Skip to content

Shiny new 20″ iMac

Apple delivered my shiny new 20″ iMac 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram today. It has been fun to get it set up and running. Since I just helped a friend set up her MacBook a couple days ago, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I routinely add to a Mac.

Both the MacBook and the iMac come with iLife ’08 and Leopard (10.5) now. That solves my need for iPhoto (to import pictures from the camera) and iTunes (to play music, download podcasts, and put content on my iPod and my AppleTV).

Other things built into the machine are: Safari (excellent web browser), Mail (best mail reader since ZMail), AddressBook (excellent contacts database), Terminal (pretty good shell/terminal emulator), and TextEdit (for reading those pesky, proprietary, and annoying MS Word doc files people insist on sending me).

Nearly everything else I use is available for free download, and comes as Disk Image (.dmg file) which makes it trivial to install. Sadly the Palm Desktop Software I use to control my Tungsten C (PDA) from my Mac is only available as a Stuffit Archive (.sit file), so I had to find Suffit Expander (free, but a pain to find now) and install that as well.

Stuffit Expander (for extracting the last few Stuffit Archives in the world)
Adium (best AIM/Jabber/MSN Messenger/Yahoo Messenger)
VideoLan (Video playback for many formats not supported in QuickTime)
Flip4Mac (Quicktime and Web extension allowing Windows Media files to play)

Camino (Excellent Web Browser, very fast text display)
Firefox (Excellent all-around web browser)
OmniWeb (Excellent web browser, very fast, excellent bookmark management)

Carbon Copy Cloner (Backups to external drive)
Chicken of the VNC (useful for remote control of other machines)
QuickSilver (Application launcher and search program)

OmniDictionary (Dictionary spelling and thesaurus)
OmniFocus (Getting Things Done tool, organizer)

Palm Desktop (Desktop organizer for Palm PDA devices)
Plucker Desktop (ebook/cached web page reader for Palm PDA devices)

OmniGrafflePro (Visual Diagram Software, the Visio-killer!)
Graphic Converter (Very good and affordable photo image editor)

Also, I typically set up the first account on a Mac as “Administrator” with the short name admin, then I set myself up as a second account without administrative priviledges so it is harder for hostile software to grab my machine.

The new iMac comes with the “Mighty Mouse” and the new aluminum keyboard… I was skeptical, but initial impression is very good on the keyboard, and my previous dislike of the Mighty Mouse may be fixed by turning off horizontal scrolling (I found it made vertical scrolling harder to control). Most of all, I love being able to simply turn off the annoying Caps-Lock key (hurrah for Preferences/Keyboard&Mouse Control in 10.4 and 10.5).

Oh, I am trying out a .Mac account to sync things between machines (might help with migrating off the dual 500MHz G4 running 10.3 I’ve been using) and I will be trying out iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) on the new machine.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *