 2006! Opening Mail (the Mac mail client) would crash the machine - good bye to all my mail archives. MSN Messenger and Adium refused to launch since they kept telling me I needed to update to the latest version and obviously that was impossible. The machine stopped recognising my iPod or flash drive. The only apps that were really still chugging along were Safari (browser), Limewire, iTunes and Photoshop. Did I mention the ole PowerBook had 256mb of ram? Yeah. I know. No laffing.
So it was time to band me belly and get a new machine. Enter Sweet Sexy MacBook Baby, second only to Little YingYang in my heart. Only 1gb of ram but I’m working on the second stick. However so far the 1gb doesn’t seem to be holding SSMB back at all. After 2 years of being unable to install anything, I’m a software and app fiend now, especially since there’s a plethora of yummy, shiny, open source and shareware Mac apps just waiting for me to explore. Yes, 95% of them are totally useless and get uninstalled after a day or so, but I keep coming across some real gems (that I wish I had serious use for).
As all bloggers seem compelled to post their list of top apps, without further ado here we go:
Fluid: An application that turns up your web-based logins as actual apps that you double-click to launch instead of opening your browser. I’m using it right now - got my WordPress dashboard set up as a mini-app
Transmit: FTP client
Transmission: Torrent downloader
SerialSeeker: *cough cough* What can I say? No link because it goes without saying that… well.. they wouldn’t have one!
Firefox: I was late to the Firefox fan club but use it exclusively on my work PC. Unfortunately Firefox is really buggy on Leopard, so I’ve had to resort to Safari as my default browser, while anxiously awaiting the release of Firefox 3
Coda: Sweet HTML editor
NetNewsWire: RSS Reader
Burn: There are a lot of good CD/DVD burning apps out there for Mac, among them the big boy Toast Titanium, but Burn is simple, fast, and seems to be able to handle file formats that cripple Toast (IMO)
Photoshop: There’s quite a few (fairly) good imitators out there, but Photoshop remains the superior graphics editor available today. Hands down it is the only piece of software I would pay hard cash for
Adium: Multi-IM chat client
DiskWarrior: Disk repair/recovery utility
And just because I can, here’s a screenshot of my dock:
Any other Mac users out there?
whoa fluid sounds nice. never heard of that before. almost makes me want a mac