Mac Programs

I got a MacBook Pro on Monday. Been loving it. What are the must have programs for Mac?
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More RAM than Dodge!

Adium is the best AIM client in the world. Aside from that nothing jumps right off the top of my head.
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Failure is just success rounded down.

the iDitchTheMAC and the iSteveJobsisSatan programs come highly recommended I hear
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Core I7 4790K @ 4.7 Ghz
Corsair H115i AiO 280mm Water Cooler
EVGA GTX 1080 TI

Thanks Nikola.

Those are my favorite Vince!
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More RAM than Dodge!

If you are using the mac at the same time as your windows machines, get Dropbox: www.dropbox.com. You can get 2g of free online storage and they have windows and mac clients. It will sync anything you put in the setup directory with all other machines that have the same setup.

Google Chrome is now avail on the mac and is faster than Safari.

RipIt is a great program that rips DVDs to the HD. Its ripped alot of movies that DVDShrink failed at.

VMware Fusion is a great virtual machine application. Not only does it support windowless mode (your windows apps can stack on your desktop "outside" of windows) but it also supports booting boot camp partitions. Watch for sales, its normally like $80 but I've seen it around $30 a couple times.

iStatPro is a great widget for your dashboard, shows you quite a few details about what your mac is doing.

QuickSilver is considered the top app launcher utility. I've never gotten in the habit of using it though.

Xmarks will sync your Firefox/Safari bookmarks with all your other machines. I've used their service for years and its great.

Thanks Sevnn. I have started using several of these programs. Really like iStatPro. I found a program called Q that looks like it will do the same as VM. I will have to keep an eye on getting VM though. I have used it in the past and really liked it. Q might turn out to be good. I haven't really started to use it yet though. I have been waiting to try to break old windows habits I have that I simply continue to do because they are familiar. Trying to use this to find new software. I am also going to start using Drop Box. I have heard for a long time that it is a great program and I am tired of carrying around a HD/Thumb drive for all the time for the small stuff. I just started using Chrome and I am impressed. It is surprisingly simple and fast. I have played with it a couple of times but always seemed to hit the little e in force of habit. Thanks for the suggestions.
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More RAM than Dodge!

VMWare Fusion and Parallels are really it for VM stuff for Mac as their performance isn't rivaled by anything else that I know of. Granted, I haven't used Q-emu at all, but I doubt that it can be as fast as the other two.
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Failure is just success rounded down.

If you don't want to pay for vmware or parallels, there is a free option. Virtual Box.
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Blargle Flarg Bergah Merg

I will say VMWare Fusion is the bomb, I've been using it on my Mac Pro at home to run a virtual machine that is always on, and it runs like a champ, while not impacting performance on my other applications.
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this is the internet.
Unless proven otherwise, you are a 50yr old man with a bucket of KFC in one hand and your penis in the other.

That's impressive it doesn't impact performance. I am amazed at the power of mac's.
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More RAM than Dodge!

It doesn't impact his performance because his Mac Pro is likely an 8+ thread machine with 6gb+ of memory and he's not doing anything else intensive.

It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a Mac.
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Failure is just success rounded down.

I will say that VMware Fusion 3 (and 2) does cause a very noticeable performance impact on my MBP. It's a 2.4ghz with 4 gig of ram and launching a VM does cause a pretty decent hit on overall system performance. I believe that this hit is primarily caused by the 320gig 5400rpm drive that I have in the laptop. From what I've read, having a 7200rpm drive makes a pretty significant improvement in VMware's performance.

The most impressive aspect of VMware is the ability to boot the bootcamp partition virtually. If you don't know what boot camp is, you can partition off a piece of your drive and install Windows to it. Its not a virtualized partition so it performs at native speed. During your boot cycle you can hit the command button (or space bar, don't remember for sure) and boot natively into Windows. This gives you a very fast experience of Windows on your mac hardware. When I was developing on my MBP I would do this to improve Windows responsiveness. The only shortfall I've had from doing this is that Windows can't understand the 2 video cards in my MBP so it boots to the more powerful one. This generates more heat and that heat needs the fans to run faster. Windows doesn't understand how to control my fans so they don't speed up and the MBP gets pretty hot. The fix for this is using SMC Fan Control (another great Mac app) to force my fans to a higher speed and then do a soft-reboot (don't power off) and boot up to Windows. As long as the machine doesn't power off, the fans will stay running at the higher speed and help out quite well with the heat issues.

I know that Parallels can boot the boot camp partition but I don't know if the other virtualization platforms can. Oh, another cool app is a Google NTFS library for mac. If you install it you can read/write to your boot camp partition from within OSX. I have a Mac drive and a Windows drive icons on my desktop and it works great.

I can attest to the awesomeness of a 7200rpm drive in the MBP. I too have a 2.4ghz 4gig MBP. I noticed VMWare 2's performance is the shit with a fast drive.
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Blargle Flarg Bergah Merg

I need more drive space as my MBP is my iTunes Podcast storage location and I'm usually bouncing off < 20g free. I'll put in a 500g 7200rpm soon (hopefully).

VMWare Fusion is on sale: http://www.spoofee.com/index.php?section=deal&did=702748

1. MySmithMicro Price : $79.99
2. Use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY2010 to get 60% off
3. Rebate Price : -$30.00 ( Exp : 12/31/10 )
Final Price : $1.99 After Rebate