Just Bought A MacBook...

skip · Post by **skip** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 9:55 am 0

Quicksilver for application launching and a whole lot more.

Emulaunch as a nice emulator front end.

gravy · Post by **gravy** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 10:03 am 0

Adium for instant messaging. Got off to a slow start but it's pretty good now and a lot better than the now defunct Fire.

Colloquy for IRC if you use like. Great app and free like Adium

Textmate is one of the best text editors I have ever used, Ideal for coding / html / scripting etc

Flip4Mac will give you WMV viewing capabilities for free

Handbrake rips DVDs for you

Connect 360 if you've an X360 and you want it to access your iTunes library or play any WMV movies you have on your Mac.

gravy · Post by **gravy** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 10:03 am 0

amanset wrote:The only thing I haven't found a decent equivalent for is Microsoft Money. Quicken is shit and doesn't seem to know that there are bank account in other currencies than USD, so I am trying to make do with iBank. It isn't as good as MS Money 2001, which was what I was using before, but it does enough.

I've heard Chaching is pretty good, no direct personal experience of this though

http://midnightapps.com/

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:17 pm 0

skab wrote:
Dave wrote:OSX VNC - VNC Server for your Mac. Let others connect to your Mac remotely using VNC.
Ahem...

Prefs -> Sharing -> Apple Remote Desktop. Includes a VNC server out of the box. Seems to be one of the best kept secrets of OS X. Everybody seems to think, oh, I don't have that Apple Remote Desktop software, so I will just deactivate that and never look at it again

Oh, wow! Didn't know it was VNC based!

I was under the impression that you had to buy Apple's client to use it. Will give it a test in the next day or two.

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:18 pm 0

tufty wrote:
Dave wrote:Someone has mentioned Fink to me before. It's a gentoo/debian-like package management system for your Mac. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it's suppose to be REALLY good when you want to inventory everything that gets installed on your system. For power-users only, of course. Better and more powerful than AppDelete, I would assume.
God, I loathe fink. DarwinPorts, too. They both store stuff in nonstandard places, and the majority of opensource stuff compiles without a hitch on OSX. For stuff that's a bastard to install (I'm looking at you, LaTeX and ImageMagick), there's iInstaller, which is a bit confusing but installs stuff to the "standard" location (/usr/local)

Interesting. So it installs stuff in odd locations, or does it simply put its source build repositories in non-standard locations?

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:29 pm 0

Dave wrote:
tufty wrote:
Dave wrote:Someone has mentioned Fink to me before. It's a gentoo/debian-like package management system for your Mac. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it's suppose to be REALLY good when you want to inventory everything that gets installed on your system. For power-users only, of course. Better and more powerful than AppDelete, I would assume.
God, I loathe fink. DarwinPorts, too. They both store stuff in nonstandard places, and the majority of opensource stuff compiles without a hitch on OSX. For stuff that's a bastard to install (I'm looking at you, LaTeX and ImageMagick), there's iInstaller, which is a bit confusing but installs stuff to the "standard" location (/usr/local)
Interesting. So it installs stuff in odd locations, or does it simply put its source build repositories in non-standard locations?

Fink, IIRC, installs everything in a completely separate tree rooted in /sw, darwinports uses /opt/local. Needless to say, at one point I had a machine with 4 copies of Ruby, all in varying locations : /usr/bin/ruby (Apple's 10.3 borked version, 1.8.2 IIRC), /usr/local/bin/ruby (handbuilt ruby 1.8.2), /sw/bin/ruby (fink, fuckknows what version, installed because it detected a dependency with something else), /opt/local/bin/ruby (ditto for DarwinPorts). Bullshit like this was the reason for the first and only time I have completely blown away an OSX installation.

Really. iInstaller or handbuilding are the way to go.

iInstaller puts stuff in the "correct" place (/usr/local), and although there was an early crasher with the release of 10.4, I've never had a problem with it. The joy of it is that, if you want to install a newer version of something, you can ./configure && make && sudo make install and not worry about having umpteen versions.

Simon

amanset · Post by **amanset** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 5:31 pm 0

According to its webpage, iInstaller is no longer supported and doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same amount of packages as Fink or DarwinPorts.

I don't know about DarwinPorts, but Fink allows you to install wherever you want. This does stop you using binary installations though so you'll have to install from source, but it is still an option if installing to /sw is that much of a pain.

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 7:26 pm 0

amanset wrote:According to its webpage, iInstaller is no longer supported and doesn't seem to have anywhere near the same amount of packages as Fink or DarwinPorts.

That's a shitter. It was the only way I found to get LaTeX and ImageMagick installed without either duplicating 90% of the software Apple helpfully provide with the system or going through dependency hell compiling them myself.

amanset wrote:I don't know about DarwinPorts, but Fink allows you to install wherever you want. This does stop you using binary installations though so you'll have to install from source, but it is still an option if installing to /sw is that much of a pain.

Yes, having a complete secondary tree of software built with different options alongside the one provided by Apple is a pain. In fact, it's a massive pain. Thing is, both Fink and Darwinports caused me a world of hurt, and I'm hardly a novice at this[1]. They may well have changed / got better, but I'd strongly recommend novices stay as far away as possible. All they provide, in most cases, is a "lazy" way to install, anyway, and the majority of open source packages simply build from a ./configure.

Simon

[1] I've been fucking with unix since 1987, maybe that's why they hurt me :)

DarkElf · Post by **DarkElf** » Tue May 01, 2007 12:16 am 0

Niceplayer and Perian for playing divx and video...
Acquisition and xTorrent for p2p
iSquint and Handbrake for converting Video and DVD
Inquisitor for better web search
Delicious Library for manage my books, DVDs and Games
UniSudoku for the freeetime
Senuti to get the music from my iPod into iTunes
DropCopy to send file across my Mac on my network

that's my 2 cents

skab · Post by **skab** » Wed May 02, 2007 12:00 am 0

tufty wrote:Fink, IIRC, installs everything in a completely separate tree rooted in /sw, darwinports uses /opt/local. Needless to say, at one point I had a machine with 4 copies of Ruby, all in varying locations : /usr/bin/ruby (Apple's 10.3 borked version, 1.8.2 IIRC), /usr/local/bin/ruby (handbuilt ruby 1.8.2), /sw/bin/ruby (fink, fuckknows what version, installed because it detected a dependency with something else), /opt/local/bin/ruby (ditto for DarwinPorts). Bullshit like this was the reason for the first and only time I have completely blown away an OSX installation.

I just tried DarwinPorts and am, too, rather unhappy with that separation thing, even though I understand the reasons for that. At least I stuffed it in /usr/local/ports which seemed a lot tidier than throwing everything in an own directory at root level (/opt/local? WTF?). The nice thing is that it's a lot easier to track and install updates, too bad is that it feels to disconnected to the OS.

sponge · Post by **sponge** » Wed May 02, 2007 1:45 am 0

If it came with Omni Outliner, use it.

It's right bloody good for all sorts of stuff. I've even used it to do my taxes for the last 5 years.

Mat T · Post by **Mat T** » Mon May 21, 2007 7:08 am 0

So guys and ladies... I have been looking about but I am yet to come across a system that allows me to duplicate and rip DVDs on my MacBook. On my PC I use Img Burn (DVD Decrypter) to rip a DVD and then if need be, DVD Shrink to get it down in size.

Is there anything like this on the Mac? What do people use?

Other than that I am incredibly impressed with the old MacBook. At this rate, the PC will be going on Ebay!

tufty · Post by **tufty** » Mon May 21, 2007 7:38 am 0

Mat T wrote:So guys and ladies... I have been looking about but I am yet to come across a system that allows me to duplicate and rip DVDs on my MacBook. On my PC I use Img Burn (DVD Decrypter) to rip a DVD and then if need be, DVD Shrink to get it down in size.

Is there anything like this on the Mac? What do people use?

Other than that I am incredibly impressed with the old MacBook. At this rate, the PC will be going on Ebay!

HandBrake

Wanderer · Post by **Wanderer** » Mon May 21, 2007 8:01 am 0

I dont own or use a Mac; but I heard something called iChat is best for instant messaging? no?

Mat T · Post by **Mat T** » Mon May 21, 2007 8:04 am 0

tufty wrote:
Mat T wrote:So guys and ladies... I have been looking about but I am yet to come across a system that allows me to duplicate and rip DVDs on my MacBook. On my PC I use Img Burn (DVD Decrypter) to rip a DVD and then if need be, DVD Shrink to get it down in size.

Is there anything like this on the Mac? What do people use?

Other than that I am incredibly impressed with the old MacBook. At this rate, the PC will be going on Ebay!
HandBrake

The problem with Handbrake from what I can see is that it only rips to mp4 format? I literally want to be able to recreate DVDs ala the PC programs I mentioned.