What software should I install on my eMac?

July 6, 2004 2:18 PM

MacFilter - I just got a nearly-new eMac, and its been a while since I've been a mac user. I need some software recommendations... (MI)

I have the major programs that I need (office, photoshop, etc), but I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for any fun/good/essential programs that I should have on my mac. Free or cheap is good, I'm primarily interested in stuff like utilities, games, etc.

posted by dicaxpuella to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Lots of good suggestions were in this previous thread about the same thing.
posted by majick at 2:25 PM on July 6, 2004

QuickSilver, Butler or LaunchBar. Each is similar in concept, and incredibly useful.

It would help if you were more specific about interests. Fun/good/essential is awfully broad and subjective.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 2:28 PM on July 6, 2004

My favourite little add-on: these Applescripts for iTunes (Also some from Apple).
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:37 PM on July 6, 2004

And be sure to take full advantage of the icons and software at Icon Factory.
posted by Robot Johnny at 2:40 PM on July 6, 2004

WeatherPop is a must-have for your menu bar. Mail Enhancer fixes Mail.app so the dock icon shows all unread messages rather than just unread in your inbox.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:46 PM on July 6, 2004

Shrook! Shrookity shrook shrook. It's an excellent RSS reader. Also, PithHelmet, an ad blocker for Safari.
posted by nicwolff at 3:01 PM on July 6, 2004

Cocktail for basic maintenance stuff.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 3:48 PM on July 6, 2004

And this one was a pretty good thread that I referred to a lot when setting up my first Macintosh in years. What I took away from it were:
LaunchBar
Notational Velocity (holy moly what a perfect application!)
Fire (which was much better than the other thing, Adium I think it was called, that a guy at work showed me)

Also I've found:
GPGMail which allows the bundled Mail.app to read and write encrypted messages.
GPGkeys which provides a nice keyring management GUI.
Poisoned for your P2P needs.
Azureus for the rest of your P2P needs.
Heidrun for your, um, non-P2P needs.
gCount which provides a biff for gmail.
X-Chat Aqua is the only non-shitty IRC client. I tried them all.
X-Lite for VOIP. Horrible interface, excellent app otherwise.
Chicken of the VNC for your remote desktop needs.
OSXvnc for your desktop sharing needs.
MacTheRipper and DVD2oneX for, um, video processing.
Handbrake for, um, a different kind of video processing.
KisMac which is somewhat Kismet-like.
NmapFE for OSX a handy nmap front end.
Metallifizer sooper seekrit beta to remove the ugly-ass metal look from almost everything. You can use the non-beta, but this one also un-uglifies the Finder windows on OSX 10.3
Sidetrack because I have a touchpad.
MenuMeters is a good system status monitor.
SunShield for people too lazy to write packet filter rules by hand.
Fugu just in case.
Celestia isn't stable enough, but still a ton of fun.
posted by majick at 3:54 PM on July 6, 2004

<hijack>
I tried to get GPGMail installed on my PB, but it won't load for some reason -- I wish I had it near so I could post the exact error, but I think it might have something to do with some Apple developers tools needing installing. Is that likely or do I need to do more digging?
</hijack>

ObTopic: Quicksilver is the bomb. You hit Apple-Space and type in the name of the app/bookmark/file you want to open, and it does it. I've done away with the dock which means more use of the the widescreen display.
posted by John Shaft at 4:11 PM on July 6, 2004

Carbon Copy Cloner for backups.

HourWorld if you need to keep track of timezones.

Meteorologist for weather (I used to use WeatherPop but this is better).

NetNewsWire for RSS reading.

Tofu for reading text (breaks it into easier-to-read columns).

VLC for viewing AVIs, video discs & the like.

Another vote for QuickSilver - just change the shortcut from Apple-Space if you use Adobe progs (Apple-Space is zoom tool).
posted by i_cola at 5:08 PM on July 6, 2004

sometimes it's preinstalled, but if not? Graphic Converter. Absolutely.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 9:36 PM on July 6, 2004

I like virtual desktops, so I use Desktop Manager.

Not a program, but I find the Zoom feature in the Universal Access control panel to be incredibly helpful. If I ever want to get a closer look at a picture or some tiny text, I hit option-apple-= and zoom in.
posted by tss at 10:50 PM on July 6, 2004

MPlayerOSX is a GUI for mplayer, and it is good. If slightly odd. It's the closest thing to KPlayer you can get for OSX. Handles some codecs that VLC does not.

Audacity for what you used to use Soundforge to deal with. Has some kind of plugin scheme, but it's a bit confusing.

Good text editors for OSX are hard to find.

SubEthaEdit is a pretty decent text editor with some syntax highlighting features and some kind of wacky collaborative editing scheme using Apple's implementation of Zeroconf. I've never found that useful, although SubEthaEdit is just fine for lightweight text editing work.

OSX ships with vim if you want something highly configurable and extensible, though. You'll need to bust out your Unix kung fu and X11 runtimes to get gvim installed. There is apparently no gvim which uses the native display system.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to UltraEdit.

Well, there's BBEdit, but it's very Old Macintosh in feel, which may either suit you or infuriate you. It does the latter for me.
posted by majick at 11:10 PM on July 6, 2004

For text editing, I've recently been playing with Smultron. It's no BBEdit in terms of feature set, but it's certainly not bad for free. And I think emacs comes with the default install as well.
posted by kindall at 12:22 AM on July 7, 2004