Apple software

[jkpescador]

This one is for all you Apple users out there. What applications would a newbie mostly use and why? What are your favoritte Apple Applications?

[kamapuaa]

This one is for all you Apple users out there. What applications would a newbie mostly use and why? What are your favoritte Apple Applications?

Kind of depends on what you want to do, don't you think? For example, I bought my mac for recording music. I tried out garageband, but I had significant issues with midi input. As a result, I switched up to Logic Express, which has been working like a champ.

[jkpescador]

Mostly it's for my mother in law to use.

Which browser do you prefer?

[dick]

If you're just looking for word processing, there's Appleworks which comes with new Macs, and there's TextEdit which is kind of like Notepad, but can open Word documents as well as save as a Word .doc.

As for browsers I use Safari.

[Pomai]

Mostly it's for my mother in law to use.
Which browser do you prefer?Most older folks I know who are newbies to the computing world only use their machine for 3 basic functions:

• Word processing (including printing those documents)
• eMail
• Web surfing

For that, OSX's built-in (free) apps do the job it's intended just fine:
TextEdit, Mail & Safari.

I prefer Firefox slightly over Safari (though I use both). Firefox tends to render PHP/MySQL pages such as right here at HT more accurately. Especially when it comes to forms buttons.

I also prefer MS' Entourage (email program) over MAIL only because I like the built-in calendar feature. MS Entourage isn't free though. It's part of the Office suite.

Of course, being a desktop publisher, I also have all the usual goodies: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive & Quark XPress (though we'll soon switch to InDesign).

If you're going to run anything graphics-intense, as always, get plenty of RAM!

[mel]

For basic stuff I use the following on my OSX Macs:

Browser: Safari and Firefox. I prefer Safari, but Firefox is good too.

Email: I'm old school, so for pop email I use a paid for version of Eudora. Otherwise it is webmail at Yahoo or Gmail.

Word Processing: I have MS Word, but for simplicity I am okay with AppleWorks and TextEdit.

[Pua'i Mana'o]

a couple of cents here...

software to buy:
-Office for Mac OSX (there's a student edition that retails less than $150). Its great because she will be able to open all those .doc .xls .ppt files and it is worth every dime.

free software to download:
-windows media player
-real player
(quicktime is already installed, but we all know that different websites use different media players and this will come in handy if she likes to watch files from cnn.com, oprah.com, etc)

tell her that she won't be able to open .exe files (unless you buy VirtualPC which I wouldn't advise doing). This really is no biggie, and keeps the mac from getting whacked by viruses.

...and if you really love her, get an airport and buy her an ibook. Then she's wireless and THAT is POWER!

[jkpescador]

Thanks for the advice all.

I did find out buying something from Apple is cheaper online than in the store.

[kamapuaa]

Don't spend the money on MS office - Openoffice.org is like 98% compatible, and it's free. Also, I think mplayer or vlc (both also free, and more importantly free of the realplayer BS) can handle most video formats.