Thread: new applemac pro

libreoffice

to do your office documents

onyx

to do maintenance if the unit has osx lion on it

text wrangler

advanced text editor


music photos and movies
it should have itunes, imovie iphoto and the rest already on it i would think

clamXav

so you can virus scan documents you share with windows users

vlc

good general media player

that should keep you busy

i also suggest the following to make things easier

toast

great dvd / cd burning authoring software with more clue than the standard apps

vmware fusion

to run windows in a window where it belongs

look at the app store and on macupdate.com for the things you need when starting out.

I use microsoft office 2011. Unless you do word doc publishing for a job it's 100% compatible with windows office doc.

For video clips & movies there are hundreds of options, however, for the most part iTunes is ok. For files iTunes won't play (it wouldnt play em on a pc either!!) then use vlc player (free download). If you want to see these files in iTunes then download (free) a Mac app called handbrake, it'll convert just about anything to anything!

For photos, iPhoto (comes with the mac) is a great place to start.

Also, if your near an apple store I'd suggest you book yourself onto the free "switchers" sessions they run. They are free and very worthwhile.

Jon

Get Adobe for your PDF viewing. PDF's are supposed to be natively supported in the OS, but seems to be a bit of a letdown from my experience.

You can do most burning tasks via Finder so I'd leave Toast until you have a proven need for it:

Mac OS X 10.6 Help: Burning a CD or DVD in the Finder

A "must have" plug-in is Flip4Mac, this will allow Quicktime to play most WMV formats without resorting to third party apps:
Windows Media Components for QuickTime - by Flip4Mac
Telestream - Flip4Mac WMV Software Update

Perhaps I'm not looking at the d/l's in formats favoured by windows users but I very rarely have to reach for VLC.

If you need to convert music files between formats that iTunes doesn't support or want to do high quality rips of your CD collection, my favourite app is XLD:

X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X

Don't be put off by the web page - it deals mainly with command line usage - the app is fairly straight forward.

In terms of playback and library management, iTunes is pretty good. I've messed with

If you just need to do basic edits or read word documents TextEdit will handle .doc and .docx but doesn't always entirely preserve the formatting. Preview will display .doc and .docx files.

If you need to do more advanced document layouts and can get away with distributing the end result as .pdf - which is arguably the best way if the recipients don't need to edit - you should have a look at Pages in the App . Pages can save out to word formats but the formatting doesn't necessarily translate.

Before adopting Firefox try giving Safari a run for a week or two. While Firefox is a decent browser, it doesn't play as nicely with the touchpad oriented user interface that Apple has moved towards. That means you miss out on the niceties like two finger swipes to move backwards and forwards in your browsing history.

OS X Lion: About Multi-Touch gestures

cheers
Paul