My experience with a Mac - So Far So Good

Model : Macbook White 2.0 GHz , 2GB RAM

OS : OSX 10.5.7

Date of Purchase : April 2009

I have been a Mac user since last three months thats not a lot of experience to say. I had googled for hours and read tons of reviews on Macs before I was convinced to buy a Macbook. Since My purchase I have to say I haven't had a single reason to regret my decision (except when I found a better Macbook being released by Apple only few days after my purchase). I find my Macbook almost perfect in every way.

Since day one of my purchase I have been googling... again but this time to find the right softwares (free-wares mostly) to accomplish my daily tasks and occasional programing on my Mac.

Below is a list of some of the softwares I found most useful and most of them are free to use.

Feel free to comment if there are better alternatives out there.

Web Browsing - Safari , Firefox

I like to use Safari almost all of the time. Its fast , Simple and the interface is unbeatable. I wish it had the add-ons and plugins that firefox has. The only add-on out of the few available that I find useful with Safari at present is Delicious-Safari.

I doubt there are any other alternative mac browsers better than these two.

Disc Burning - Burn , Toast (Roxio)

Although Toast is regarded as the best burning software among the Mac community , I found it to be bulky with a lot of features that most of the novice users like me don't need and it costs money to own a copy. hence Burn was the best free alternative I could find ,Its light and has all the basic functionality I need.

Productivity - xPad , Google Docs

There are tons of notepad like utilities out there for mac , It doesn't matter which one you chose as most of them have similar functionalities and are light. I use xPad.

I don't have much to say about iWork as I seldom use it and yet to discover the Pros and Cons of iWork, I prefer to use Google Docs its free and has more features than I ever need for the kind of Docs I prepare.

To-Do List - Check off

Check-off is a handy utility to maintain a To-Do list. It sits right on the menu bar hence easily accessible and tasks can be color coded according to ones priority and its free

Movie database and DVD cataloging - DVD Hunter

If you are a movie buff like me then this free utility is a must , DVD hunter automatically fetches information for any given movie including cover image from amazon.com and stores it in a neat user friendly manner.

Media codecs - Flip4mac

The free version of Flip4mac enables one to play windows native media like wmv in Quicktime player.

Lyrics - Get Lyrical

The one thing that Itunes lacks is an option to fetch lyrics automatically. Well I found this free alternative and it does the job quite well by fetching the lyrics from wiki-lyrics and automatically embedding it to the MP3 file

HDD defragmentation - iDefrag (trial version)

Not that I find the need to defrag my Macbook HDD often , in fact I have only used iDefrag once in the last three months just for curiosity sakes and I had a neat 99.9% defraged and compact HDD after iDefrag finished its work. If I ever need to defrag a mac HDD this will be the tool I would use. Would prefer to use a free alternative if available.

I-Explorer only Sites - Internet Explorer for Mac

Unfortunately there are some sites which are still IE only. I haven't found a plugin or add-on for Safari to open IE only sites. So I found the last working version IE 5.2.3(2001) for mac and it opens the IE only sites just fine but its sluggish and the interface sucks.

Photos - iPhoto (bundled with all Macs)

No doubt its the best thing for managing photos on a Mac. I don't have any reason to find an alternative. iphoto is sufficient.

Subtitle editor - Jubler

To synchronize and edit / create subtitles.

Clear unwanted Language packages - Monolingual

The first program I run after installing a new software package. It clears all the unwanted language packages freeing GBs of HDD space. I m an english only person.

FTP - Pure FTPd manager

An FTP server is a convenient way to share private files with your friends and family . The pure FTPd manager provides an excellent GUI interface for the FTPd server. It provides useful and powerful features like restricted access , usage statistics , virtual hosts etc.

Tweak - Tinker tool

Although OSX has a great features and Interface (one of the reasons why i bought a mac) I like to turn off a few features or change the default setting to suit my likings, for instance I prefer the 2D dock to the 3D. Tinker tool is a neat tool with moderate tweaking options.

For a clean uninstall - Appcleaner

And Finally Appcleaner is a must if you want to do a clean uninstall of any application It removes an application completely by deleting along the related files and documents of the app.

Programming - Xcode

The day I bought my Macbook I was excited to try Apple’s X-code development environment. I had to go through few posts / articles before I could get my simple "hello_world.c" program to run but as C,C++ and perl is all that I ever use for my development work I find the old-school ways much more convenient (vi and the terminal environment) may be because I have been used to it for a long time now.

With more free stuff being released every now and then I wish to keep my search on before I settle down with my favorite ones.