Virgin Install
My good fortune is your gain, dear readers. Whatever do I mean, you ask? I just got a brand spanking new Mac mini at work and I am in the throes of setting it up. Well, it is all set up but I am still working on getting the OS and software installed in such a way that pleases me.Since I am very clever I thought this process would make a great new feature here on TUAW. 'Virgin Install' will chronicle those software packages that I (or any of the other bloggers who would like to chime in) deem an essential piece of my Mac experience and must be installed on any new Mac I encounter.
Keep your eyes peeled for the first 'Virgin Install' in which I highlight a piece of software that even C.K. hadn't heard of.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Lewis said 8:22AM on 12-09-2005
Opera, Skype, Eudora? All excellent SW. There are soem great widgets out there too, like the BBC weather one, and my favourite, smsmac.com
I am forced to use MS Office in a work environment on my iBook, and it is vastly superior to the PC version.
I will keep an eye on this blog, but I am looking for a really good, free, "tidy-up" utility that will clear free space, empty caches and organise my HDD to maximise free space (a bit like Norton Utils, but not, if you see what I mean). Any ideas?
Lewis in London
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Lewis said 8:26AM on 12-09-2005
Yeah, MacStumbler is really good.
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Dave said 11:23PM on 6-21-2005
Blacktree's Quicksilver. NO Mac is complete without it.
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Scott McNulty said 11:46PM on 6-21-2005
Quicksilver is on the list, but the thing I will talk about tomorrow is even more important to me than QS.
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Karan Lyons said 11:38PM on 6-21-2005
Quicksilver. For the love of god, quicksilver. Adium, Realplayer, Longhand, Office, wikipedia and rabbitradio widget. Irooster, Keycue, Mplayer, stuffite, transmit, wiretap, cocktail, iBackup. And GROWL.
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Blake Pierce said 11:43PM on 6-21-2005
Granted Software's Peripheral Vision. Invaluable.
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Mark H said 11:50PM on 6-21-2005
Quicksilver (http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) is amazing.
DejaMenu (http://homepage.mac.com/khsu/DejaMenu/DejaMenu.html) can save you time if your workspace is spread across two monitors.
iScroll2 (http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/) adds two-finger scrolling to iBooks and Powerbooks made in 2003-2004. Although it's obviously not useful for your Mac Mini, it is the single most-often used piece of third-party software on my Powerbook, by far. I really don't know how I ever got anything done without it.
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Karan Lyons said 11:55PM on 6-21-2005
iscroll wont help on a mac mini...
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Karan Lyons said 11:56PM on 6-21-2005
iscroll wont help on a mac mini...
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Karan Lyons said 11:56PM on 6-21-2005
Blake: Hardware Growler which comes with Growl does the same thing and is free.
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Robert Ellis said 11:13AM on 6-22-2005
Menu Meters is a great way to monitor your system.
Dasher will bring up your Dashboard at a set interval.
TransparentDock will give you... a transparent Dock.
TinkerTool for tinkering with system settings.
JunkMatcher for spam filtering; essential if you use Mail.
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stinky said 1:35AM on 6-22-2005
I give my $0.02 and vote and thumbs-up for saft and super duper! (the exclamation point is part of the name. While I am enthusiastic about the software I rarely get so excited I feel compelled to add extra punctuation.)
Saft is a bunch of cool stuff for Safari - it saves all the open tabs if you accidentally close Safari so you can reopen all those tabs painlessly, Type-ahead searching, kind of like firefox, it forces new windows links to open in new tabs, lets you sort bookmarks by name from the bookmarks menu, adds draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, and a it does a bunch of other stuff.
Super Duper! is a great program to use to back up your HD. It is simple, it is attractive, and it is effective. The UI is really good and intuitive and I would give my kudos to the author if I had any more kudos.
Cocktail or macjanitor are nice ways to run those cron scripts when you feel like it and cocktail can repair permissions, to boot.
Oh, and MS office is a no-brainer. How the MS Mac division can make such good software and the windows division can suck such a$$ is beyond me. Clearly, MS is capable of making good software. When IE 5.0 for Macs came out in '98 it was the bee's knees, too. Maybe some mysteries aren't worth wasting my brain's precious and limited abilities.
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Kevin Ballard said 1:41AM on 6-22-2005
MS Office is not good software. For a job that requires it, it's probably the best that's available, but for home use I'd install iWork and leave it at that.
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John Lee said 3:30AM on 6-22-2005
Talk about timing! This will be fantastic. I'm getting a Mac (for the first time) this week, and this will help a lot. I can't wait to switch out of this 128MB RAMed 880MHzed PC.
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Yves said 8:23AM on 6-22-2005
Desktop manager is a "must have" too. It's a great virtual desktop manager.
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Jamie Phelps said 9:33AM on 6-22-2005
SubEthaEdit, LittleSnitch, Salling Clicker, Synk, Pulp Fiction, iPodRip, ecto, 1001, and MAMP (if you do web design)
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Pete said 9:31AM on 6-22-2005
I can't believe no-one mentioned Omnigraffle. If you do any work involving the creation of diagrams, it's essential!
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jc said 9:40AM on 6-22-2005
Anyone please care to tell me what quicksilver is, and why I need it? thanks...
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christine said 9:57AM on 6-22-2005
Growl, QuickTunes, Adium. That's what I have, I'm looking for more to add so I can't wait for these posts!
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David said 10:38AM on 6-22-2005
Get a FireWire external and use that as your boot drive. Then get Deja Vu for making automatic backups to the internal drive. Seriously, the internal drive of the mini is slow enough to have an impact on usability and this is particularly noticeable with applications that access the drive or open large files.
QuickSilver is okay but also take a look at LaunchBar - they both do about the same thing but the underlying main purpose of each is a little different. Lots of people who don't like the one will like the other.
NetNewswire is a must if you are a heavy news reader. The lite version is free and worth paying for. The shareware version is even better.
Keyboard shortcuts are more uniform on the Mac than on Windows but sometimes companies make shortcut decisions that make no sense to me - or don't make them at all. QuicKeys not only lets me make my own shortcuts but also makes the creation of macros very simple. It is a must have for me.
It is easy to take pot shots at Microsoft and Office certainly has its flaws, but iWorks is not currently a viable replacement for everyone. I know, I tried. I don't use PowerPoint at all, Excel still gets used a lot, and in the half year I've been using Pages I've still found it necessary to power up Word now and again. I think this will be true for anyone using their Mac in business or academia.
Finally, I've found SpamSieve to be a major time saver. After training it with about a month's worth of email I had in my trash folder, it has seldom incorrectly marked mail as spam or let spam through.
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