Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Music editor. Anything minimal around that will let me paint notes on staves and play back the cacophony?

Syntactically correct but incomplete answer: yes, there is. A few nights ago I went looking for a Mac equivalent to NoteWorthy Composer. And, er, I found one. I might be able to tell you more when I get home.

(Downloading and installing software, incidentally, is *so* much easier on the Mac...)

I dislike powerpoint because it looks like built-your-own greeting card software circa 1997. The only reason to have it is for the compatibility with your desktop machine. Otherwise I'd go for Apple's relatively new but totally gorgeous Keynote. Supposedly it opens and exports powerpoint format, but those things never go perfectly smoothly. Word is okay, but there are alternatives. If you're like me you're mainly paying for dead-simple compatibility with others' documents. There are other choices for the brave. Heck even Apple's built-in text editor opens and edits Word format. I think your powerbook might come with GraphicConverter, which does lots more than its name implies. Give that a try. Otherwise I recommend jumping to Photoshop Elements. Go with Dreamweaver, but you might also want to look into getting a text editor by BareBones, like BBEdit or the free TextWrangler. They make fantastic stuff and any Mac user who codes HTML (or anything else) should probably have one of them. I myself am sick of emulator software. It works okay, but it costs a fortune, uses up gigs of drive space and half your computer's resources to run a teeny little Windows app. What I do is Remote Desktop to my Windows machine when I need to.

Hi, David -- I'm not sure this will help but I noticed an item from Koan Bremner; she put together an outline describing how she's migrating from a PC to a Mac with the goal of bringing and/or replicating most of her stuff.

I have a recently updated list of the Mac essential software that I use posted at:

http://www.bryanstrawser.com/archives/008629.php

Apple's keynote is a good program too - much snazzier than Powerpoint - though truth be told, I use both.

B

Dreamweaver is available on Mac; it works.

If you like Thunderbird, stick with that. Apple
Mail has some nice integration with Spotlight,
but nothing worth dropping an email program you already like.

Firefox works fine on Mac.

All the blizzard games are available on Mac. Doom games and Halo are also available. There are actually quite a surprising number of other titles. Some are even Mac-only, especially some puzzle games.

For graphics editing, Photoshop is the most capable/accessible probably; if you only need light effects, then Photoshop elements works. It comes bundled with many digital cameras. For free graphics editing, nothing beats the gimp, though it's popup-oriented UI will remind you of Interleaf days gone by.

For hardware (for a powerbook), I recommend a bluetooth mouse. Much better than the touchpad. Apple sells them, but I would guess that any bluetooth mouse would work. If you are a multi-button guy, then any USB mouse will work.

Virtual PC 7 is the ultimate PC emulator for Mac. If you are buying MS office anyway, get the "pro" version of office; it comes with VPC7.

Also - I usually monitor versiontracker - www.versiontracker.com and downloadsquad.com as well as tuaw.com for new software and ideas

Thanks for the link!
Bryan

I'll admit it--I like Entourage. (The native Apple mail client sucks.) I look over my wife's shoulder as she uses it and wish I could justify putting it on my machine. She's happy with Office for Mac generally--you might just go for the whole shebang.

As to coding, bite the bullet and fire up XCode. The tutorials aren't bad. Play around with the various options, and I think you'll find that building GUI-driven apps aren't particularly harder than in VB. (I too dislike C++.) If you're getting 10.4, then you'll get Core Data Modelling--the one thing that really makes me want to move up from 10.3, but (sadly) my third-world university gets no discounts (to the best of my knowledge) from Apple.

Thinkpads are nice machines--let me know where to send the get well card.

presentations: i prefer Keynote to PPT but if you're gonna do much/most of your dev/prep on the PC, stick with the Office suite (which means you get Word)

for Email -- thunderbird, mail.app or entourage are all fine, though I prefer the first two for ease/simplicity of use

Graphics: iphoto can do a little, but it's mostly for organizing. Photoshop elements is a good program and as others have said is often bundled with digicams.

Web: Dreamweaver
Browser: Firefox (though Safari is worth checking out for how it handles RSS)

I use the Sage Firefox plug-in for RSS feeds, but Safari is ok and many folks use Net News Wire for a sep. aggregator (you didn't ask about this, but here it is anyway)

Hardware add-on -- if you have an iPod you should use part of its capacity as an extra/backup drive. Otherwise ... give a firewire HD or sync consistnely between the PC and Mac (FolderShare or something like that gets a lot a fav. feedback). And definitely a two-button mouse.

For music -- play around with Garageband. it doesn't do (i don't think) what you described, but it's free and it's fun to play with (and good for creating podcasts). Audacity (free) is another godd audio editing software to have, IMHO.

IM -- iChat is fine for AOL screennames, AdiumX (free) works with AOL, MSN, YahooIM, GoogleIM, and Jabber. That's what I prefer.

websites: macintouch.com, macnn.com, TUAW, and AppleInsider should get you started

Also i agree with the guy who suggested Remote Desktop (free) over VPC, which is slow as all hell

David... you know that a Mac is much more than a machine... it is a "magic box"... it is "wonderful" as you say... it requires a user willing to be "enchanted"... are you sure you're such a person... :) Why such a hurried decision after the traumatic accident with your ThinkPad... BTW... did anyone ever called the Mac a "CreatePad"... am I the first to come up with this... :)

You'll want to get to know http://macfixit.com/ as well as the sites that Josh suggests. Regular free content, but a Pro subscription is cheap ($25 per year) and well worth it.

And you might want to consider Real Basic as an easy to use but pretty powerful programming environment, although it isn't free. The Mac comes with free developer tools, but they might be a bit more than you're looking for.

If you can make the jump from VB6 to VB.net you can compile your apps using mono and run them on your Mac.

go-mono.org

Aloha, David! You may find one or two useful apps here: http://tinyapps.org/osx.html . Especially recommended: Fugu (SFTP client), Smultron (text editor), Imagewell (basic image editor), and ToyViewer (image viewer).

Open Source Mac The price is right, and the applications are excellent.

Programming Environment
If I were you I'd try out real basic, its easy to use for a beginner and yet powerful enough to do some real cool stuff, including compiling for windows, mac and linux :)

www.realbasic.com

Joel

Hey there... if you live firefox on the PC, you'll HATE it on the mac. i recently switched full time to a mac and firefox 1.0.7 (current release) is slower than molases going uphill in January!

Make sure to use the latest 1.5rc2 build of firefox... pageloads, startup time and menu items are about a bazillion times faster than the current stable 1.0.7 build. I have had barely any qualms with the new relase candidate other than a few quirky CSS issues.

Congrats on the purchase!

Hi David. I was reading TUAW and they asked me to write. Since I just benefitted from the generosity of the ruby on rails crowd, here goes.

For programming I recommend ruby on rails (website programming that is). Text Mate is a great text editor for programming and SubEthaEdit is a stroke of genius. They use bonjour and internet tech so that you can team program with someone else anywhere in the world

Keynote is spectacular. PowerPoint boredom is very common. Somehow they all look the same. Keynote blows people away. In typical Mac fashion it has less features but is far more aesthetically pleasing.

MySQL is strongly recommended for your database if you are comfortable working with SQL dbs. I used to own ($5,000) a copy of MS SQL. IMO MySQL is better.

FileMaker Pro is great for database work. It has a couple of limitations but will work for you 95% of the time. It is much easier to learn and deal with than Access although don't get me wrong, I like Access as a product.

There are lots of word compatibile wps but you can get caught out depending on what you want. I recently found that AbiWord is good but complex numbered lists can fail to be read 100% accurately. I find there is little substitute for XL, it must have been MS's finest hour (or 100,000 hours or whatever).

Hope that helps.

bruce

I did switch more than a year ago and compiled a list by myself:

http://switch.mad4you.homeip.net/

Have fun!
Mario

1. powerpoint or Keynote are both working great.
2. Word or Pages are both good too.
3. Photoshop and Illustrator are industry standard. Get them. You can get the cheaper Photoshop elements too.
4. Dreamweaver works fine on Mac too, tad slower maybe.
5. Mail.app that comes with the Mac worth a try. Otherwise you can use Thunderbird.
6. Safari that comes with the Mac is a great browser. FF for Mac handles Flash so so...
7. Xcode is the best programming environment and it comes with your Mac I think.
8. You can run VPC 7 to emulate Windows.
9. Games? There are many, but I don't play...
10. Music? Garageband should come with your Mac. You gonna love it.
11. Max out your RAM from Crucial.com. At least 1GB, but 2GB is better. OS X is memory hungry and power comes with memory.
12. Add-ons can be found free or shareware on macupdate.com
13. You are cordially invited to our mac/design blog http://creativebits.org for anything you may want to know about your Mac.

Definitely Keynote which is wrapped into an Apple package called iWork and includes Pages which will import and export Word docs. Though I'm not so keen on the Pages part of iWork, for Keynote alone it's the best $79 you are likely to spend on software.

For a cheap cross-platform office suite, ThinkFree might be worth a look. I think it's about $50.

For other add-ons, it depends what you want to do with your computer. If you're at all into graphics, Photoshop is essential and I would also recommend Pixologic's ZBrush

For programming, I second other suggestions to try XCode.

All basic movie (iMovie), photography (iPhoto) and music (Garageband) software ships with every Apple, but if you're interested in pro apps, Apple has many affordable, high-end solutions, like Final Cut Pro (movies), Aperture (photography) and Logic Pro (music), all on the Apple website which is also a first port of call for open-source Shareware, games, widgets etc. Screensaver? Try Useless Creations

For games, my kids got me interested in Bugdom and Nanosaur II but I'm really not much of a gamer.

If you're getting the latest Powerbook, you're going to love two-finger scrolling - up and down, sideways and diagonally.

Hope you have as many years of fun as we've had with Apple.

Welcome to the Mac world! I've been a user since 1984, and I spent part of my career as an Apple Developer. These things are great! These days I'm back in academia doing multimedia. Here's what I would suggest:

1. Word Processing. Microsoft Word is readily available with Office for the Mac, and Office also contains Powerpoint, so you're covered there. If you want to step out and try something new, the iWork Suite (Keynote and Pages) is Apple's offering and they are good programs. And yes, you can pull Word and Powerpoint docs in and out of these guys.

2. HTML. There is a great free editor called NVU. www.nvu.com. It's free. Also - Contribute, from Macromedia is also handy. Of course, Dreamweaver also runs on the Mac, so if you want all the power, it's there. I'd suggest Studio MX if you want all the bells and whistles.

3. Graphics. If you get the Studio MX suite you'll get a graphics app along with Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. Otherwise Photoshop is hard to beat. Photoshop Elements if you're on a budget.

4. Browser. Firefox also runs on the Mac, although Safari, which comes with the Mac, is also a great choice.

5. Programming. There is a Basic for the Mac, but if you're entry level, good at scripting languages, and want to be able to whip up interfaces in a hurry, SuperCard might be worth looking at. One upon a time there was a great free program that Apple included with the Mac called HyperCard. SuperCard was a commercial competitor, and it's still around. Take a look. http://www.supercard.us/

6. Garageband is a great app, but it doens't allow you to paint the notes. You might want to look at Logic Express. It uses the sound libraries that are in Garageband. You can also get many more sounds/loops through the Apple Jam Packs. Additionally, there are several choices for additional sounds. If you search on "Audio Units" on the web, you'll find a number of sites that will link you to free and commercial things that are out there to plug into Logic or garangeband. Logic will allow you to enter music on a staff and play/edit it. I'm currently using it for a Graduate Composition class I'm taking (also do a search for "sabulatodd" at Macjams.com if you want to hear some stuff).

7. Email - Use the Mac mail app. It's good, does great filtering, and it's free!

8. Add-ons. I use a powerbook in my studio. I put it in a Kensington Holder that is mounted on a VESA arm. Next to it I have a 19" LCD display that is also mounted on a VESA arm. It's quick to hook up and I all the flexibility I need to edit, etc. The virtual desktop is great and I use the apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse. You can see a picture at
http://homepage.mac.com/sabulatodd/PhotoAlbum76.html

That's all I can recommend for now! Have fun, and again, welcome!!

If you need Powerpoint and Word I'd suggest you get Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, but you might also want to try Apples iWork first. It got an Powerpoint equivalent called Keynote, it's definitely will make your presentation more beautiful and elegant. There Also is Pages (with .doc support) which is quite nice if you're not going to do heavy duty work.

http://www.apple.com/iwork

Browser. I'm very fond of Firefox on the PC.

I highly suggest using Camino. Of course, you could use Firefox for Mac OS X, but Camino feels native to the OS, and is by far the fastest browser on the Mac. I actually like it so much that I wrote a piece explaining exactly why I think it's superior. Link.

David, if you like Dreamweaver, just stick with it on the Mac. As for the mail client, Mail will win you over in about a minute.

As for utilities I would recommend Speed Download (http://yazsoft.com/) for download management, Adium X (http://www.adiumx.com/) for IM and Unison (http://panic.com/unison/) for Usenet.

Since you are doing music editing, I'm assuming you will occaisionally be burning discs.

Roxio®'s Toast Titanium 7 is probably the most essential software you need to get, after Office (Or iWork or OpenOffice) and Firefox.

To keep your Mac's harddrive running smoothly, you should also get DiskWarrior.

Personally, I think Newsfire is an essential RSS feeder. I haven't seen anything that approaches it on Mac or PC.

This is great advice. Keep it coming!

Like it or not, I've ordered MS Office (student-teacher edition) because even if Keynote is 1000x better, I need Powerpoint for the reasons stated. I don't do text-based slides with Powerpoint. I use its animation features. I know Keynote has some great slide transitions, but I actually don't use slide transitions. In any case, Powerpoint is in the mail.

The programming environment may be the hardest piece to satisfy me about. I mainly want to be able to use on the Mac the VB6 utilities I've developed. Rewriting them in a new language might be fun but would take many many hours. I think it'll be a bear to get them translated into RealBasic but it looks like that'd still be easier than using the .NET upgrader which basically makes everything that's easy in VB6 really really hard.

Garageband is some type of music-snippet splicer, a mixer-masher sort of thing? I'm looking for something that will let me put notes on a staff and create "music" that way. I'm not much of a mixer-masher. Just give me my Rudy Vallee LPs and a shawl and I'm set for the evening.

Thanks again. All the information and comments are incredibly helpful. Heart-warming, too.

* yes, I'll second Keynote as a great PP replacement for OS X. If you need to consume a lot of other people's PPTs, though, you'll probably just want to get it.

* Word is great on OS X, as is Excel. IF you're used to Office, just buy Office. No need to bother looking for replacements.

* Grpahics editor: for free, try the (still young) "Seashore" project, which is a wrapper for the GIMP. Once you pass free and open-source, you'll have to probably pay for something like Adobe Elements, or possibly Photoshop.

* HTML editor. Do you need a WYSIWYG editor? If not, check out the free TextWrangler, a baby brother to BBEdit, a great text editor for the Mac. If you need wysiwyg, I can't suggest anything

* Email: Mail.app and Thunderbird are both fine. Mail is a lot more Mac-like of course.

* Browser: you'll want to at least *try* Safari, the browser that comes with OS X. Firefox is perfectly good on OSX, and if you're as dependant on FF extensions as I am, just install it.

* Programming environemnt: surely you're not asking for a VB programming tool on OS X? You might look at RealBasic, a very popular programming environemnt for the Mac (and PC) that has a rather VB-like syntax. It lets you create executables for both Mac and PC.

* Apple's free XCode is meant mostly for writing Cocoa apps, but it's a nice general purpose code writing tool. It's free, and comes on the Developer Tools CD you'll receive with your machine. I'm not quite clear on what you want here, but xCode certainly lets you build "forms and UIs"...making those actually DO something is more work.

* Emulator software: are you just asking for a Windows emulator? Virtual PC is your only option. Running virtual PC to get to your blog editing software seems insane to me, though. Why not look at ecto or MarsEdit?

* games: There are many many many cheap and great Mac games, and of course there are many big games that are ported to OS X. Start with insidemacgames.com and go from there.

I would definitely recommend VideoLan (http://www.videolan.org) for any video file you want to view. Hope this helps!

For HTML etc I heartily recommend Smultron.

Browser: Do take a look at Camino. I love it.

If you get into MySQL (great single click installers for PHP, MySQL, Apache2 at serverlogistics.com) then CocoaMySQL is the best admin tool there is.

And you really should check out NetNewsWire lite. RSS will suddenly make complete sense!

For movies that Quicktime can't play, both VLC and MPlayer2 are both great.

Best of all, every single one of these recommendations is free!

Do also check out panic.com, flyingmeat.com and rogueamoeba.com. Excellent small independent software companies with fantastic, cheap software.

If you frequently give presentations, you should consider a remote to control your powerpoint (or keynote) presentations. There's a lot of cheap infrared stuff out there, and I haven't found a really good one that works flawlessly.

The only exception, which is what I use all the time, is using my bluetooth mobile phone with Salling Clicker software. The software is $24, and works with many different mobile phones and pdas. I can't say enough good things about the software. Added bonus: if you get yourself a sony ericsson phone, you can even have a laser pointer attachment plugged into the phone so that you can control powerpoint and your laser pointer from a single device in one hand. It's quite convenient.

Oh and hey, Joho, your comments thingy is broken. I signed in with TypePad, did Preview, did Post from there, and got a "You need to wait for approval" message. Might want to look into that.

If you want PowerPoint and Word...just get the entire Microsoft Office 2004 which comes with Word, PowerPoint, Entourage, Excel and MSN messenger. I use Word for word processing but now use Apples Keynote instead of Power Point which is gorgeous and will allow you to save your work as PowerPoints or export to Flash as well. Keynote is part of iWork which has Apples new word processor...Pages which I have not played with a lot but has lots of really beautiful templates to work with. I'd recommend Photoshop Elements as it seems to have about 95% of the full Photoshop at about 1/10 of the price. I use Apple mail but if you get MS OFFICE then Entourage comes with that and its a decent email, calendar, organizer program in and of itself.

Truth be told....you could probably get by without buying anything new but whats the fun in that?

At MacZealots, we wrote two articles answering your exact question (along with the millions of other switchers seeking the same advice):

From Windows To OS X: The Applications
http://maczealots.com/articles/applications/

Switching to a Mac: What you need to know, and why
http://maczealots.com/articles/switch/

I've recently moved my digital life completely to macs. I have been using a Dual G5 PowerMac for over a year now. My school issues Dells to everyone. Last week I bought a PowerBook G4. I'M FREE!

Anyway, I had been using Office on my PowerMac for around a year to do papers and such, and I decided to buy iWork. I wasn't disappointed. First thing you need to realize is, its not Word and Powerpoint. Once you get the hang of them though (remember its apple so its not hard) they really do work much better. Pages can import and export from Word and Powerpoint documents

Development, I use everything from XCode, jEdit, Eclipse to the internal editors (vim) and compilers.

Apps:
CoconutBattery
Acquisition
DTV
DeliciousLibrary
Romeo (great if you have a bluetooth phone)
SSHKeychain (i'm lazy and all that password typing is irritating!)
Transmit
Saft

Some of those are free, some aren't, but the ones I've found that cost something are well worth it. Have fun! any questions, feel free to email me!

I switched (back) to the Mac from Windows about a year ago. Here are a few of my preferences:

Carbon Copy Cloner (backup)
NetNewsWire 2.0 (feed reader)
Adium (multi-protocol IM client)
Ecto (blogging client)
Quicksilver (utility for keyboard control of your Mac)
AlmostVPN (utility for tunneling your Internet traffic over SSH)
TextWrangler (text editor)
Disk Inventory X (utility for graphical display of disk usage)

I use the iLife apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand) and love them. I think the I use MS Office 2004 and barely tolerate it. By the way, I think GarageBand 2005 has a musical notes view.

And I expect you've seen Pito's "Switcher's Log" posts, but if not, here you go.

For IM, I second the AdiumX recommendation. Much more powerful and flexible than iChat. As far as IRC, I found a little program called "Conversation" which is a good, basic IRC client. http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/

I apologize that this doesn't address your exact question but not to long ago there was a meme going around listing peoples 10 favorite Mac apps (excluding the included software of course).

I posted mine on my own site http://stationa.net/?p=25

You will find a link to some other peoples entries there as well.

While not specific to your request I hope this helps. Good luck with the Mac.

Needs:
(PowerPoint & Word) you need MS Office. It's a bummer, but if you're going to work with others then Office is just the easiest way to do it. I love Keynote and Pages and they blow the doors off of Office, but I still use Word and Powerpoint just cuz...

Graphics Program:
Pick up the Macromedia Studio 8 and Adobe's CS 2. It's a lot of money, but you'll have way more tools for images and web features than you'll ever know what to do with.

HTML Editor:
Dreamweaver comes with Studio 8 listed above. It's really slow, but it's the best WYSIWYG editor I've seen. Try out RapidWeaver as well just because it's a neat program.

Email client:
If your corporate network is running Exchange then use Entourage (comes with MS Office). It's a pain to get setup, but once it's up and working then you have all the functions (email, calendar, scheduling, directory) that you had using Outlook. If you aren't burdened with an Exchange network that you have to communicate then iCal, Mail.app, and Address Book, which come with OS X, are your new best friends. They all integrate with each other and they are wonderful.

Browser:
I used to love Camino from the mozilla.org project. Liked Firebird, but when it gets right down to it I use Safari for 90% of my browsing needs. One thing to remember is that some sites say they aren't compatible with Macintosh. Most of them are lying and Safari will work just fine.

Programming environment:
You are looking at the programming platform to beat all others. Go to Apple's website and download the latest version of XCode Tools from the developer section (you have to register, but it's free).

Emulator Software:
Probably out there, but don't bother. You bought a great machine with great software available. Use it as itself and don't waste your time trying to make it into something it isn't. Just leads to resentment of your own machine. Virtual PC is great and it comes bundled with MS Office if you get the pro version, but you shouldn't need it.

Games:
Versiontracker.com, downloads.com, games.yahoo.com, gonna have to find what you like.

Music Editor:
Lots of options. Start with GarageBand (comes with the OS). It's great if you pick up a $99 usb midi keyboard.

Hardware:
Two button mouse (or preferrably a Kensington Trackball)
Monitor and Keyboard for when you want to plug in at home or at the office.

Utilities and Misc:
macosxhints.com for all your terminal, unix, applescript hints.
mac-windows.com for all your get my Mac working in a windows world help
deal-mac.com for your purchasing needs
dealram.com for additional memory

That should get you started :)

Ciao,
Troy

For a (cheap) music editor, you might want to look at Melody Assistant. It's about $20 if I recall. You can also download a fully functioning demo, but it puts a huge "watermark" on anything you print. My wife uses it more than me and she tells me that it does a pretty good job for the price.

You didn't ask for this, but do yourself a favour and download Quicksilver, especially if you're a keyboard shortcut kind of guy. It's an app launcher and so much more.

You said you use PowerPoints animations pretty heavily. If you get Apple's keynote software you will be blown away by how much more professional and clean it is compared to Powerpoint.

I use Keynote every week. Besides the animations being far superior to PP I find it much more simpler and faster to use. Everything is centered around drag and drop (like most Mac apps)

Keynote can read PP files and export to a PP file.

It comes packaged (titled iWork) with Apple's word processor Pages for only like $80 bucks. Pages will also open and export Word documents.

To me iWork is a steal compared to purchasing Office.

Trust me you'll love it!

Well, I tried to add a comment with a couple of links that I thought were particularly appropriate, but it only contained the links and either you didn't think they were funny or the comment system didn't like them so let me just summarize...

first, there are no ruggedized PowerBooks anymore... they used to be tested by being driven on by a caterpillar tractor and then dropped down a mineshaft, etc and they kept on ticking. But design improvements have driven the ruggeditity right out of them.

So what you'll really need is a rosin bag. By warming up your powerpoints using a rosin bag you will be less likely to drop the unit.

I crack myself up.

although I have no personal experience, I hear people who like vb'ish dev env's enjoy real basic. and it's cross platform.

http://realbasic.com

minuteur
is an example of what you can do with it (a nice looking app). I had no idea it wasn't written in cocoa until I saw the web page with the realbasic tag on it.

PowerPoint: do try Keynote. It has lots of animation features, and a very nice diagram drawing tool built in that just feels good. It was built to do Steve Jobs' presentations, which means that there is an implied assumption that you have a second computer to show webpages and demos in, but otherwise it is nice. Buy iWork and give it a go.
Raster editing, Photoshop. Vectors, try Keynote and OmniGraffle (which I think is bundled, at least in a demo version) for diagrams.
HTML - I use SubEthaEdit, but I write HTML by hand. CSSEdit is a great tool fro styling. Botha re cheap and have free demo modes. SubEthaEdit is the collaborative editor you have seen Mac folk showing off at conferences.
I find OS X Mail useful.
Browser: Safari is nice; Firefox is handy too; or give Flock a go for it's blogging features (it's Firefox plus)
Programming environment: Macs come with loads of them - XCode is the thing you install; it's either on one of the disks that comes with it or a big download. Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, ObjectiveC all included. If you like easy GUI-building, InterfaceBuilder is nice, and ObjectiveC isn't too hard.
RealBasic may run your VB stuff, but it may be worth the effort of finding others' tools that do what you want too - lots of tool hackers on the Mac.
GarageBand has sample and Midi modes. Try it, you may like it. My son got a USB Midi keyboard for $49 that lets him play straight into Garageband.
IRC: I use Snak, but that's 'cos I have been for 11 years. There are lots of others, Colloquy, XChat Aqua etc.
iChat is nice for AIM, but also for the AV features, which integrate slickly. Skype works fine too, and sometimes gets through when iChat can't. Check the prefs in iChat to turn off speechbubble mode and show names instead of pictures.
emacs is included; for text editing I use SubEthaEdit normally (nice code highlighting and HTML preview; can share editing easily) BBEdit is the serious text editor, and has lots of other nice features (integrated multi-file difference tracking and merging; HTML templates and validation; good multi-directory search)
Ecto and SuperDuper for blogging and backup respectively. NetNewsWire for feed reading. Spike as a multi-clipboard manager. 1001 for tracking people's flickr streams.
Do get as much RAM as you can.
There are loads of flexible note-taking and organising things like DEVONThink and VoodooPad and Notational Velocity and FreeMind.
As the Mac has Apache and so on built in, you can readily install blogging and wiki software locally, so you can keep personal notes that way with your blogging and wiki tools. When the Mac is on your home network, the PCs could see them too.

KEYNOTE is brilliant and technically, it's compatible with Powerpoint but if you need collaborative files, you have to stick with PP but if all you need is a leave behind - slide show or otherwise, try KEYNOTE and export the file as a self player, PDF, etc ...

You get ENTOURAGE as part of the MS Office package which I prefer over T-BIRD and Apple's MAIL but that's your call - ultimately they're about the same (I prefer ENTOURAGE because it will scoop up mail from 3 of my 6 mail accounts versus the other two whch insists on sweeping up EVERY account in accounts - personal preference on my part).

You can do rudimentary photo editing editing in iPHOTO - if you know your way around unix, you can download GIMP. Technically, you don't have to be a unix whiz but I wouldn't recommend it for very casual mac users.

There are free shareware downloads for 90% of other graphics needs like re-sizing jpegs, etc ... but if you want to do serious image manipulation, you will need ELEMENTS or PHOTOSHOP.

HTML editor - there are lots of low level WSYIWYG editors but nothing great - you can download demos to test out. Serious web designers use BBedit for htmling. Technically, MOzilla (not Firefox) has a web creator but it creates wonky files. Dreamweaver is of course available on the Mac - not sure if you sidegrade.

EMULATOR - Pretty much Virtual PC is it but with the Intel Macs probably coming out in January - it's a pretty big investment and what's coming is ahrd to say so if you can avoid it commiting to an emualtor, wait and do so.

GAMES - you get a couple free with mac - hundreds/thousands to Dl at macupdate.com, versiontracker.com & macgamer.com. Of course, the quasi legal old VG emulator macmame is brilliant .,.

MUSIC - you get the freakin' brilliant GARAGEBAND INCLUDED! that should satisfy your needs. I just fool around with it so I cannot be sure what you can do about notes & notation.

You will be impressed by the seamlessness of lots of apps - from widgets to expose to the general look & feel.

It's the difference between a rental car and a BMW. Both have 4 wheels and both will get you there but one is so much better :-)

HARDWARE - if you travel a lot, there are some airport (wireless) gadgets to consider that make life useful - read through MOBILE magazine's website.

As for software, here's a basic list of apps:
http://homepage.mac.com/metroxing/mac.html#Software

(since you get ilife and unix, you get a lot of ground covered)

here's a good shareware starter list:
http://homepage.mac.com/metroxing/macstart.html#Shareware

have fun - good luck!

JB

If you do more vector based diagrams that 'vector art' then I would strongly recommend you checkout OmniGraffle. Its probably one of the coolest OSX applications out there (compared to its Windows equivalents). There is a free trial version available at:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/

Even further out of left field and falling right into the fun basket is Comic Life. You really have to try that (free trial version) as explaining what it does is just way too hard but think iLife meets comic strip and you are close:
http://plasq.com/

I would stick with PowerPoint. Its graphics and backgrounds are tad bit better with Office 2004 and it plays very nice with Windows and Office 2003.

I love Keynote and it looks awesome, but it became too much of a hassle to export out of Keynote for anyone else to view your presentations.

Office is relatively cheap, so I would just stick with it. One more thing- many vendors will allow you to send in your discs for Mac versions of their products (Adobe is one who does this). You should try that before you buy any other packages.

Good luck!

dude, for utilities, they dont get any better then Cocktail. It unlocks a lot of hidden featuers in OS, plus allows better control of OS's built-in maintenance scripts.
I recomend Keynote for presentations, and Im pretty certain Pages will handle Word docs ok, too.

You didnt mention this one, but for RSS Feeds and Podcasts, it doesnt get any better than Newsfire... its just an awesome, gorgeous app, that works so smoothly it'l blow your mind.

A couple of nice, free games are available in widget form from VanillaSoap.com. My favorite is Snake.

Oh and, for graphics editing, obviously Adobe CS2 is the best choice, but you can get the open source Gimp (or alternatively GimpSHOP which apes the photoshop interface)

Good luck!
If you need any help setting up your Mac, check out website, MacTutorials.blogspot.com! It's a beginners guide to OS X and third party apps

For web software try Rapidweaver 3.2 - http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/. It may be a theme-based website creator, but it's easily adaptable via CSS and HTML, does blogging very well [along with podcasting!], and is only $34.95!

Needs:
The entire Microsoft Office Suite, Dreamweaver, and Firefox are all available for Mac. For your e-mail, the included program "Mail" is wonderful, but Thunderbird is free, too, so no harm in trying both out.
The Safari web browser is very nice, though, and I'd recommend giving it, say, a week-long test drive before jumping onto Firefox again.
As for graphics applications, a myriad of Adobe products is available for Mac.

Wants:
Unfortunately, I can't be of much help in this area.

Fun:
Oh, there's plenty in this area. Head over to the downloads section of the Apple site and narrow down the search criteria to "Freeware" for a big list of time-wasters.
For music editing, toying around with Garageband (which is included with the system) is fun, but if you want to get deeper into it, go for Logic Express. I'd recommend heading down to the site and comparing it with its more advanced (and more expensive) counterpart, Logic Pro. Wonderful programs.

Hardware:
An Airport card is essential for any Apple laptop. An external hard drive is also handy for when you want to take on larger projects. I recommend the LaCie lineup.

Misc.:
Widgets. Lots and lots of widgets. There are literally thousands of them out there and they're far more useful than they first seem. Having a calculator available at the press of a button is rather elementary, but what about having a customizable list of stock quotes? Or a translator?
One of my personal favorites is the Gas widget, which only requires a zip code to display the gas prices in the area, complete with the addresses of each station and what brand they are.

I haven't listed URLs with most of these because they're really easy to find, but I'll post a link to this one: VLC.
This is the singular most useful media player I've ever seen. It plays nearly any video file you throw at it. The only videos I've seen it not play are RealMedia files and the more recent Windows Media files, which require the WMV3. I just play them in their respective native applications, though, so no big deal.
VLC is essential because it plays .avi files. It's amazing because it plays all kind of other obscure files as well, such as .mkv files or .ogg files.

Another useful little app is EasyWMA. It doesn't do much, but it converts WMA files to MP3s, which is something I'd been hunting for for ages before I finally found this.

Fetch Art is a neat little script that fetches the artwork for your songs in iTunes. Select the songs, run the script through a pulldown menu, and it looks up the album art on Amazon and downloads it for you, then adds it to the songs with another click.

Hope this helps a bit!
Mohammad

PowerPoint: Keynote roxors PowerPoint but the one reason to stick with PowerPoint is if you're moving your presentations over to a PC. You should use PP in that case. On the other hand, if you plan on giving presentations off of you new PB then stick with Keynote. It's really awesome. You'll get a 30 day trial of it with your new system probably so check it out. It's easy to use and makes PP look like crap.

Word: There's no real substitute for Word I'm sad to say, though the Mac version is fairly good. My advice for PP & Word: buy the Student Teacher Edition of Office which you can get for less that $150. It's much less than a full version of just Word or PP and it comes with 3 serial numbers. No ID needed at the Apple Store for this one, and hey why give extra money to a company that breaks the law?

Raster Editing: Graphic Converter should come with your computer. It does basic editing. If you're looking for free you might try GIMP which you can get compiled for Mac OS X's X11 environment. A step up would be Photoshop Elements (make sure to get version 3 which should be out soon if not already).

HTML Editing: If you already know Dreamweaver on the PC, there's no reason not to stick with it on the Mac.

Email: I'd suggest the built in Mail over Thunderbird which lacks polish on the Mac in my opinion but either would work. Mail is nice because it integrate with Spotlight searching.

Browser: Safari is my browser of choice (that's the one that's made by Apple), but I also use Firefox since some sites seem to work better with it. Use whatever suits you best or both.

Programing: Apple makes a (free) Programming Environment called Xcode that does C/C++ Java and more but if you're a basic programmer it might be a bit complex for you. For my basic Java stuff I use an free environment called BlueJ . It's designed for learning so it's easy to use.

Emulation: I don't know of anything that really works reliably other than Microsoft's VirtualPC. If you do use it have LOTs of RAM.

Games: I'm not sure what kind of games you like but one of my all time favorite games that is approachable to just about everyone is Escape Velocity. It's a Shareware game space privatizing game that's had several iterations (the latest being Nova). At $30 it won't break the bank. For lots more Mac game information check out Inside Mac Games.

Hardware: Umm, got an iPod? Maybe a real mouse (with a scroll wheel) if you're not a trackpad person (like me). Don't get the Mighty Mouse.

Utilities: Get an RSS reader! I like NetNewsWire or NewsFire. VLC for playing videos that don't play in QuickTime (.avi files). FTP? Cyberduck (donateware) or Transmit (shareware). Text editing? SubEthaEdit or TextWrangler (both free).

All the software I've mentioned should be easily locatable by searching on MacUpdate.com or VersionTracker.com (software databases).

Quicksilver (blacktree.com) is the hands-down, best app you can try out. It'll have you wishing you were using your powerbook ALL the time. Try it out to see what it's all about.

here's a list of great apps to start out with. covers a lot of ground.
http://www.theappleblog.com/2005/01/28/your-favorite-apps-for-os-x/

enjoy the new notebook!

Helle Mr. David:

My suggestion is to give Keynote a try. The precentation tools can make for not just a cleaner presentation but you can easily add fun aspects. For addtional themes, check out KeynotePro.com. The european magazine iCreate has some good tutorials.

Also, Keynote documents can be exported as QuickTime movies, Powerpoint, and PDF to name a few.

Good luck and Enjoy,

rd

Hey there

Congrats on switiching. you may want to check out this website: www.opensourcemac.org before forking out more money. I haven't bought any programs for my mac, other than upgrades to existing ones, because I got everything I needed for free :) You may still want Keynote in place of powerpoint as it's excellent. You can of course use Firefox on the mac and Thunderbird, although the built-in mail.app is good.

I see Quicksilver has been mentioned twice already, but it deserves another. Without a doubt, the most useful app on my computer (well, besides the apps I actually work in). A lot of people (including myself) dismiss it at first because they don't "get it." But take some time to get your head wrapped around it and you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

David,

For vector editing, Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/download.php

For raster - the Gimp: http://gimp.org/

HTML editing, NVU (http://nvu.com/)

Presuming you need file compatibilty, just get Office for OS X. Yes, there are alternatives, but most of them aren't worth the hassle. I love Keynote, but if you need to give a PPT to the orgnizer so they can load it on the machine at the presenter's podium... you don't want to be messing with compatibility issues.

I like Proteus for IM. Firefox and Thunderbird work fine on OS X...

David,

Congratulations on purchasing your first Mac. I have to tell you that about 9 months ago I was in your position, but found everything I needed and more in less than the time it takes to install Windows and make it secure (well, as secure as possible). Anyway, to answer your question I will describe my choice of applications.

For presentations, there is nothing better on the Mac than Keynote. Bundled with Pages in the iWork suite, Keynote is the same presentation software Apple CEO Steve Jobs uses during major Apple events such as Macworld Expo. Being a user of Powerpoint on PC and having more advanced knowledge of Powerpoint's abiltiies, it took some time to become accustomed to Keynote's look and feel. Perhaps the reason was the intuitive user interface that makes everything accessible with only a few clicks of the mouse. Compared to Powerpoint, I found that it is quicker to throw together presentations in Keynote because one is not always digging through extensive contextual menus and varying settings in order to accomplish what they have set out to do. Not to mention that the overall appearance of presentations is stunning. Every time in the past six months when I have presented using Keynote, I am always asked how I make my presentations. However, when it comes down to cross-platform compatibility, Keynote is still lacking. Although it includes the ability to export to Powerpoint, presentations will lose Keynote-specific aspects such as animations and some styling.

For word processing, there are many applications that offer almost the same features, but there really is nothing that can compete head-on with Microsoft Word. Pages, part of iWork, is Apple's latest attempt at a word processor and a big step up from AppleWorks. However, if you are used to Word on PC, there isn't much difference with the Mac version. In fact, the floating palettes make it easier to apply styles, change fonts, and more.

For graphics, I would suggest either Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. If you are working more with vecotr graphics, Illustrator is king. Photoshop is the best when it comes to all-round graphics editing, whether it be for print, web, etc.

When it comes to HTML editors, I haven't found anything I like better than Macromedia Dreamweaver. Arguably the most advanced and full-fledged HTML editor available, Dreamweaver makes creating visually appealing and fully-functional Web pages a breeze.

Garageband, most likely included with your Powerbook in the iLife suite, is the best audio editor for your needs. Powerful enough to record up to 8 tracks simultaniously, yet easy to learn and use.

And for email and browsing, the built-in Mail and Safari are great programs and offer numerous features, but if you are accustomed to Firefox and enjoy its browsing experience, by all means use Firefox. I personally alternate between Camino, a browser made specifically for the Mac by Mozilla, and Safari. I cannot comment on various mail applications, as I only use Mail and Microsoft Entourage.

With all that said, one of the best things to do is bookmark a Mac-based news site that offers information on various applications, and helps make Mac life even better than it already is. Be sure to check out The Unofficial Apple Weblog, a great Mac blog that I am almost always reading. In addition, you may want to join some Mac usergroups online, where you can get tips for working in various programs, help if you are experiencing problems, and a lot more.

Here's what I picked up when I first got my PowerBook almost two years ago:

Hardware:
Microsoft IntelliMouse, because more buttons=more fun! I tried the one button, cmd+click thing for a while, but I really missed the scroll wheel and the right click action. If you're not going to be doing any heavy gaming, a Mighty Mouse might suit you just fine, but the Microsoft mice are cheaper as far as I know.

iPod. Because, why not?

Software:
iWork 05. That's Apple's office suite. It's got Pages (Apple's version of Word) and Keynote, which has been mentioned before. If you really need Office compatibility you may as well get Office 2004. Funny thing is, the Mac version has more features than the Windows version...

Graphics I'm not too sure what else is out there, I grabbed Photoshop and later got the whole Creative Suite 2.

HTML I use Dreamweaver, haven't tried GoLive yet.

For music editing, GarageBand might do the trick (I've never used it). When I got my PB it had Panther which included GarageBand, not sure if they're still doing that in Tiger (though I don't know why they wouldn't).

For programming, Apple ships their professional-level IDE package, XCode with Tiger. It does freakin everything (well except maybe for VB) Cocoa, Carbon, Java, C, I think it even makes coffee too. I started using it for my Java class, and when I say professional level I mean it, it kinda scared me the first time out. But dude, it was free.

Safari is a great browser, I personally prefer it over FireFox. Opera is nice too, and it's free. Mail is a nice email client, though if you get Office it comes with Entourage, it's up to you really.

Don't worry about antivirus packages or any of that stuff. You should be fine by virtue of owning a Mac. One untility you should get is Cocktail (www.macosxcocktail.com) which is great for running tasks like repairing permissions and clearing caches automatically.

And finally for games....umm...it comes with Chess. There's a nice little Risk (I think it's Risk) game out called Lux. It costs like $10 I think. I picked up Halo, Age of Mythology, and Unreal Tournament 2004 (but those were kinda pricey). If you were a fan of console gaming ala SNES or Nintendo there are plenty of ROMS and emulators out there, SNES9x is my favorite. Still not sure if those are honest to God legal, but recent changes to the DMCA might mean they are (as a console more than 10 years old can be considered "obsolete" by any standard really).

So that should about do it, sorry for being so long winded. Welcome to Macintosh :)

I'm thinking it's a cult.

One bit of advice for new Mac fans: bookmark Versiontracker.com, which lets you watch all new commercial, shareware and freeware programs released. Very handy tool.

For email, Mail is probably the best bet going forward. It's very nice, not perfect, but since it's part of the OS you're guaranteed to not have any update delays, etc. when Intel arrives.

For graphics, most apps are on the Mac as well. I am a Photoshopper myself, couldn't start my day without it.

Games, I use Macmame and my 5+ gigs of classic games regularly. Nearly any commercial game worth its salt makes it to the Mac within a year, so you've got good games to choose from out there in the ether. Google up the Pop Cap games if you don't know them, the Mac versions are excellent.

Please excuse a shameless plug for my own Mac Tips website:

http://www.andrewburke.orcon.net.nz/mac/index.htm

There are about 35 mini-reviews of must-have apps for the Mac.

Andrew

Download Xcode and try writing a Cocoa app. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to create graphical user interfaces with it. Don't get hung up on Objective-C and the whole square brackets thing--it's far simpler and more elegant than C++, and if you can handle C, you're well on your way to understanding it.

music: consider Melody assistant, an unrestricted shareware that has a path to a more ambitious product if needed: http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/melody.htm

presentations: the most powerpoint-compatible as of now (and this evolves) is Keynotes, and as such it also really is worth

word: depending on your mood, you may select Pages, the free and easy-to-install NeoOffice (look is closer to word's, which you may consider good or bad :-)

I'd suggest exploring OSXApps, http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/ a site that'll allow you to browse almost all mac applications with really many criteria (for instance: only open-source word processors, only shareware graphic editors, etc.) -this allows to converge rapidly while still discovering many alternatives

FWIW, I discovered your question on TUAW

One of many advantages of using OS X is availability of open-source software,
have a look here:
http://opensourcemac.org/
http://freemacware.com/

Powerpoint and Word compatible word processor: OpenOffice.org, or you can of course buy Microsoft Office or Keynote.

Graphics program: The GIMP, Seashore

HTML editor: Nvu

Browser: Stick with Firefox. Safari and Camino are also derived from the same source code.

Programming environment: What about learning Automator, AppleScript or Python?

Games: The tilt controlled Bubblegym?
http://www.balooba.se/baloobasoftware/

Music editor: Audacity

Music: enough GarageBand recommendations already. Dave is not asking about GarageBand. What Dave is asking about, GarageBand does not do.

But one of these will. None of them are actually free, except in highly limited versions - which is probably why I never got round to downloading any of them myself - but a couple are pretty cheap.

Encore: http://www.gvox.com/store/products_ENC.htm
Finale: http://www.finalemusic.com/finale/product-comparison.htm
GenieSoft: http://www.geniesoft.com/
Nightingale: http://www.ngale.com/index_041.html

I recently updated my Mac OS X recommended software page. It should get you going, and recommend some things you don't even know you need:

http://asteroid.divnull.com/?p=35

As for your specific request:

Powerpoint: The Office X version of this is decent. Keynote is a better product, though.

Word-compatible word processor: Again, the Office X version is good (better than the Win32 version, IMO). I use Nisus Writer, though.

Graphics program. Vector and raster editing: I use Illustrator for vector and Photoshop for raster. The links in the opening paragraphs of my recommendation page should link you to cheaper alternatives, but I haven't found any that are better than the big guns.

HTML editor. TextMate (see the entry for it on my recommendation page for some alternatives)

Email client. Mail does all I need it to.

Browser. My recommendation is Camino, a native Mac app built around the Firefox code. The Mac version of Firefox is also good. Camino prints better, though.

Programming environment. No VB on mac, fortunately. Since you like "forms/UI", you might try Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.com/). Tiger comes with a versio of it already installed.

Emulator software? Virtual PC still rules. I've used some of the others, but they are not ready yet.

Games. Anything from Ambrosia (see my recommendation page).

Music editor. Not sure on this one.

Hardware: A second AC adaptor.

Utilities and misc.: See my recommendation page.

David referred to my email, so going on the record:

Before you buy Powerpoint, at least give Keynote, the Apple prez software (which I think will come on your system as a demo) a try.

Programming: The XCode tools that ship in OS X (you'll get a bunch of discs, it's on those) is an excellent IDE and supports lots of different languages.

Emulator: Virtual PC is pretty much the only emulator worth salt, but it's not worth it's own salt--the upside is that if you get PowerPoint as part of Office for Mac 2004, you get Virtual PC as part of the package (comes to about $150 less than buying separately with tax)

Gimp and several good open source graphics and image editing programs run on OSX. (I use Photoshop)

Mail client: Apple Mail is good, the integration with Spotlight makes it better than it was. Still no *great* client.

Browser: You'll be very fond of Firefox on the Mac, too

GarageBand, which will come on the system, will let you futz with music.

Everything else, except IRC, comes in the system. I use X-Chat Aqua for IRC, but there are a number of alternative favorites out there.

Buy an extra battery, that's the essential hardware upgrade.

A few neat applications I never want to miss again: BBedit, Synergy (for iTunes), Quicksilver (the better Spotlight), VLC (movie player), MPlayer for OSX (handy with some crappy codecs, VLC does not want to handle that well...), Cyberduck ((s)FTP Client), Delicious Library (a virtual DVD and book shelf), Firefox (of course), ScummVM (to play your old Lucasgames adventures) and that should be all apps I use that don't come with the Mac already.

Firefox - I started using it on my mac at home and pc at work so I could easily switch machines with out having to reformat my brain. It works great on both machines.

Music editor - Garageband came free with my machine. If you are lucky enough to get it with yours it is a lot of fun.

Other - Quicksilver. If you have to switch back to PC very often you might hate this one because there is nothing like it on the PC.

Programming - I am moving most of my stuff to the web, so I can go cross platform. You could go with host that supports .Net or PHP is not that difficult.

hardware - not much really, other than a good laptop case, ideally sized specifically for the Powerbook (easy to find). Marware's "CEO" line is what I went to.

software - free
* Quicksilver - a program that is hard to describe. To begin with it is a program launcher; OS X has no WIN-R equivalent. Spotlight (CMD-SPACE) is convenient for finding documents, but is not low-weight enough for app launching. QS is more than this though. Really, just check out its website: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
* Adium if you want AIM/Gtalk/MSN/Yahoo IM (the built-in iChat is better for local-network "Bonjour", and can do AIM and Jabber as well.) I personally have iChat on for Bonjour only and use Adium for everything else
* iStumbler - lots more information about wireless networks your laptop "sees" than the Airport interface provides.

Software - not free
* NetNewsWire - _the_ RSS aggregator. There is a free "light" version but the full version is worth it!
* OmniOutliner - yes, its just an outlining app, but its replaced TextEdit for me, for all those small snippits of text one generates. Structured documents are so much better than unstructured ones...
* OmniGraffle - if you need an MS Visio replacement
* BBEdit and TextWrangler are ok, but personally I recommend TextMate. Bare Bones (the company that makes the first two) has gotten a bit complacent...

-RS

I didn't see the added requests:

help forum : http://forums.macrumors.com/

IRC: http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/
(Switch to the single window interface, is my suggestion.)

I didn't see the added requests:

help forum : http://forums.macrumors.com/

IRC: http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/
(Switch to the single window interface, is my suggestion.)

I'd also recommend getting a .Mac account; I admittedly have more than one Mac, so its extra useful.

Could you expand a little on your raster graphics editing needs? There is no real replacement for Paint Shop Pro on the Mac. PSP's forte is internet imagery, which also happens to be one of Photoshop's weak points.

Seashore, by the way, is not a GIMP wrapper, it is a completely independent program that happens to be using some components and protocols from the GIMP.

David,

Congratulations!

Mellel for word processing! For writing it can't be beat ... kind of word compatible too, might be word compatible enough. This will always be a question of how many tables/images you use.

Sloppydisk's Descender is a great Tetris knockoff
Triptych is a very good twisted Tetris game.

iChat is a graceful chat client

Xylescope is a great CSS tool if you do any CSS.

Many great laptop cases are made for macintosh computers. Have fun choosing.

I have a recently updated list of the Mac essential software that I use posted at:

http://www.sitgame.com

Apple's keynote is a good program too - much snazzier than Powerpoint - though truth be told, I use both.