Shiny new world

[Pondlife]

Soooo the “shiny thing make it all better” MBP has arrived and thus far I’m well impressed.

Got it running VirtualBoxes for SAP-IDES and another Ubuntu one with LAMP for messing about with MyCos website. Uber fast!

But, what are the must have apps in MacLand?

I have installed Firefox, caffeine, openMan, handbrake, VLC, Office, OSX SDK, dropbox & Tinker so far but what else is useful?

Ta Muchley.


PS. Any comments about my mac ownership being based on vanity, winkerism or generally related to how empty and pointless my life must be will be viewed as jealousy and nothing more. HTH

[stek]

Perian - codecs for Quicktime Player

ILife/iWork - Apple Productivity apps

ZOC - The best Terminal Prog

Playback - Streaming to PS3

Transmission - Torrents

Transmit - SCP/FTP client

AdiumX - Messenging

[Sysman]

An external disk for Time Machine backups.

I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable backup on another external drive. I'm a backup freak; it's a belt and braces approach. CCC is nagware so see if you like it before buying.

Back-in-Time 2 - a better interface for restoring Time Machine backups. Demo mode is "fully functional" with the restriction that you can only restore the latest version of a file. Its initial value to me was the display which shows how much is backed up and when, so that I could work out what TM is doing.

Graphic Converter. Nagware (30 second delay on startup) which doesn't expire. You need a licenced copy for batch conversions.

NotLight. Free .An alternative interface for Spotlight. The early Spotlight interface was crap, so this was indispensable in earlier versions of OS X, but I still find it handy.

Firefox / Opera / other browser of choice.

Don't think much of iLife myself apart from iPhoto, but it's worth it for that.

OpenOffice for spreadsheets and formats that iWork or Office can't handle. The iWork spreadsheet Numbers is fine for noddy stuff, good for graphics, but compared with Office or OpenOffice it's too basic for professional use. iWork's Pages and Keynote are very good.

Disk Inventory X. Free. A graphical display plus directory tree of where your disk space went to. It churns for ages when you give it a disk to go at, but you are rewarded with a pretty and useful display. Just found out where I can free up 20 GB

If you use newsgroups, MT-NewsWatcher. Donationware.

Lingon. Explore your plist files.

Audacity. Free. If you want a more professional music editor, Amadeus Pro is well worth the money.

Soundflower. Free - redirect audio from one app to another. This was more useful on my old iBook which didn't have audio in, but I still occasionally use it to grab internet radio to disk.

Various utilities I grabbed from Apple's development site. There is some useful stuff there, often including sources, depending on what you want to do.

Avoid macports or fink. If you need something from unixland which doesn't have a native OS X version, use one of your unixy virtual machines instead.

Also have a look at VMware Fusion. This is VMware for the Mac, and with its Unity mode you can access client menus direct from OS X, have client apps on the Dock etc. It's rather sexy.

[eek]

Also have a look at VMware Fusion. This is VMware for the Mac, and with its Unity mode you can access client menus direct from OS X, have client apps on the Dock etc. It's rather sexy.

Whats the difference between VMWare fusion and Parallels. Just plotting for my purchase later in the year.

[craig1]

Whats the difference between VMWare fusion and Parallels. Just plotting for my purchase later in the year.

I think it comes down to user preferences. If you're used to either product then go with that, there's nothing really that's so different that it makes one a "must buy" over the other, despite what the salesmen will have you believe.

I use Fusion and think the Unity functionality is outstanding but Parallels has the Coherence (IIRC) functionality that's much the same. The only reason I don't try Parallels is that I have the Fusion license and it's very cheap to upgrade when a new major version comes out.

[Sysman]

I think it comes down to user preferences. If you're used to either product then go with that, there's nothing really that's so different that it makes one a "must buy" over the other, despite what the salesmen will have you believe.

I use Fusion and think the Unity functionality is outstanding but Parallels has the Coherence (IIRC) functionality that's much the same. The only reason I don't try Parallels is that I have the Fusion license and it's very cheap to upgrade when a new major version comes out.

Parallels has come a long way since I looked at it a few years ago. Parallels and VMware Fusion seem to be giving each other some healthy competition, and a bit of leapfrogging is going on.

Wiki comparison - note that the neutrality of that article is disputed. It really looks as if they are in a war against each other to tick the boxes.

Going back to February 2010, when it was Parallels 5 (6 is the current release), Parallels won on performance. But from the Wiki comparison above, Fusion supports more operating systems and has a broader base of appliances available. Parallel's claimed ability to sync Time Machine with snapshots looks very useful (I've seen how large virtual machine backups can be).

Fusion has a 30 day free trial, which I don't see for Parallels.

VMware are putting a lot of effort into attracting developers. VMware Bets Its “PaaS” On Friending Developers:

On Tuesday VMware launched a new platform called “CloudFoundry,” publicly available infrastructure against which developers can write applications.

There are many such “Platform-as-a-Service” products available today, including Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s Beanstalk, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com’s Heroku. VMware’s distinguishing pitch to woo developers? More choice when it comes to where and how a developer’s application ends up running.