A recent convert :)

[Spud1]

After recently purchasing my ibook, i've pretty much fallen in love with the apple way of doing things

everything just...works in OSX, as opposed to windows crashing all the time and moaning at the slightest thing. ofc its so pretty as well, everything just looks great. Simple to use as well once you get used to the single click mouse system. The thing that worried me about moving towards macs was the gaming side of things..but WoW works flawlessly on my mid-low specced ibook(1ghz, 768ram) and from the looks of things there are plenty of other games out there for the mac

So next time i need to upgrade my pc..it will be a switch to a mac methinks By then it might even be an intel based mac...depends if i have to patience to wait 3 years (2 before they are released iirc and another year for the bugs to be ironed out )

While i'm here, is there any 'killer' software that i 'must' have for my ibook? preferably freeware stuff that you find very useful a good place to find free widgets would also be useful, i'm not up to speed with where to find mac software.. any help would be great

[bsodmike]

I have a ton of info about this...gah need time to reply Will reply later

For now: apple.com/dashboard

[Spud1]

hehe ty or i'll try and catch you on msn =0

[daverobev]

You can get a load of good *nix-y type stuff if you install the X windows manager...GIMP, etc...depends what you want to do!

Is it one of the brand new iBooks with the 9550 graphics chip? My mac mini has only got a 9200 and WoW is pretty...juddery.

[Red10]

You can get a load of good *nix-y type stuff if you install the X windows manager...GIMP, etc...depends what you want to do!

A very good point! I was lost until i found this out

[Spud1]

its got a 9200, but wow works fine for me a bit juddery as you put it if theres lots happening, but for the most part its fine

[menthel]

Welcome to the club!

[bsodmike]

Don't forget fink, let's you download precompiled binaries of many apps or compile yer own. Fink Commander is also quite nice, but doing it from the shell is much easier once you know what you want; the commander is a nice directory view of what's out there.

Best place to find software for Mac - versiontracker!

IRC: Look no further than irssi, install via fink

FTP: Transmit

CD/DVD Burning: Toast Titanium

IM: AdiumX

Text Editor: SubEthaEdit < very nice app!

VNC: Chicken of the VNC

This is only a handful of many ace apps for the mac. Also there is MS Office 2004 for OS X and the full Adobe CS2 suite as well.

If you aren't ethically challenged *cough* many of thid stuff can be found as torrents, but they will be located in 'seedier' areas of the net, much like you'll find people selling crap out of the boot of their cars...Only difference in this scenario is that you take, and don't pay... :-o

/me has a vision of Viki Polard going "No but ya but no but ya, some crap she didn't steal it is just permanently borrowing sommat....Don't go giving me evilsss ...BAAATCH"

heheheh!

*Oi don't shoot me, I'm just saying like it is...now give me back my shoe you scavenger *

If you are serious on the web development side, you can edit apache's configs like you would on any system to enable php and you can install MySQL as well. Right now I have MySQL setup so that the daemon only loads when I want it to rather than at boot time, even thought I've changed where it creates the socket. (just being pedantic really).

Take a look in the sharing pane: Windows sharing == SMB, Personal = AFP (Mac to Mac chat), Web server == apache and a few other goodies. Remote access: allows others to ssh in with a valid username/pass. By default OS X has the root account disabled but the good thing is that 'sudo' works quite a bit If you are trying to edit some really heavy stuff you can enable the root account, do your work, and disable it (via the netinfo manager)...

I had to play with this so as to allow me to create a new 'group' on the office G5. This allows certain users to access HDD #2. If they don't belong to this funky group, no sireeee they can not access the data apart from ripping it out...

BEWARE: All Macs allow you to boot them in FW Target disk mode...this means that they just plug into your Mac like they would an HDD...and *pooof* they can access all yer data. If this is a problem (I hope it is!) you need to grab the um...

*where the heck did I keep it...*

Open Firmware Password Utility < that's the chap. Set a password. Lots of stuff are restricted @ the firmware level, which is good. Just don't forget the pass as you would have to start removing RAM and running around in circles to reset it.

/me has said too much

[menthel]

VLC is a fantastic media player for divx etc, I can highly recommend it. If you need photo editing stuff but can't afford photoshop CS, get photoshop elements 3 instead.

[Spud1]

great posts guys thanks I've got some of that eg VLC since its a region free dvd player Need to find some cash for office I think, thats pretty vital.

Cheers for the info /me heads over to versiontracker

[bsodmike]

/me stabs him self! - How on EARTH did I forget VLC! I live by it LOL...

Also get um...Azureus LOL, it is quite nice. Other useful apps include OmniGraffle/Outliner...

[Shepps]

VLC is a fantastic media player for divx etc, I can highly recommend it. If you need photo editing stuff but can't afford photoshop CS, get photoshop elements 3 instead.

I didn't find VLC all that great for OSX, video was choppy and bearly watchable on my ibook g3 500mhz. MPlayer works a treat though

Adium is a decent msn / yahoo / ICQ etc client and I use Xchat for irc.

Lots of software can be found @

http://www.tinyapps.org/osx.html
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/
http://macspecialist.org/

Lots of programs to check out

[menthel]

VLC is fine for me, but then again it is a new 12" powerbook.

[bsodmike]

Depending on how you use IRC, if you are used to configuring and messing about with mIRC I think you'll probably like XChat. Only problem with this is that all the windows aren't as managed as mIRC and you may start to get irritated. irssi on the other hand has a fairly steep learning curve but I got an easy way of setting it up to work in a few mins (you need to configure the config file, duh ) and once you've setup a theme you like, logging etc...you'll feel right at home