(in my best Troy Mclure voice) Hi, Im QBSneak000. You might remember me from such forums as ATS and BTS....

For the longest time I have been using regular PC for all of my computing needs until recently I bought a Macbook. Now, I know this might come across like one of those commercials but WOW, after using Mac, I will never go back.

From using it for the last month or so I found there is a lot of great Mac software out there that rivals if not beats PC software of the same type.

I wanted to start this thread for all that use Mac to share ideas and things for Mac or even help with Mac issues.


I'll start with a few great programs I've found that I enjoy using

-Pixelmator (like photoshop but way more user friendly)

-Vuse (cool for finding music, videos etc.)

-iLife

-iWork (like microsoft office but better and faster not to mention it can read MSoffices documents and spreadsheets etc.

-OSXplanet (really cool, real time earth watcher for weather, storm tracking, earthquakes etc. (free)

-fun card maker - just like it sounds creates fun customizable postcards to email to friends

-Pulpmotion advanced - awesome slideshow creation software

-iPhoto buddy - great for helping organize all your iphoto stuff (and its free)

-Comic Life Magic - really fun comic creation software with an enormous collection of templates.

-Garage Band - fun music creation software


What I am looking for is a relatively cheap/free program for creating slideshows that is easy to use. I mentioned Pulpmotion advanced and although it is an awesome program its $150.00 USD and thats a little too much for me. Any suggestions? I'm always looking for great programs to use so post what you use or like cause I would love to check them out.

I've found most all of the software I mentioned here Apple Software

if anyone has other sites to find good Mac software please post it here.

Also, for all you PC users who would like a piece of the OSX action.. Depending upon the hardware in your PC, you can install and run OSX quite happily, and enjoy OSX without the heartache of making Mr.Jobs that little bit richer.

I'm not sure on the board rules here for posting links to other websites and so on, so I won't until I've clarified that for myself, but needless to say Google is indeed your friend here.

Just for the record, my hardware specs, (nowt expensive, all fairly basic spec by todays standards) are as follows. AsRock (Intel G945Z chipset) board, Core2Duo CPU (E2180. 1.8Ghz overclocked to 3Ghz) , Nvidia 8600GT gfx, 2Gb RAM and a couple of SATA HDDs and IDE CD/DVD drive, and OSX Leopard (quad-booting along with XP Pro, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 8.04 and Slax linux) works like a charm.

Hello and congrats on your new MAC! I just got one recently as well and I found out about this site, freemacware.com, that has a ton of programs that are of no cost, including lots of the stuff you mentioned. I love this site and it gets updated pretty often so I would suggest checking back every few days! Good luck!

I hope other MAC users respond to this thread because I'm still new to mine and every time someone comes over who knows how to navigate an imac, i learn all these neat little tricks and I'm sure there's plenty more to learn!

reply to post by Lozzo

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mmm, thats what Im doing. If anyone is interested just check out insanelymac they have some really good info there and mac apps.

heres what I use:
-coverSutra, this is for displaying itunes song info and all that on the desktop
-Candybar, for changing all system icons etc.....
-Awaken, my alarm in the morning, it uses itunes
-transmission, for bit torrent downloads
-Adium, for IM related things
-kext helper, for install kexts (drivers in mac os)

here is a screenie of my current desktop (it has my icons changed with candybar and coversutra turned on):

screenie

[edit on 20-9-2008 by funky monk]

A couple of must have programs/utilities for all mac users:

little snitch
flip4mac
macdust
superpop
vlc

and if you want a high performance mozilla based browser with tons of bells and whistles I highly recommend Flock.

Great input, thanks guys!! So far so good. I wish I could upgrade the video card though. Other than that, after the little learning curve, Mac is way better than PC in my opinion.