MacBook Pro, Part II
Now that I’ve had my MacBook Pro for more than a day, I have decided to write up a post on all of the programs I have found to be extremely useful to my day to day activities, along with some that I think are just really cool.
The program I would say that I use the most is Firefox 2.0b1. When I was still on my PC I was using Firefox 2.0a3, so this is a great improvement to what I had been using. I do not really have much to say about it other than it does its job perfectly. There are a few random crashes and whatnot, but I could never switch to Camino or Shiira because I am too attached to my plugins.
My second most used program, and a very close second it is, has to be Adium. On my PC I never used the standard AIM client, but I used the Microsoft-manufactured MSN client. I could have used gaim for both AIM and MSN, but I chose to use MSN Live Messenger so I could use features like shared backgrounds and video conferencing. Now that I cannot use those features on any of the Mac-based MSN clients, I decided to just use Adium for both, and I must say I love it. It is much more full-featured that gaim, despite the fact it lacks some basic features for MSN. There are so many extensions available to use with it, and everything about the display of the buddy list and messages is fully customizable. It is probably the best messenging client available for the Mac.
Aside from Firefox and Adium, I don’t use very many programs constantly, so now I will just list them in the order I can think of them.
NewsFire is a great RSS aggregator. Not much else to say other than it costs money, and I didn’t like that. The features are excellent though. Top-notch program.
GROWL! Having those pop ups whenever a new track is played, or when I get a new email, or when a new news item is found in NewsFire, or a new buddy logs on or off is amazing. I really wish there was a comparable program for Windows XP. I highly recommend this for everyone who uses OS X.
Transmission is a great BitTorrent client. It’s not as awesome as uTorrent, but it gets the job done.
Delicious Library is probably the coolest program I have ever seen. You can scan the UPC’s of all of your CDs, DVDs, books, and video games. You can add contacts so that you can check out your belongings to your friends and keep track of who has what. For $40 it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s just so cool that I had to buy it.
So far, that is all I can think of, but if I remember any more cool programs, I will make sure to add them.