New MacBook Pro!

About a week ago I bought a 15-inch MacBook Pro. It’s my first mac and since then I’ve wholeheartedly decided to chuck my PC/Windows preference. The look and feel of the thing is miles ahead of any windows PCs/laptops I’ve had in the past and the new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, put it way over the top.

Some of my favorite features are:

• Quick Look - Let’s me look through text files, view movies, play music and view photos without opening the application usually needed to do those things.
• Time Machine - I’ve always been horrible when it comes to backing up files. This makes the job nearly effortless.
• Spaces - Makes things stay neat and in their place. Wicked.

I’ve also had some time to get to know the third party applications that are available for the mac and dwindled them down to the best.

Top 13 Mac OS X applications:

1. Stacks Overlay - this one isn’t actually an application, but it’s a must have to make the new stacks feature in Leopard look a zillion times better.
2. Firefox - best browser ever.
3. Quicksilver - a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.
4. NeoOffice - a software port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac OS X platform. Free full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs). The only thing better is Microsoft Office.
5. ecto - best desktop blogging client.
6. BBEdit - professional HTML and text editor.
7. Transmit - best FTP client. Syncs with .mac and iWeb.
8. Transmission - free, lightweight, open-source BitTorrent client.
9. HandBrake - free open-source DVD to MPEG-4 converter. Great for ripping DVDs to play on an iPod.
10. MacTheRipper - free DVD ripper. It can extract commercial DVD movies to your hard drive, minus all the copy protections and region controls put in place by DVD publishers. You can then use various tools to burn the movie back to DVD-R for use in DVD players.
11. Audiobook Builder - import your Audiobook CDs (or tracks that are already on your Mac), organize them and output one or two files that your iPod recognizes as actual Audiobooks.
12. VLC - kick-ass multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
13. Adobe Photoshop CS3 - expensive but awesome. Must have for all photographers and web developers.

Sincerely,

Apple convert (not fan-boy)