Reply With QuoteWait for the next macheist, productivemac.com, macbundle.com-type of bundle sale. I do like Sparrow.
Thanks to a deadly combination of an Amazon 20% off laptops coupon, about a hundred bucks in Amazon credit, and the generosity of a Qt3 user who wasn't using his Kindle Offers coupon, I shall soon be the owner of a new MacBook Air 13. Been away from the Mac for a couple of years. Didn't really have a great desire to own one again, but couldn't resist the hardware on the Air 13.
Here's what I'm planning to install:
MS Office 11
Chrome
Photoshop Elements 9 (yay for both versions in the package!)
Lightroom 3 (yay again for both versions in the package! :)
Civ IV (Yay for both versions on Steam!)
MS Remote Desktop Client
For those times when you just gotta run Windows software, I have an old Parallels license from my MacBook Pro days that I can upgrade for $39. I'm going to go that route instead of Boot Camp, as it'll save SSD space and I don't anticipate playing any PC games on this anyway. (Maybe something old that will work under Parallels, like SMAC...)
So, what else do does a noob Lion user need? Any cool Mac-specific photo/video/writing apps I should look at? Must-have utilities? Other suggestions?
Wait for the next macheist, productivemac.com, macbundle.com-type of bundle sale. I do like Sparrow.
TeamViewer. I'll let you know what else I have loaded on my Macbook.
If you need to do any sort of charting, Omnigraffle is great (as are the other Omni apps). I'd pick up Pages -- it's miles ahead of Word when used in layout mode and is good about importing and exporting Word docs.
Pixelmator is the "cool" Photoshop alternative for the Mac. Acorn is a simpler alternative.
Notational Velocity is a great free (simple) note taking app that syncs with Simplenote.
I really love TextWrangler and TexShop, but they are probably not that useful unless you write code or documents in TeX.
Sparrow for email (especially if you use gmail).
Pages might do all you need for word processing; in fact, I probably wouldn't buy Office at all at first, until trying cheaper current alternatives like the iWork apps for awhile.
Since you're using Lion, check out Safari for the full-screen mode and gesture support, before trotting off to Chrome (which eats more CPU per open tab, on top of just being less well-integrated).
Fusion is perhaps a better buy than spending money on a Parallels upgrade.
There are a few writing apps that people consider must-haves (not familiar with them myself, sorry) -- it wasn't too long ago I saw a compilation that went over their uses and differences.
TextMate is still really handy.
Safari blows, don't bother with it.
Notational Velocity (a client program for splendid webapp Simplenote) is really good.
Caffeine is a handy little free app. It puts a little coffee-cup icon at the top of the screen. Click it and it will prevent the display from dimming or the computer from going to sleep for the duration of your choice; click it again and everything goes back to normal.
Isn't Sparrow kinda redundant when the Lion Mail app is heavily "inspired" by it?
Pathfinder for tabbed finder windows, a drop stack and a million other improvements over the finder!
Default folderX! My lord how did we open, save and place files without it.
I recommend you try Alfred, a search/launcher. I couldn't live without it.
Or at least I couldn't if I still had a Mac.
Well, I suppose I'd live. But not at optimal happiness.
1Password Pro. Screw Pathfinder--that's just more bloat.
I like Watts very much.
Get TheUnarchiver and Xee.
Pre-Lion Keyboard launcher is a tossup between LaunchBar, Alfred, Butler and Quicksilver.
Not sure if Moom (from www.manytricks.com) is supported or needed in Lion. Witch is also great from the same developer.
Hazel is great.
I prefer Safari to Chrome on the Mac, but you'll have to enable WebGL manually (on Lion); it takes 2 seconds. WriteRoom and Scribner are two of the popular minimalist writing apps. Caffeine is great. Textmate is where I spend 99% of my non-Xcode programming time. I wouldn't buy a license now, though, because it's getting long in the tooth. I'd probably get BBEdit.
BBEdit is especially tempting now that it's $40.
Reeder is awesome if you need an RSS client.
VoodooPad is a notes app where each document is kind of a personal embedded wiki, and syncs to a good iOS app.
DaisyDisk is about as awesome as analyzing your disk usage can get. John Gruber mentioned it a couple times but it was a writeup at Egg Freckles that sold me on it: http://eggfreckles.net/tech/daisydisk/
Sublime Text 2 if you edit lots of text or do programming
Alfred to replace spotlight
witch is nice if you want more control over how alt tabbing works in OSX. Shows hidden windows, all instances of a window, and lets you narrow alt tabbing by desktop
Civ 4 is going to run like dogshit on your Air
Reeder is great if you want a nice google reader rss client
F.lux is a must have if you are up all hours of the night using your laptop
Keyremap4Macbook is great if you want to replace some of the missing keys on the mac keyboard like delete, home, end, or you want to up the repeat rate beyond what the preference panel allows.
Thanks, y'all! Lots of good stuff to check out.
Well, I get an employee deal on Office, so it's not a big investment for me.Originally Posted by Michael Fortson
Why Fusion over Parallels? I had both back when I had my MacBook Pro a couple of years ago and Parallels seemed to have a richer feature set and better performance. Upgrade price is the same either way... ($39.99)Fusion is perhaps a better buy than spending money on a Parallels upgrade.
On a 1.7GHz Sandy Bridge Core i5?
Xee and the Unarchiver. I really miss those.
Yes, I installed it last week on my new air and its not really playable.
I think I've mentioned this in other threads but I find that Safari has the edge over Chrome in respect of speed so sometimes I opt for the former over the latter. These days I have Safari running full-screen so that my wife and I can both be logged into Facebook, Gmail etc. I prefer to use Chrome for almost everything else but that's largely because it has more extensions. Otherwise - well, they both use the same rendering engine (WebKit) so most of the differences are superficial.
F.lux looks interesting but probably isn't a good idea if you use your Mac (or Windows or Linux) to edit photos. (Haha, no one uses Linux to edit photos).
Does anybody use Skitch? It's pretty good but I rarely find anything that I need it for :(
Fusion is thought of as being more stable -- better for productivity. Parallels has better support for 3D and gaming, though it is considered less stable. If you install Windows to a Boot Camp partition (which I recommend), you can get either Fusion or Parallels to point to the partition and run the Windows apps when you're in OSX. If they have trial versions, you might be able to determine which works best for you. The Air won't be great for gaming, so I suspect that you'll boot into Windows when you want to game. The performance will just be too poor otherwise. I use Fusion, FWIW, and always play games by booting into Windows.
You've got an SSD now; disk space isn't free, and you might actually prefer the (much slimmer and faster) iWork suite anyway.
Not only is it more stable on its own, but systems with Fusion installed tend to have fewer bizarre occasionally head-scratching "why the hell is this other app crashing" issues overall than systems with Parallels installed. VMWare is just better at making reliable VMs and not breaking other parts of the system when they need direct access -- not really surprising given how long they've been doing it. On top of that, VMWare has better support, better forums, and tend (unlike Parallels) to NOT charge for updates very often. Which can be infuriating with Parallels if something goes wrong and you have to pay for an upgrade because the fix is in the newest release.Why Fusion over Parallels?
Ignore the Safari haters and give it a try -- especially on Lion with a smallish screen, you're probably going to love it because of the great fullscreen and gesture support.
I was initially using Safari after I upgraded to Lion because it supported all the new OS features. Now I'm back to using Chrome, but I'm running the Canary build, because it too has support for all the good stuff in Lion, plus my plugins...
Reeder is a great suggestion if you're at all into RSS.
1Password remains the best Mac password manager, in my opinion.
VLC plays everything.
Transmission is still better than uTorrent, as far as BitTorrent clients on the Mac go.
If you're looking for a cloud-syncing task manager that also works on iOS, I'd recommend Wunderlist.
Enjoy!
Chrome already has full screen and gesture support (sans sliding animation) in Lion.
Perian.
Sparrow for email (especially if you use gmail).If I only have a single Gmail account and use it for all my email, is there any reason to use Apple's Mail app or Sparrow instead of Google's web client? If so, what?Isn't Sparrow kinda redundant when the Lion Mail app is heavily "inspired" by it?
I recommend Quicksilver. It somewhat overlaps with Spotlight but has some unique killer features.
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