Mac Software

February 8, 2005

As some of you may know, I am going to be getting a Mac tower in the near future, once Rebekah gets her new iBook. The tower is a Dual 500 Mhz G4 with 1 GB of RAM; I will be putting my DVD burner in it and just got a 17″ LCD for it. This is my first experience with owning a Mac, so while I have used them at work, I am anxious to start doing my own thing. While I have some ideas in mind on how I will have the computer setup, I am looking for suggestions from Mac users for programs they love to use. First, these are the programs I am definately going to have on my machine:

I am now looking for 3rd party programs that are optimally free, but at least shareware so I can try them out before buying. I am looking for software that will help me manage my media collection. Frank suggested Delicious Library, but it doesn’t offer much more than MediaMan for the PC and MediaMan is free when compared to 40 bucks for DL. I am also looking for a program to catalog my growing comic collection. I am going to try Comics first, but it seems rather limited if the program isn’t good, so if anyone has any suggestions, I am open to them.

I also use Trillian on the PC, so I am assuming that Fire is still the multiservice IM program to use, but if there is a better one, I would be interested in trying it out. I am also open to all sorts of other programs that are recommended to use as I am not open to the entire Mac world, so send your submissions in using the comments below.

3 Comments

If you’re looking for a good media player I’d suggest Video Lan or VLC player. You can get it at download.com. It’s the best free player out there for a mac, in my opinion.

Comment by Colin — 2/8/2005 @ 2:08 pm

Some programs to mess with:
IM Program - AdiumX
Music Library - iTunes (by far the best)
Weather - Meteorologist
‘Quick Launcher’ - QuickSilver

The apps listed above are totally free

Great shareware apps:
SideTrack - great for trackpad < -> 3button mouse, may not need on a tower I guess.
Litttle Snitch - application firewall, a great application.
Synergy - iTunes start/stop/pause/etc program that sits in the menu bar - great app.

Comment by random viewer — 2/8/2005 @ 5:01 pm

I would see if Prell has a prerelease of an unstable build of OS X 10.5. My experience has always been that having a copy of those prereleases comes in awfully handy when hopping around Hotline servers. Plus you can install them on work computers.

Comment by mattbot — 2/9/2005 @ 8:29 am