software recomendations?

[Florian1234]

Hey guys, so after I decided to go for a MacbookPro 13" (with some very good hints from you), I have some questions about apps and widgets.

What would you consider to be useful software pieces for a Mac? I mean really essential ones. And also some good ones to quick-process some photos etc.

My main stuff on there is Office pack for writing, coconut battery, adium for chatting.

What is a must have for you? And why? What does it do/why does it help?
Thanks in advance. (Please avoid trench fights about Mac and Office.)

 

[ColSebastianMoran]

Hello Florian. I use Mac as well.

For photography, I use Lightroom all the time, occasionally Photoshop, and very occasionally PTGui (for panos), Photomatix (HDR), DXO Optics Pro, Perfect Resize. I generally check jpg images in Apple's Preview. I do not use iPhoto because you cannot know where and under what filenames it is storing your photos.

Be aware that on the Mac, the browsers and Preview are color-managed. This means that they will use any color profile embedded in an image file. If an image looks different on the Mac vs. on the Windows machine, this is usually the reason (specifically, many Windows applications treat all image files as sRGB regardless of an embedded profile profile).

Enjoy your Mac.

 

[ramosa]

I would not recommend Photoshop unless you're into major post-processing. I am not, so I gave up on Photoshop and have since used Lightroom and Aperture. Both have all the basic and intermediate functions--and much, much better file management than Photoshop. I used Lightroom when I had a PC. Now, with a Mac, I use Aperture 3 and couldn't be happier. With Lightroom and Aperature 3, I have also used Nik plug-ins, especially Silver Efex Pro.

 

[Coldkennels]

One nifty piece of kit that I use all the time is Clean My Mac. It gets rid of caches, usage logs, unnecessary language files, unnecessary halves of universal binaries, etc. Can save you a LOT of space on your hard drive, especially the first time you run it.

I've also started using Camino as a browser since Safari got a bit sluggish with one of the last major upgrades (have they fixed that yet?), and use VLC for video playback (because it will handle a lot of things Quicktime will not).

I know that you said not to touch on Office, but I've been using OpenOffice for the last three years. A bit clunky and slow to start up, but works a treat. And hey, it's free (without breaking any laws).

 

[Florian1234]

Keep them coming, guys, very interesting.

I use Lightromm on the pc machine, so I either will get it for mac, too, or try aperture. Well, for Office I use microsoft's mac 2011 pack, mainly for comfort of sharing with my university colleagues.

The suggestion of Clean my mac sounds very useful, indeed. I also thought about things like socialite and maybe a similar thing like flipboard or pulse (I know they are for mobile devices)?

 

[greyelm]

If you go for Lightroom wait for the version 4 to come out. Silver Efex Pro plugin is a must if you like black & white. A low cost but excellent basic image processor is Snapseed (from the makers of Silver Efex)

 

[Tim Gray]

I'd give you suggestions, but most of the **** I use is weird Unix stuff and things like that.

I can highly recommend Photo Mechanic if it fits your needs.

If you've bought into the whole iCal thing, particularly if you use it to sync with your iPhone, etc., Fantastical is a pretty cool interface to your calendar.

 

[mugent]

I use Aperture rather than Lightroom, I think it's a lot easier to use, and MUCH cheaper.
For Email, I think Sparrow is really good, clean UI, very nice.
If you want to do some web design, try Flux, but I would say that, I wrote it 🙂

 

[Coldkennels]

Oh, here's another good one: Apimac Timer. I think it's freeware or shareware, and it's a great stopwatch/timer/alarm clock program. I can't remember why I picked it up originally, but it's great for timing film processing. Or cooking, for that matter.

 

[ColSebastianMoran]

And, Massive Dev Chart for your iPhone. You're going the Apple route whole-hog, right?

 

[mwooten]

Aperture is about half the street price of Lightroom 3. I'm invested in Lightroom, and understand it somewhat, so I'll not switch. If there is an Apple dealer near you, you could play with the program at the store.

While I have Apple's Pages, Keynote, and Numbers on both my laptop and desktop machines, I use Office stuff most often. Numbers is nice, but Excel is more powerful. Keynote beats the stuffing out of Powerpoint, and Word is a lumbering beast -- I use TextEdit for most of my word processing needs.

I agree with "Coldkennels" about Camino. I've been using it for years. It's a browser, and it doesn't attempt to be anything else. Doesn't hit the harddrive as much as Safari.

 

[Meakin]

One thing I often use, when post-processing - is built into OsX, the digital colormeter, I often mention it to people that didn't even know it was there.

Use your spotlight search and type "digital" - should turn up. Very handy for getting RGB values in different color spaces of images etc. (or anything really as long as you can mouse over it)

Cheers,

/Meakin

 

[Florian1234]

And, Massive Dev Chart for your iPhone. You're going the Apple route whole-hog, right?

Sorry, no iphone or ipad here. 😀 for mobile: android.

 

[petronius]

I use Graphicconverter for organizing my photos and for some pp.

 

[nightfly]

I second or third Lightroom. It's just really nice software. I have Photoshop but I find myself using Lightroom much more and have basically abandoned iView Media Pro for photo management.

The other thing I'd get is Quicksilver (free download), if you like using the keyboard instead of the mouse. It's an application launcher where you set a quick key and then just start typing the name of what you want to launch and it finds it and launches it. But you can also do things like open files, navigate your hardrive, play music from itunes, copy files and do lots of neat stuff without leaving the keyboard. Once you get used to it, it's hard to use a computer without it. Google it and watch some videos. It' difficult to describe.

I just basically re-installed my OS on an SSD and have been bringing things over as needed. So far I have:

Art Directors Toolkit (App that comes or use to come with Macbook Pros for doing onscreen measurements and finding color values etc)
Photoshop
Lightroom
Firefox
Quickbooks 2012 (Intuit sucks but I need it for my business and the 2012 is the least bad version in awhile)
Notational Velocity (great super fast personal database)
Microsoft Office
Dropbox
A Better Finder Renamer
Transmit (FTP)
Quicksilver
BBedit (programming text editor)
SuperDuper (backup software because I find Time Machine annoying)