Hey Mac owners!

[telophase]

Now that I am officially a Mac owner again* I have a question for other Mac owners: what sort of software do you find essential and why? :)



* I don't participate in the OS wars, but I tend to prefer Macs. Had the PC solely because I was entering grad school and I could get what I needed for cheaper, but now with a virtual machine I can have the benefit of both OSes on one computer. Mind you, the last time I used Macs for longer than a couple of minutes at a time it was back in the days of OS9, before they got all feline in their names.

Comments

[solarbird]

I use a lot of the bundled software, honestly. I know most people find the contacts app woefully underpowered, but it seems okay for me. The Calendar and Mail apps are fine, Safari is a perfectly good browser but Firefox and Chrome are available if you want.

Huge numbers of artists I know do work in PaintTool SAI.

Adium is a good multiprotocol IM client.

iMovie actually is pretty good for editing video. It's not professional level, but it's not trying to be, and it works for things like my live video posting needs.

I do all my music stuff on my DAW, which is Linux based, so can't help you much there.

I hate Word and Excel, but I have to use them for various annoying reasons. Pages is nicer; I haven't tried Apple's spreadsheet application. (I want to move the data I have in Excel over to Google Docs spreadsheet, mostly so we stop keeping redundant copies of EVERYTHING.)

That's all I have.