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What Do You Use on Mac OS X? (Various Programs)

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S

Sanjuro

Member
I'm creating this thread to further spread the word for good programs that I use and with hope I can help some people or find great alternatives to the ones I already use that might offer more features and run faster. Its been almost a year since I have switched and I love my Mac.

Here is how the format works. First make note of what processor you are using seeing how the Mac base has bee divided for the time being (G4, G,5, Intel) and your OS X (Tiger, Puma, Cheetah, Leopard, etc.), Second and lastly post what type of program it is (Browser - ) then the program name and any info about things your like about it or past expierences with other types. Also feel free to add different types of programs not listed!

Mac Mini - Intel Mac OS X Tiger

Browser - BonEcho 2.0.0.3 (Optimzed FireFox - Intel Version)
I've tried Safari, Camino, Opera and I keep going back to Firefox. No other browser I can customize to my taste as much as this one. With constant updates and 3.0 already on the horizon this is my favorite browser on any OS.

Messenger - Adium 1.0.2
Customizable as hell just wish there was a Intel native version. Takes a little to boot.

IRC Client - X-Chat Aqua 0.16.0
This is the best free version I could find. I can't justify spending money on another program that is still not even close to mIRC.

Torrent Client - Transmission 0.70 (1739)
My favorite of the torrent clients on the Mac. However with yesterday's update I can't seem to set the upload speed to my choice. Probably a glitch.

Media Player - Quicktime 7.1.5 (w/Perian & Flip4Mac codecs)
I also have VLC installed but at least on the Intel Mac it is horribly unstable.

Image Editing - Photoshop CS3

Burning Tools - Toast Titanium 8.0

DVD Rip - Handbrake 0.7.1
I used to use CloneDVD / AnyDVD on the PC. Those are the only programs I have never found a great alternative to.

Comic Book Viewer - ComicBookLover 1.2
Best OS X version I have ever used hands down.

File Decompresser - Stuffit Expander 11.0.2
 
B

bridegur

Member
Browser - BonEcho 2.0.0.3 (Optimzed FireFox - Intel Version)
I've tried Safari, Camino, Opera and I keep going back to Firefox. No other browser I can customize to my taste as much as this one. With constant updates and 3.0 already on the horizon this is my favorite browser on any OS.
Click to expand...


Where can I get this?
 
Y

yayaba

Member
Macbook - Intel Mac OS X Tiger

Browser - Firefox 2.0.0.3
I've tried Bon Echo and it screwed with my system and would lock up. Regular Firefox works fine for me. Sometimes I go to Safari just for the hell of it but 90% is Firefox.

Messenger - Adium 1.0.2
Best IM client. I never use iChat.

IRC Client - nothing
Don't use IRC

Torrent Client - xTorrent
Picked this more because it just worked and I was looking for a torrent client.

Media Player - VLC
I'm not a fan of quicktime and plus I watch DVR-MS files on my Mac so I need to codec support.

Image Editing - Photoshop CS3

Burning Tools - Haven't burned anything yet...

DVD Rip - Handbrake 0.7.1 / MacTheRipper

File Decompresser - The Unarchiver
 
D

djkimothy

Member
Thunderbird
Firefox
iPhoto
iTunes
MSN Messenger
Graphic Converter
Office 2004
Stuffit
VLC
MT Newsreader

all i can think of.
 
8

8bit

Knows the Score
SanjuroTsubaki said:
Comic Book Viewer - ComicBookLover 1.2
Best OS X version I have ever used hands down.
Click to expand...

What does this have over Comical that makes it worth paying for?
 
M

mollipen

Member
2.0GHz G5 iMac


Browser - Opera / Flock
Can't really decide. I love the weeklies of Opera 9, but it is totally flaky far too often, and the built-in torrent feature - while I love the idea - is horrible when it comes to connecting to a large amount of peers.

Flock has gotten far better as of late, and I far prefer it over FireFox. It can use a lot of FireFox plug-ins, but then has features like the built-in support for image services that I absolutely miss when using other browsers. The ability to easily bookmark and tag sites is nice, and the search box searching all your bookmarks to find links with tags that you've added is just wonderful.

Messenger - ??
I'm an iChat guy, and love it. But I have two contact that won't give up MSN, so I've been trying Adium. I really do like it, but a few things bug me about it, such as its chat logging system, inbility to see online contact from the menubar icon, etc.

Torrent - Transmission
Love Transmission, though if I could see it get any one feature, it would be support for only downloaded specific items from multi-item torrents.

Mail - Mail.app
I use Mail.app, though I hate it. I use it because I hate it less than I hate other Mac OSX mail apps.

Burning - Toast / Burn
If you need to do disc burning, and don't want to... uhm, "borrow" Toast... try Burn. It's free, and actually has a lot of functionality for being such a little app.

Video - QuickTime + nightly Perian + Flip4Mac
Absolutely detest VLC's UI, and like MPlayer OSX (not MPlayer 2 OSX), but QuickTime Player with most recent builds of Perian and Flip4Mac is wonderful and plays damn near everything I want to watch. Plus, going this route gets me subtitle and full codec support in things like FrontRow, which makes life even better.

Video Editing / Support - MPEG Streamclip
If you do any editing / encoding of video, you MUST have MPEG Streamclip. Just an incredible app.

Audio - iTunes
Simply the best there is. People who use non-libraried audio players are freaks.

Images - iPhoto
Like Mail.app, I don't use iPhoto because it is the best, but because it is the least terrible.
 
S

Sanjuro

Member
8bit said:
What does this have over Comical that makes it worth paying for?
Click to expand...

I'm on the Intel Mac, so I dunno if that has anything to do with it just Comical runs horribly and always shuts down. I used FFview for a while and that was decent.

ComicBookLover is basically the iTunes, Quicktime equivilent of the viewers. It intergrates well, have never had it crash once, creates a listing of all the comics read and makes an icon for each comic featuring the cover art. I didn't purchase it however.
 
8

8bit

Knows the Score
SanjuroTsubaki said:
I'm on the Intel Mac, so I dunno if that has anything to do with it just Comical runs horribly and always shuts down. I used FFview for a while and that was decent.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, I'm on a PPC and it runs pretty well for me.
 
S

Sanjuro

Member
8bit said:
Fair enough, I'm on a PPC and it runs pretty well for me.
Click to expand...
Yeah thats why I put the post which kind of Mac you are usng. Everyone raves about VLC. I used it on Windows and for a little on the Mac. Its a fantastic program just on the Intel Mac it loves to **** up all the time in the middle of a video.
 
S

Sanjuro

Member
shidoshi said:
Video - QuickTime + nightly Perian + Flip4Mac
Absolutely detest VLC's UI, and like MPlayer OSX (not MPlayer 2 OSX), but QuickTime Player with most recent builds of Perian and Flip4Mac is wonderful and plays damn near everything I want to watch. Plus, going this route gets me subtitle and full codec support in things like FrontRow, which makes life even better.
Click to expand...

Where can you find the nightly builds of Perian?
 
T

thesoapster

Member
Firefox
Adium - IM (AIM/MSN)
iChat - Video chat (including 3+ people)
Skype - Voice chat
iTunes
Transmit - FTP client
DVD Player - DVDs
VLC - Non-DVD video files sans .wmv and .mov
Quicktime w/ Flip4Mac - .wmv and .mov video files
iPhoto
MS Word 2004
Photoshop CS3 (whatever beta they're up to now...since they don't have the full version out)
Colloquy - IRC client
xACT - FLAC decoder
Azureus 2.5 - Torrent client
 
M

mollipen

Member
SanjuroTsubaki said:
Where can you find the nightly builds of Perian?
Click to expand...

I have a friend who builds them, so unfortunately I'm not sure. The nightly builds are WAY beyond the current release build, though - support for h.264 high profile, Matstroka containers, .sub subtitle files, and more.
 
R

radios shipping overview

Member
Browser - vanilla Firefox + Adblock + Greasemonkey + mouse gestures works for me.

Messenger - Adium suits me fine. I'm just hoping for MSN/GTalk VOIP (or even video) soon.

IRC - Colloquy is awesome, and free. It's one of the best clients I've used.

File decompressor - The Unarchiver handles Japanese filenames better than the built-in utility, and supports more formats. For more recent WinRAR-generated RAR files, UnRarX works well.

Torrent client - Tomato Torrent. I haven't really explored the options out there, and this one doesn't let me pick and choose what to download from a torrent, but it works well enough.

Audio player - Cog. This is the closest thing to Winamp I've found on Mac. It's early in development, but the format support is good, and it's actively supported. Songbird is promising, but it's a little too bloated and buggy (and lacking in formats) for now.

Audio ripping - Max. This is just about as good as CDex. Supports plenty of encoders, looks CDs up in MusicBrainz, and does it without a hassle. Free, too.

Video player - NicePlayer, except in the case of MKV, for which I use MPlayerOSX. I haven't found an all-inclusive solution yet. VLC is too buggy.

Text editor - TextWrangler. I was so glad to find this free, just-the-basics version of BBedit. It's got plenty of the features I need to get by with web development, plus it can open files via FTP/SFTP.

Email - Mail.app. Does just what I used Thunderbird for on Win32. Gets the job done.

FTP/SFTP - Cyberduck (a great free app), or command-line.

Word processing/productivity - NeoOffice. Still runs on Java, so it's still slow, but it works.

Image viewer - Xee. Does exactly what I used Irfanview for on Win32. It's a lean, mean image viewer that lets me flip through the images in a directly quickly and without an irritating file browser. Free!

Budget book/finances: EZ Money. Lets you assign categories to all your expenses and deposits, and can break down your monthly budget into exactly what you're spending your money on. Stable and has a good interface. Also free.

The cult of shareware is alive and well on Mac, so I'm glad I've been able to find open-source and freeware solutions to all my usual tasks. I'm still looking for a way to play PSF files with any reliability, though. Audio Overload sort of sucks.
 
W

White Man

Member
shidoshi said:
Mail - Mail.app
I use Mail.app, though I hate it. I use it because I hate it less than I hate other Mac OSX mail apps.
Click to expand...

I use Entourage. I was surprised how much I liked it since I wasn't a very big fan of Outlook 2003. Entourage has more features than Outlook and it's laid out better. Unfortunately, you have to pay for Office to get it, which I'm sure is a deal breaker to a lot of people. Even in light of the pretty great Outlook 2007, Entourage is still my favorite PIM software on the market.

shidoshi said:
I have a friend who builds them, so unfortunately I'm not sure. The nightly builds are WAY beyond the current release build, though - support for h.264 high profile, Matstroka containers, .sub subtitle files, and more.
Click to expand...

Oh please please please hook me up. PLEASE!
 
S

Sanjuro

Member
White Man said:
I use Entourage. I was surprised how much I liked it since I wasn't a very big fan of Outlook 2003. Entourage has more features than Outlook and it's laid out better. Unfortunately, you have to pay for Office to get it, which I'm sure is a deal breaker to a lot of people. Even in light of the pretty great Outlook 2007, Entourage is still my favorite PIM software on the market.



Oh please please please hook me up. PLEASE!
Click to expand...

I would love to be hooked up as well. Perian only faliure is lack of update, but still works better than anything else around.
 
M

Musashi Wins!

FLAWLESS VICTOLY!
Man, a regular Perian update would be ace.

I'm on an Intel Macbook.

Browser - BonEcho optimized FireFox release. I find it very stable and I use a TON of extensions. Occasionally I also use Safari for cocoa features, but I end up missing my tools too much.

Information Management - I've used DevonThink Pro for quite a while, but I'm frustrated by having to interact with Safari or another webkit browser to get the most out of it. I'm also using EagleFiler and may transition over to it for collecting my various information and archiving mail.

Journler - An amazing donationware diary that actually does far, far more. There is barely a paid comparable program out there, much less one released at your discretion. The developer is soon releasing an information/pdf manager by the name of Lex that you should also check out.

Creative Writing - I use Scrivener or WriteRoom. I like Scrivener's pegboard/notecard outlining features quite a bit. I'm also playing around with Curio for projects of all sorts. Pretty amazing program.

FTP - Transmit by Panic. Natch. I'm also playing around with Coda.

1Passwd - If you're switching around a lot of browsers and such, I find this an excellent keychain replacement.

Bittorrent - Transmission for most things, BitTyrant when I need to hit and leave it or select particular files.

Quicksilver - Pretty much the baseline for essential apps on my Mac, once I figured out that it does, oh, everything.

VisualHub / handbrake - For putting movies on my PS3.

I'm looking for reasons to keep .mac and not finding them. Another nail in the coffin today as the Mac beta of Mozy was released: https://mozy.com/

2gb free and it has basic backup picks just like Backup. Get it now!

Obviously I use a lot more and some of the same as everyone here, but these things are pretty vital in a day to day way.
 
S

StopMakingSense

Member
Couple of apps I use that I havent seen been posted yet:


TextMate - Hot text editing sex in a bottle. Rediculously great text editor that I use hourly. So worth the 40-50 bucks to register, depending on exchange rates :p

Cyberduck - Great free open source FTP client. Transmit doesnt do that much more that I need an FTP client to do that Cyberduck doesnt already do.

CAMINO - Best ever 'just a browser' web browser.

irssi - Compiled via Darwin Ports. Who needs a GUI for irc? irssi + screen + ssh is an absolute must.
 
S

Sean

Banned
Intel MacBook


Adium (chat)
Acquisition (p2p)
Colloquy (irc)
Growl (notification system)
MacTheRipper / DVD2OneX (backup/rip DVDs) & HandBrake to encode them
NetNewsWire (rss)
Parallels Desktop (run Windows)
Quicksilver (does a thousand different things)
SuperDuper (backups)
The Unarchiver & MacPAR Deluxe (extraction)
Transmission (bittorrent)
Transmit (ftp)
Unison (usenet)
VLC (media player)


other stuff:
- Inquisitor: awesome plugin for Safari
- Netflix Freak: I use this to rearrange my Netflix queue sometimes (drag and drop)
- Paparazzi: take screen captures of full websites
- QuickShareIt: it's an image/file host kinda thing and you just drag the file onto the dock icon and it copies the URL to your clipboard. really useful.

Codecs: Flip4Mac, Perian
Widgets: AppUpdate, WidgetUpdate
 
O

OnkelC

Hail to the Chef
PowerBook G4 1,5GHZ/1,25GB RAM, Mac Mini G4/1,42 GHZ, 1GB RAM , both latest Tiger build
Applejack – Single User mode tool for repair and maintenance tasks, no Mac should be without one!
MainMenu: Great tool for running regular maintenance and common actions from the Menu Bar
DiskWarrior 4: Directory optimization and also troubleshooter
Chicken of the VNC for tooling around between the two machines
iTunes with iTunes LAME plugin for Music ripping and storing, Clutter for adding covers that iTunes doesn’t find
HandBrake MacTheRipper and iSquint for DVD / Video manipulation:
SlimServer and a Squeezebox for the Music goodness
FTP: Cyberduck – free, fast and painless
IRC: Conversation – got the OS X feeling that xchat hasn’t, albeit less features
RSS: NetNewsWire Lite
P2P: Transmission, BitTyrant, Cabos and xDonkey

Word Processing: still torn between several programs. Mellel or WriteInOne for smaller tasks, Pages for layout-heavy stuff, NeoOffice for .doc stuff, Word for Mac if I have to.
Browsing: Safari with SafariBlock, Camino for the few problematic pages
Webpage creation: Rapidweaver or WordPress
Managing my DVD / Games collection: DVDPedia and GamePedia from Bruji
UnrarX and The Unarchiver for decompression needs
MacHacha for joining stuff
JustLooking and pdfView as Preview replacements
Quicktime w/Perian, DivX Player, vlc, MPlayer and RealPlayer for videos,
PhotoTool contextual menu for fast and good image resizing
ImageWell for doing minor image manipulation,
Todos for looking at all the shit I got installed,
Appfresh for updating above stuff,
AppZapper to remove it,

for Virus protection (working a lot in mixed environments): ClamXAV

All of the above stuff can be found with google. http://www.macupdate.com and http://osx.iusethis.com are prime resources if you are looking for stuff you need.
Also, there is this little thread with more interesting stuff:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117295
 
M

mrkgoo

Member
Powerbook G4 1.5GHz, 1.25 RAM

I try to use as many first party apps as possible, simply because I like the tight integration.
Regular programs I use:
Browser: Safari
Mail: Mail
Music: iTunes (I also have iPod)
Media: VLC/Quicktime
Images: Preview/iPhoto/Graphic converter
Messenger: MSN (I don't have a problem with it, adn everyone I know uses it).
Productiviy: Word/Excel/Powerpoint
Torrent: Transmission (I tried 0.7.1, but it doesn't upnp ports as well as o.7.0 for whatever reason, so I'm using an older build).

Also recently dsicovered Papers as a PDF reference organiser, a la iTunes - it's good, but I'm just wondering if I should pay for it.
 
W

White Man

Member
Musashi Wins! said:
I'm looking for reasons to keep .mac and not finding them. Another nail in the coffin today as the Mac beta of Mozy was released: https://mozy.com/
Click to expand...

Same here about .mac. I mean, it wasn't even a great service when I signed up. I wish they'd change it up so you can use, say, your gmail space for syncing purpose. Building the syncing service so it can only use .mac is lame.

I shall check out this mozy.
 
G

guise

Member
shidoshi said:
I have a friend who builds them, so unfortunately I'm not sure. The nightly builds are WAY beyond the current release build, though - support for h.264 high profile, Matstroka containers, .sub subtitle files, and more.
Click to expand...

DO WANT
 
C

ClivePwned

Member
Apart from the standards- Camino, Azureus, QT, etc

Photoshop Elements 4
Logic Express
Final Cut Pro
Soundtrack Pro (awesome for putting together podcats:lol )
Motion
DVD Studio
Neo Office
Cyberduck for FTP
Garage Band (logic is good but nothing beats GB for working quickly)
and Delicious Library- keeps track of DVD and Games Collection

I also have Pro Tools HD on my PowerMac at work. Pro Tools is a piece of shit
 
C

ckohler

Member
Here are some of my other favorites that I've not seen mentioned:

CocoaMySQL - website
Best SQL app I've found for OSX.
Price: Free

Mactracker - website
Will tell you *everything* about any Apple produce ever made.
Price: Free

Nicecast - website
Best MP3 streaming software ever created.
Price: $40

Photo to Movie - website
Ken Burn's effect on steroids. Much, much better than iMovie.
Price: $49

Sound Studio - website
Simple but powerful, down and dirty sound editing, manipulation and conversion.
Price: $79
 
M

mollipen

Member
For those who are interested in the Perian builds, here's a link to my friend posting it over on my forum. (I've turned guest downloads on for now.) It's the April 10 build, but it'll still give you a lot more than the current official Perian release.

I was just talking to said friend about more recent builds, and supposedly things are ramping up to an official 1.0 release. So, try this for now, and the final version should be out sometime soon.

http://cafe.gomorning.com/index.php?showtopic=3310&hl=perian
 
G

Geoff9920

Member
woxel1 said:
Coda looks to be a great web design application (from the makers of Transmit, my all-time favorite Mac app).
Click to expand...
I've been looking for a text editor and this seems like it just may be the one. I checked it out the other day and it looks very cool. I'm currently deciding between this and Textmate. Plus this is just for side projects/learning and I couldn't justify the cost of BBEdit even though it seems to be the goto app. Anyway, nice to see it get a mention.
 
M

mollipen

Member
There's supposedly an issue with h.264 inside of .mkv containers with the beta, so just be aware of that before trying it.
 
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