What must-have software for a new mac owner can you recommend?

Posted by Hugh
Apr 12, 2012 at 11:21 AM

To Steve’s excellent list, I’d add the following:

Two heavyweight applications for specific jobs:
Omnifocus (task manager)
iBank (personal finance)

A nice free simple word processor:
Bean

Back-up:
Super-Duper (Apple’s Time Machine is fine for files, but Super-Duper incrementally clones your disk)

Of course:
Dropbox

The Apple equivalent of MS Office (more limited, but cheaper):
Pages
Numbers
Keynote

A programme to allow you to run Windows software on a Mac (for the pretty rare occasions when you can find no Mac equivalent):
Parallels

And a list of simple utilities, most of which are inexpensive and exploit the Mac system to help knit different applications together:
Hazel
Caffeine
Growl (the earlier free version)
Launchbar (or the recently updated Alfred)
Concentrate
Cobook
QuickCal
Blotter (puts your calendar on your desktop)
Minco (a nifty task timer)
Minuteur (a scriptable “tea timer”)
1Password
Default Folder
Mailtags
Coconut Battery
Formal Address
TextExpander
Wallpaper Wizard
A feature of the Mac platform is that there are many utilities like these available.

This is a good review site (featuring articles by Steve Z.):
http://mac.appstorm.net/category/general/
It’s also good for learning about the little utilities, like those above.

And “Mac at Work” by David Sparks is an excellent perspective of the best of the entire Mac software waterfront.