Interloper in the House! Need cool Mac Stuff

[GilesGuthrie]

The Finance Director of Guthrie Towers has requested a MacBook Air. It has arrived and is strange. The @ symbol is in entirely the wrong place. It has some weird power cable arrangement that utterly prevents me from hammer-throwing the Mac to the floor. And its Data Import feature rendered my 20+ years of IT Consultancy experience completely redundant.

So, she wants it for internet/email and some writing. I had Pages preinstalled on it (for £14, which is cheaper than Office).

On the basis that I've got it connected to the house, the internet, the music library and the Office 365 Exchange Server, what else do I need to do? What's cool (from the perspective of an iPad user) to put on Macs these days?

 

[Dennisch]

Windows 8.

 

[sesselpupser]

No idea about games, but essential software: Firefox or Chrome (Safari drinks RAM), The Unarchiver, Perian (a codec for QuickTime that lets you watch pretty much any video format)... I can't really think of anything else. If you want to stream media from Mac to PS3 there's Medialink, Air Mouse is a decent wireless iPhone mouse/trackpad/keyboard app and that's all I can remember.

Oh, Open Office is also good, a free alternative to Office which deals with .doc files far better than Pages does. That's all I've used it for, however.

 

[Solo]

Touchgrind is always good fun, and free from the mac app store, although it is very frustrating

And I'd differ from what neema_t says, Safari has been by far the best browser for me over the past year on my Macbook Pro. Chrome just isn't quite as smooth or polished. As for other Apple software I'd say Keynote is worth purchasing too if you're making any presentations (£14 again). I've found no need for Numbers yet although at £14 again its cheap as chips compared to its Microsoft counterpart. Garageband that comes as part of iLife is fun to play around on and you can create some great sound clips on there. Geektool, the mac version of rain meter if you want to customise your desktop a bit.

Oh and if you haven't already got it, upgrade to Mountain Lion, its a vast improvement over Lion!

 

[E28]

Geektool, the mac version of rain meter if you want to customise your desktop a bit.

Damn you, I was going to recommend that! You can get some pretty cool stuff for GeekTool, like Twitter/Facebook feeds, weather info, and widgets displaying unread/recent messages.

And IMO, stick with Safari, it's the best browser for OS X from what I've used.

 

[sesselpupser]

I'm basing my opinion of Safari on the fact that if I run JUST Safari, even with every non-essential process quit or stopped, it immediately uses all but 20 or so MB of my 2008 MacBook's 2GB of RAM, which obviously slows everything to a painful beachball-laden crawl. On my Mac Pro with 6GB of RAM I've seen Safari hit over 3GB usage just by itself, but since switching to Chrome I've been much, much happier because I can actually use my MacBook now! From what these other guys have said I suppose there has been an update lately which may have fixed it but I haven't updated my software in a while due to fear of Java breakage. I haven't used Safari since maybe March of this year.

But yeah, your mileage may vary, however I found Safari to be a really hateful piece of crap. I guess things have changed but I'm quite enjoying Chrome to be honest, I use it on my PC too so it's nice to have a familiar interface between my machines. It's hard enough getting used to the ctrl/cmd thing every time I switch from one to the other. Anyway I'm now rambling. If you (OP) have any specific requirements then let us know and we'll be able to offer contradictory opinions on what's best!

 

[Takumi Fujiwara]

Syncing your iPad without PC iTunes making you want to through the iPad through the screen is a pretty nice feature, haha. I swear Apple makes the PC version horrible on purpose.

 

[Anghammarad]

Plex is quite fun. www.plexapp.com

 

[DQuaN]

Plex is quite fun. www.plexapp.com

Thanks for that, I just installed it on my PC. It's really good!

 

[Anghammarad]

Thanks for that, I just installed it on my PC. It's really good!

Yes, I like it. I've copied all of my DVDs and Blu Rays onto hard disc drives and then put the discs in a box in the basement. I run a Plex media server on a Mac mini that is always on. This means I can stream all of my movies to a number of devices, including my iPad, iPhone, my computers, my PS3 and Samsung TV.

 

[Shoogar]

From experience, Firefox is horrible on Mac. Go with Chrome.

As for other things, the typical, VLC, Pages, iTunes.. I really can't think of much else that I use my mac for.

 

[Takumi Fujiwara]

Oh, if you have a Magic Mouse, get MagicPrefs. It lets you add extra "buttons" to the mouse and stuff. It made a huge difference in the usability of mine.