MacOS X apps for newbies

[GiantRobot]

I've been seeing a lot of "can a Mac do this" or "what Mac software do I need for this" sort of threads lately. So I figured to be friendly and useful I'd preempt a lot of questions and make a list for people to check out and/or to add to to help out new Mac users. This list isn't by any means comprehensive but I hope it will answer a lot of people's questions early on. All too often people seem to think that because application X isn't available on the Mac that is impossible to perform the task application X does. Millions of folks use Macs as their primary systems and do the same things Windows users do so that should tell you right off that Windows is not really required to get most things done.

Internet (web, mail, ftp, etc.)

• Safari - This has become the default browser on Macs anymore since it now comes bundled with the OS and it set to be the default browser. It's fairly capable and has some nice user protections like the ability to block pop-ups and such. It also displays pages with a high level of competency and the upcoming 1.3 version even moreso.
  
• Camino - This is a browser project originally started by Dave Hyatt who has now been working for Apple on Safari. Camino used to be known as Chimera and uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. What pages Safari has trouble with Camino usually handles very well. Camino is an excellent browser choice if you're stuck with an older version of OSX for some reason since the latest versions of Safari only run on 10.3.
  
• Mail - For a free e-mail client Apple's Mail is very capable. Except for the most demanding organizational tasks Mail is a really nice e-mail client. It can handle POP and IMAP mail and has a really well designed anti-spam processing system. It also supports encryption if you've got a personal certificate from someone like Thawte. A plug-in will let you use GPG for encryption and signing.
  
• Entourage 2004 - Entourage is part of Microsoft Office. Unlike it's counterpart on Windows, Outlook, it is actually a really useful application that doesn't open your system up to every exploit and malicious bit of code on the internet. It's biggest drawback however is practically no integration with the rest of OSX. Mail uses OSX's Address Book to manage contacts and such, Entourage uses its own address book and such.
  
• Transmit - A good FTP application is worth its weight in cybergold. Where Transmit really shines over some other Mac FTP apps is its relatively fresh codebase. It has excellent AppleScript support and very much feels like an application designed from the ground up to run on OSX.
  
• Cyberduck - Cyberduck is an open source FTP application for OSX. Like Transmit it is very capable and is a well written OSX application. My favorite feature is the ability to open files in a number of different external text editors.
  

Productivity (text editors, word processors, etc.)

• TextWrangler - This is the more modernized cousin of the venerable BBEdit. It replaced BBEdit Lite and serves as a much cheaper version of BBEdit for folks who have no use for BBEdit's extensive web-oriented capabilities. To some people it seems strange to pay money for a text editor but if you really want to streamline programming or administration work TW is well worth the money. It allows you to do the sorts of stuff you'd need to roll your own Awk, Perl, Sed, and shell scripts to do all with a sensible interface.
  
• Word 2004 - My second listed Microsoft application. On Windows Microsoft office has largely killed its competition through various means. As such Office has a monopoly position on the office productivity market. This has caused a bit of stagnation in the progression of the suite however and Office XP is little if any better than Office 200 was. On the Mac this is not the case, Microsoft still has lots of competition in the productivity market and as such puts a lot of effort into Office for the Mac. Word is a very nice word processor and is quite a bit nicer to use than its Windows counterpart.
  
• Mariner Write - For a majority of users the full capabilities of Word 2004 will go entirely unrealized. Mariner Write is a good alternative for Mac wielding folk. It supports all of the formatting options available in Word as well as more advanced features like styles and mail merge features. It can read but not save to Word format (.doc) which is a bonus and then a drawback rolled into one.
  
• SubEthaEdit - Consider yourself cool if you get the literary reference in this application's name. SubEthaEdit is a free-for-personal-use text editor in the same vein as TextWrangler. It doesn't have all of TW's advanced edit, search, and transformation features but it is a very nice editor. It support syntax highlighting and has easily written syntax definitions. It's claim to fame however is its ability to let multiple people edit the same file all at once. If you're interested at all in "Extreme Programming" this is a very interesting feature.
  

Business graphics (charts, presentations, etc.)

• OmniGraffle - Few traditional graphic design apps are geared for use by non-artist types who need to have balanced organizational charts and wow-the-PHB diagrams, not Pantone support or umpteen dozen image filters. OmniGraffle is one of the best applications I've ever used for this purpose, ever.
  
• Keynote - I just recently started using Keynote after years spent hassling with PowerPoint. The difference is ridiculous, especially compared to the Mac version of PowerPoint. Keynote uses Quartz and OpenGL components to do 3D and 2D transitions and can output to .ppt files, movies, or even PDFs.
  
• Stone Create - Not everyone needs XPress but a lot of people want or need to publish small business documents. It's a really nice graphic design app that doesn't overwhelm you with a fantastic array of features.
  

IM and IRC

• Adium X - Adium is the Trillian of the Mac world. It is highly customizable, works with all of the major IM networks, and best of all is open source. It uses the libgaim library for IM network connectivity but uses fully Cocoa front-end code. It looks and feels like a regular Mac application ought to. Adium is pretty featureful and is getting better all the time.
  
• Proteus - Proteus is the closed source cousin of Adium. Like Adium it is built around the libgaim library but is not itself open source. Proteus isn't quite as customizable as Adium but it does provide quite a bit of customization options. It supports buddy icons for several networks (something Microsoft's official MSN client still isn't able to do).
  
• Snak - Snak is one of the more mIRC-ish IRC clients available for OSX. If you've been using mIRC on Windows you'll feel pretty comfortable with Snak. It supports ircII and AppleScript scripts though it does not support existing mIRC scripts.
  
• Ircle - Ircle is a very un-mIRC IRC client but is no less functional nor workable. It's interface takes some getting used to but it can end up being extremely handy with some practice. Ircle has been in existence for a very long time and if you look there's a huge number of scripts available for it.
  

RSS aggregators and Usenet readers

• Unison - This is a very new newsreader from the folks at Panic. Despite its age it has turned into a very capable and extremely useful newsreader. It recognizes media files in Usenet postings and displays them in lists so they're easy to download. If you grab any sorts of files off of Usenet Unison is a very useful tool.
  
• MaxNews - MaxNews is an older newsreader that has been ported to OSX. It is functional and relatively light weight. It handled newsgroups in a typical three-pane fashion.
  
• NewsWatcherX - NWX is a Carbon port of an older Mac newsreader called NewsWatcher. It is a very plain application with practically no Aqua fanciness included. If you're not into the all dancing all singing types of Mac apps this is a definite keeper.
  
• NetNewsWire (Lite) - NNW and NNWL are both awesome RSS aggregators built from the outset for OSX. Their interfaces are very simple but not so simple they lack any function. NNW can not only read RSS feeds but also post to all of the popular blogging engines from inside of its own interface. The Lite version is free and lacks some features but if you're a cheapskate it works well enough to use on a daily basis.
  
• PulpFiction - PulpFiction is an RSS reader that is styled more similar to Apple's Mail than NNW. it's got some very excellent features and is a bit cheaper than NNW. The per-feed refresh schedules and search functionality serve to make it a very nice RSS aggregator.
  

P2P programs

• Poisoned - This is one of the nicer P2P clients available on OSX. It is compatible with several networks and has a very useful search interface. It is an open source application and is very stable and functional. Poisoned allows for a lot of control over bandwidth limitations and ports used.
  
• Acquisition - This is a P2P client written in Java but specifically for OSX. I think it does a good job of showing off how well a Java app can run on OSX. Its got the same features as Poisoned for the most part but is not open source nor free. Some people much prefer it to Poisoned even if their features are roughly equal.
  
• Tomato Torrent - While Tomato isn't the "official" Mac BitTorrent client it is very awesome. It supports pretty much the entire range of BitTorrent option and provides a very nice and comprehensive GUI for all such features.
  

Game Publishers

• InsideMacGames - While IMG isn't a game publisher they're one of the better if not best sites covering Mac gaming. While we don't get the volume of games that Windows does we do get quite a bit. IMG provides pretty good reviews of the Mac ports of games and offers some nice previews of upcoming ones.
  
• Ambrosia Software - Ambrosia makes some of the most addicting computer games around. EV Nova is one of their most popular and is even available on Windows. They make some excellent non-game software as well. The Ambrosia guys are excellent developers and all around nice people.
  
• Aspyr - Aspyr has been on a game porting binge much to the relief of Mac users everywhere. They've recently released HomeWorld 2 and KOTOR and are set to release CoD:UO soon.
  
• MacPlay - MacPlay has been in a bit of a lull in releasing newer titles but they've got a pretty nice collection of slightly older games available that are no less fun to play despite their age. They did however just release TRON 2.0 which is a very well done port of the game.
  
• MacSoft - MacSoft is responsible for porting one of my favorite games (NWN) to the Mac. They've also got Halo and Unreal Tournament 2003/4 under their belts.
  
• Freeverse - Most people have probably heard of Freeverse already since there are Windows versions of some of their games. Their Mac games despite being small in scope are a lot of fun and graphically appealing.
  
• Graphsim - Graphsim publishes a number of simulator games such as X-Plane and F/A-18 OIF.
  

[stigmata]

For the love of God, someone please make this a sticky!

However, since this is already a Mac newbies thread, it's probably a good idea to say this hear and now (on the offchance this is stickied, and that people actually read it before posting elsewhere):

No, your Mac cannot run .exe files without Virtual PC software. It's a fact of life.

Oooh, that felt good ^_^

Some more software that might be useful for newbies:

SpeedFreak - a useful little application that "speeds up" your machine by a small fraction, by giving priority to whatever program is in the foreground at the expense of whatever's behind it. Very useful on older systems, because it allows other programs to retain some usability when you're doing something intensive in the background.

WireTap - a free little utility from AmbrosiaSW that allows you to record audio directly from your Mac, with no loss of quality. To clarify, it records every sound your machine would normally put out the speakers, but nothing from the microphone (should you have one).

AudioIn - Got a Microphone? The old iMacs, all iBooks and any iSight all have built-in microphones, and AudioIn allows you to simply record audio from them and save it to the desktop. It's about the simplest solution of it's kind, and very useful for recording anything you need for later (meetings, interviews, etc...)

CarraFix - On a network with a number of other users, but are being perpetually hounded not to use so much bandwidth? Carrafix allows you to limit the amount of bandwidth (speed) each program on your machine is allowed to use, and means other people on your network don't kill you in your sleep. Very useful in conjunction with netstat (or Apple's Network Utility for the less geeky).

MPlayer OS X 2 - Quicktime can't play everything, and that's where MPlayer comes in. Originally a port from the original Linux version, MPlayer allows you play avi, wmp and asf files that Quicktime can't, is very simple and easy to use, and is free.

[.Pi]

Great thread idea!

Just my two cents, there's also Open Office for productivity stuff, crossplatform freeware for Linux, Mac, and Windows that does pretty much everything that MS Office does.

[stigmata]

Just my two cents, there's also Open Office for productivity stuff, crossplatform freeware for Linux, Mac, and Windows that does pretty much everything that MS Office does.

Note for anyone's who's actually considering OpenOffice: as it is, this productivity suite requires you to do some mucho geeky stuff, such as running it in the X11 window environment. While it isn't really all that difficult, anyone who's unwilling to try it now can rest assured that the next major release will be much, much easier to run, and will be native to OS X.

[GiantRobot]

OpenOffice.org for the Mac is a really sore point so I try not to suggest it too often. Yes an open source productivity suite is awesome, OpenOffice is not all that awesome unfortunately. OO.o is a really big and bloated suite and its 2.0 codebase is orders of magnitude cleaner and more robust. Even on Linux OO.o is a slow unwieldy beast, on OSX it is really unwieldly and is a pain to add to your workflow. NeoOffice/j is even slower and more unwieldy which is hard to believe. In another nine months or so OO.o will be really nice and once the 2.0 version has hit the scene a native Aqua version will be soon for the world and all will be right and good. Until then...not so much.

[Anubis]

Another good media player is VLC (made for PC as well, I believe). About the only thing I've found that doesn't run on it is the WMV3 codec. Hopefully that will change . . . <grumble> stupid Microsoft </grumble> . . .

SpeedDownload is another. Download accelerators are very handy!

[Cassidy]

Tsk tsk, no mention of Appleworks? It's a good alternative if you don't want to spend quite as much. Also:

Telnet
If you happen to still be in the MU* scene, Savitar is a good basic shareware program. The only area it's really lacking in is triggers, which its Windows equivilents have.

As far as media players go, it's really a shame that us Mac users can't play Windows Media files with Microsoft's DRM on them. :/

[stigmata]

Tsk tsk, no mention of Appleworks?/

There's a reason for that. Up until Apple discontinued it, it was good. No longer - it's obsolete, annoying, and doesn't even really look like an OS X application. Die, AW, die! :)

As far as media players go, it's really a shame that us Mac users can't play Windows Media files with Microsoft's DRM on them. :/

Allow me to extend that statement: it's a shame that us Mac users can't play Windows Media files with Windows Media Player. Full stop, with a rare few exceptions - and those ones are a nothingth the quality of an MPEG-1 at the same bitrate. It's depressing.

[GiantRobot]

AppleWorks would have gotten a mention but it isn't something I would necessarily recommend to a new Mac user. AppleWorks will do what most users need it to do. Unfortunately it has been largely abandoned by Apple and there isn't much of an apparent future for it. Right now many Mac productivity apps support AppleWorks files but that will go away as those files become rarer and rarer.

For the interested here's a little sordid history of AppleWorks. Way back when Apple spun off a subsidary to develop application software relatively independently of the hardware and OS people. This subsidary was called Claris. They originally sold MacWrite, MacDraw, and MacPaint, as well as AppleWorks (same name different program) for the Apple II. Two of the guys from Claris (who has worked at a company called StyleWare previously) left to start a small company called Spartacus to develop a Microsoft Works killer. They wrote what became the core of ClarisWorks and sold their code back to Claris and took jobs there again.

Claris was originally intended to become an independent company and go public. Unfortunately this never happened. This made several of Claris' longtime executives angry and they ended up leaving the company. After ClarisWorks 1.0 got out the door most of the CW staff moved to Oregon in a newly opened office in Portland. ClarisWorks 2.0 was well under way by this time and was a huge success in the market. ClarisWorks was kicking the crap out of Microsoft Works and Office in sales volume. As CW 3.0's development started however the dev team and newer executives had largely different views of what the release schedule ought to be. CW 3.0 was largely just an upgrade to 2.0 with only a handful of new features. The 4.0 release was what 3.0 should have been.

After the release of CW 4.0 Claris wanted to integrate OpenDoc into ClarisWorks. This required a huge rewrite of core CW components and was an enormous undertaking. Before CW 5.0 (supposed to include OpenDoc capabilities) was completed most of the core CW engineering staff left to form a company called Gobe Interactive. A few engineers managed to hack together an OpenDoc version of ClarisWorks and even demoed it at WWDC '96 but before were all recruited by Microsoft. ClarisWorks 5.0 shipped with no OpenDoc capabilities and was largely a set of bug fixes and minor changes from CW 4.0.

In 1998 Apple broke up Claris, absorbing ClarisWorks as an internal project. What was left of Claris became FileMaker and were left with FileMaker Pro (an awesome database application akin to Access) and HomePage (a very nice WYSIWYG HTML editor). ClarisWorks was renamed to AppleWorks and in March of 2000 was released. However it was really just a minor update to CW 5.0 and lacked a few file translators that had shipped with CW (Word being the most important). Later updates included the missing translators and Carbonized it so it would run natively in OSX. Unfortunately AW has gone without an update for more than a year now and there's not even rumors of a new version on the horizon.

[Uphill Boarder]

An app that I use everyday on my iBook is a little app called "iComic" which you can find here.

http://www.ruxp.net/iComic/default.asp

Its a program that automatically downloaded and shows the entire archive of any comic you can find a plugin for. It shows the comics in an easily accessible calendar form and it downloads the latest comics automatically if you are connected to the internet.

Ananth wrote a plugin for Applegeeks which you can find.

http://www.applegeeks.com/downloads/AppleGeeks_iComic_plugin.dmg

Also you can get the plugins for the following comics on my public iDisk folder
username = paynestewart

Ctrl-Alt-Delete
Applegeeks
Penny-Arcade
Mac Hall
Megatokyo
Little-Gamers
Real Life
8-Bit Theatre (aka Nuklear Power)

[Uphill Boarder]

Bugger, links didn't work. Oh well, copy and paste away!

[XHeadintheCloudsX]

In the web browser front, don't forget Firefox, the current Mozilla open-source effort. Again, if you run into a page Safari doesn't run, this'll work.

For media, don't forget Audion. Available at Panic.com (same people as Transmit), it's a pretty good alternate MP3 player, with many, many skins.

Panic also makes Candybar, which together with icons from www.iconfactory.com, allows you to customize a ton of your icons (even generic icons, or icons that can't be changed by copying and pasting).

other useful links:
www.macfixit.com
www.versiontracker.com
www.macgamefiles.com
www.x-plane.com (a very cool ultra-realistic flight sim, with a downloadable demo. Updated regularly, and, get this, developed for Macs first, then ported to windows!

I think there's a good start here... keep the list up

[stigmata]

Bugger, links didn't work. Oh well, copy and paste away!

The format is

Code:

[url=http://url.com]

or

Code:

[url=http://url.com]text here[/url]

:)

Another schweet piece of software is Noise, which has a very unique purpose:

It creates a standing wave of white noise, best heard in headphones, which very quickly starts to sound like heavy rain. What's the point? It does two useful things: drowns out any sounds around you, and helps you concentrate on the task at hand, both of which are accomplished MUCH better than would be done by simply listening to music. After a while, it becomes very relaxing, and it's easy to concentrate and get some serious work done.

I love it, despite how weird it must sound.

[Cassidy]

AppleWorks would have gotten a mention […] Unfortunately it has been largely abandoned by Apple and there isn't much of an apparent future for it.

Well, gee. I own the thing and I didn't even know they stopped supporting it. It's a shame, really. It's a decent little program.

<snipped history of Appleworks/Claris>

You learn something new every day. I used to run ClarisWorks on my old SE all the time. Very cool history lesson.

[S3r4ph]

Macs also have the standards in terms of applications...

Full Adobe Suite
Full Macromedia Suite

and even some free alternatives....

wanna photoshop your head on arnold's body? Dont have photoshop money? go with the GIMP, it is free, open source and actually fairly decent and photoshop-ish. Mac OS X includes gimpprint so hopefully printing wont be soooo clumcy as it is with open office.

S.