I’m now a Mac not PC
I finally bought a new MacBook this month. After a year of waiting for the rumors to come true, I took the plunge and bought the middle-tier white one.
Moving from PC to Mac is something covered in a lot of locations; the most useful links I found are:
After one week of actually working on this laptop, here is a list of software I installed to get going.
Must Have for Survival
Firefox This is a no-brainer, especially if you’re coming from PC. It’s a browser, it’s familiar, it works, and it has a ton of useful add-ons. I don’t know much about Safari and at this point I don’t really care.
Adium A cross-platform IM client that works with GoogleTalk, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and more. It’s beautiful, has no ads, and works with no hitches as long as you’re an IM purist (in other words, you just IM – I don’t know much about the file transfer, video, etc., capabilities).
Flip4Mac’s Windows Media Components for QuickTime For those times when you need to watch a video in Windows Media Player (WMP) format, this plug-in will allow the stream to work with the QuickTime Viewer.
Really Useful
Growl Growl is a System Notifier that other programs plug into. It’s sort of like that little speech bubble that pops up in Windows XP near your clock saying that updates are available. In this case, though, any program can add support for Growl notifications, so you can always see these pop-ups for when people in IM get online, when Firefox has downloaded something, when GMail has a new message, and more. As expected, it looks beautiful.
VLC Every other description calls this a “Swiss Army Knife” for video, so this may be the only thing you need for all of those video formats out there on the Internet.
Transmission A free BitTorrent client so that you can find your favorite files online and get them quickly; if you want more functionality, Azareus also works well.
CyberDuck You can use the command-line if you like, but if you want a pretty GUI for FTP, CyberDuck sounds like the best free choice. There is also a Firefox add-on called FireFTP, but I like my web and FTP client separated.