What’s Hip Hapnin?

Jeff and Clay both got macs around christmas time and I have been promising them for weeks that I would write this post of what software I am using on my mac. I have tried to put a little review and a link to each company but that is getting exhausting so the list will probably get worse the closer you get to the bottom.

	Adium - this is the greatest chat program in the world - how could i possibly justify that? Free, Apple scripts that deliver Chuck Norris quotes, and it works really well with every chat type.
	Adobe Creative Suite - What can I say, you have to have it this is what your mac was built for. I really have a love hate relationship with Adobe - I love everything Adobe does but opening their software means I am doing work.
	Audacity - It’s Free but it’s useless. I have a whole bunch of Audio apps I don’t use including “Live, and Audion” because Garage Band works great.
	Disk Inventory X - Disk Inventory X is a disk usage utility for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called “treemaps“.If you’ve ever wondered where all your disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X will help you to answer this question.And of course it is FREE!
	Fugu - This is a graphical interface for SFTP, SCP and SSH connections. No more looking for Unix commands you can’t ever remember as you fumble through Terminal connections. I love this app. It is FREE but I would pay for this one if they would only let me.
	Juhu - This is the best way I have found to post to your jaiku account. If you don’t have a Jaiku account you better get one. Leo was right this is way better than twitter. Juhu also has an iphone and ipod touch application. Not that I have either of those…yet. Just a couple parting thoughts on Jaiku. I still post to twitter but only because my jaiku account is picking up my twitter feed. The other thing you can never forget when google went shopping they bought Jaiku and skipped over twitter. I like to align myself with the two most powerful forces in the universe, God and Google. Both know where you are and what you are doing at all times.
	Google Earth - Everyone loves google earth. I am really not sure how we lived without it. I use it a lot for planning my longer runs when I am training. It always freaks you out when you see how far it actually is. Click on this link if your are going to download it because this one pays me
	Celestia - Celsetia lets you look at the stars without even going outside. As Jeff always says “why would I want to go out and look at the sky when I can just see it online?” I like this one just because I am a big big geek.Stellarium - Is basically the same thing, they both work on Mac and they are both FREE
	Microsoft Office 2008 - Office 2004 was long overdue for an update. Especially because it was slow and clunky on Intel Macs. I don’t really care about word, powerpoint, and excel. I am not a power user so I could probably get by with open office or something else. But I LOVE entourage. I read a number of blogs on setting up Entourage based on GTD (Getting Things Done) principles. This has changed my life I get twice as much done as I used to it is amazing. Entourage is reason enough to switch to a Mac, Outlook sucks. That being said my copy of 2008 (I got it the first day it was out) started out a little bit buggy. apps would crash pretty frequently. Then the other day after a restart everything just began to work like it should and now I am happy again.
	Mozy - I have tried lots of backup solutions…most of them are a huge pain especially on the Mac. Mozy works great always. Backup without thinking or knowing about it, it just gets done. This isn’t the first time I have posted about Mozy but here is the deal. A free account gets you 2 gig of backup (that is enough for everything important) and for $4.95 a month you get unlimited storage. This is the account I am on and I am currently backing up about 50 gig. The first backup takes a long time but after that they just watch what you do and look for changes. I signed up as an affiliate so if you click on this link or the logo I will get paid Mozy Unlimited Backup - $4.95/Month
	FreeMind - Mind Mapping Software, I love this for brainstorming and taking notes in meetings capturing and making sense of ideas big and small. It is FREE of course. You should download this one and then figure out a way to use it.
	Omnigraffle Pro - Visio for the Mac is the fastest way to explain it. But that is doing Omnigraffle a huge injustice. I use this software for almost all of my IA (Information Architecture) projects. It can rip through wire frames and and sitemaps. The key to your success and happiness with this application is to scour the web for “Stencils” these are basically templated shapes you can drag into whatever you are creating that is a huge time saver.
No logo?	Paparazzi!- Mac only application used for capturing screen shots of websites. The reason it is fantastic is it automatically grabs the entire page no matter how long it is and then you can save it in jpg, png, or pdf. very very useful. oh and like always It’s FREE.
	Parallels - I don’t want to write anything about Parallels. I even signed up as an affiliate and I am not even going to bother putting the link in here. The thing is I just can’t get that excited about it anymore. Weird to think that just over a year ago this is why I made the jump to a Mac. I do use it every couple weeks - it is slow and frustrating. Usually I just wait until I get home and I can use my desktop PC.
	Skype - Everyone knows about skype and loves it. I just wanted you to know that I am in line. I use skype for podcasts and recording calls I have this great and cheap podcast setup that connects to my mac through firewire you can easily do a podcast where somebody is calling in and it sounds better than a telephone call. I should do a whole post on Podcasting equipment. I got the whole thing going for under $500.
	Toast - I haven’t used this yet but Jeff gave it to me and said it was great.
	Transmit - Not only is this the best FTP client for a Mac but it is the best FTP app I have ever used. It isn’t free but it is worth it. But this application. (with endorsements like that I should figure out how to become an affiliate)
	Wakoopa- Wakoopa is a geeky application but it is good for Jaiku users. Basically it watches what you are doing on your computer and then uploads an RSS feed of the software you have opened. It’s Free

I obviously have a lot more software than this. There were a bunch of torrent apps that I use and a bunch of video apps but I thought the list was getting too long. I also didn’t mention any of the software that comes with the system by default. I hope this helps the Mac Noobies get up to speed. comments and software suggestions are welcome to round out this list.

Ok My Buddies Jeff and Clay have recently made the jump from PC to mac so I have promised both of them that I would post something to my blog on what software I use and why, sort of a quick start guide. I shouldn’t have promised that because it is taking longer than I thought to pull it all together and I have a feeling the post will be longer than i want it to be. I thought I would post about Mozy quickly. I think I have plugged them before but it is a Utah company that does computer backups. I switched to Mozy because they had a mac client. It works great i have no complaints and I just signed up sprout for a corporate account. The free account comes with 2 gig of backup space and for $5.95 $4.95 a month you get unlimited space. This is something you do for your wife fellas so she doesn’t have to stress about losing pictures if the computer is destroyed.

(click on the logo it’s a link)

So if you read my previous post I was pretty excited about getting leopard on the day it was released. I also wrote this post on how great Apple is at launching products. Well let me just say I have spent my entire day in Apple Hell. You have probably read all of the post on the leopard blue screen of death errors. You can also read more here, here, and here.

We have five Macbooks, I installed it on two and then Kaboom! In the long tradition of Microsoft stealing from Apple suddenly the tables have turned and leopard is giving me the blue screen of death. It is actually a simple fix you simply reinstall the os with the archive feature. This is an old support trick I had to learn with Windows (rename the windows folder to winold [or whatever you want] and reinstall. Windows thinks you have formatted the drive and you don’t lose anything). So I don’t know how to share this next part but either Apple thought ahead and automated this processes. Or they were in too big of a hurry to fix the install bugs and automated the process. Either way I was pissed that Apple is turning into Microsoft. (I am also upset that Starbucks is turning into McDonalds but that is another post.)

It took about 4 hours but we were able to get computer number 3 up and running. Some of the apps were missing (firefox) but all of the content was there.

I am yo-yoing from raving apple fan to less than satisfied customer. It seems like they are making more and more decisions based on what is right for them instead of what is right for us. Like the iphone only being on cingular instead of all networks. Rushing out a me too operating system to follow Vista. That being said I am typing this on Macbook with Leopard…

I will let you know how the install goes. If you never hear from me again that means it didn’t go well.

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