Mac specific apps

The posting may actually speed up a little after this. *May...*

The first Mac app to get familiar with, which I'd previously seen on Windows anyway, is of course iTunes. The main difference between previous media players was the whole way in which the library was arranged, with the slight annoyance of "Unknown Album" - not every song is or has been on an album!

The impact of this is that compilations I'd previously set up for 60's, 70's, etc, no longer worked in the same way as when I used Music Match Jukebox on my Archos Gmini. Now I have got used to it, I don't actually mind that much.

The Macbook came pre-installed with iWork, but I wasn't tempted to pay for an application when the excellent Neo Office is available for free. Ditto Aperture, when I could use free applications such as the GIMP and Seashore. Fortunately, that was pretty much it for pre-installed apps I did not want to use.

Safari was the next one to look at. Even though I have now installed Xmarks to keep in sync with work PC, and a version of del.icio.us to allow me to access my preferred bookmarks, the lack of extensions that I have on Firefox means I use it sporadically.

iChat is OK, but I swiftly decided to use Adium instead due to its ability to work seamlessly across various different IM clients.

One application I was keen to install was Delicious Library, having read about it in John Naughton's Observer columns. This great little app allows you to load various media items into a glossy interface - books, CDs, DVDs, gadgets, games, etc. It uses the Mac's inbuilt iSight as a barcode scanner and carries out lookups via various different Amazon sites. This isn't always foolproof, so text based searches are also possible. It is true to say that it can be a little flaky at times, and at one point I lost my entire DB and had to restore from a backup, but nonetheless this is a much more attractive option than a dull old spreadsheet cataloguing system.

Best intentions are a wonderful thing - I have still done no more than briefly tinker with Garageband, but I promise to myself that its time will come. The same goes for iWeb - it's there, but I have not played with it.

Removing installed apps on Mac is so simple, but is helped by App Cleaner which also nicely removes all associated files, settings, etc. I work this alongside Monolingual, that deletes all the language files that come with applications that are not required (this saves 100s of MB of space) as well as Cache Out that does a useful clean on start up (not that starting up is required too often on a Mac)

Now that I have a Flickr Pro account (and had painstakingly and timewastingly scanned in all my old photographs before I finally plumped for a digital SLR a couple of years back), the Flick Uploadr is very useful too.

xACT allows me to convert FLAC files to MP3 (via WAV) format for use on iPod

Stuffit Expander looks after most compressed file formats

SWF & FLV Player, MPEG Streamclip, iSquint, MacTheRipper and Handbrake take care of various video needs. I have to say I have been unimpressed with iMovie's abilities, preferring instead Toast Titanium for burning, but the Mac SuperDrive is extremely fussy when it comes to accepting DVDs and even CDs, half the time spitting them out contemptuously.

At the very outset, I tried a trail version of Parallels and experimented with triple OS setup using Win XP and Ubuntu. Nice, but ultimately I realised that I didn't really need to use either, and all they were doing was taking up valuable disk space - so that all came off!

But the disk space continued to be an issue....