Laptop update!

[annathepiper]

I have now received the email from Apple saying that my MacBook is on the way. According to the mail, it'll probably get here on Friday!

This means that y'all have until then to get me your votes if you haven't voted already on what I should name the machine! So far, 'Winnowill' is well and thoroughly in the lead. Browncoats, are you going to take that lying down? What would Mal say? ;)

Meanwhile, I have begun composing a to-do list of stuff that I do on the computer in general and what I'll need to install on the Mac to take care of the same functionality there. Input from Mac users is welcome on any blanks I need to fill in!

• Writing: This is obviously the most important thing I need to do on the box. The immediate solution for this will be OpenOffice. I will also consider MacOffice and Pages if anyone wants to advocate me some reasons why I should plunk down monies for either of those.
  
  
• Web browsing: Safari of course will already be on the box. I'll also be installing Firefox just because I'm used to it and will probably default to using it. Most likely I will also install Netscape and Opera on the off-chance that I might need them for any work-related testing purposes. It doesn't happen often, but it does occasionally happen!
  
  
• Email: solarbird uses the default Mac mail client. However, it's looking fairly likely that I'll need to install Entourage. Yes, anti-fans of Microsoft, I know this means installing a Microsoft product on the box. However, so far that's the front-runner solution because of my next major need, which is--
  
  
• Ability to sync with my handheld: There is software that will allow my current handheld computer, the iPaq, to sync with OS X. However, it seems to expect Entourage as a mail client. The software in question is "The Missing Sync", and I have the impression that this is the most popular solution for this very problem. If anyone has any clever recommendations that might allow me to use alternative mail clients (e.g., the default Mac client or maybe Thunderbird), I am open to suggestions. There's also something called PocketMac, I know.
  
  (And yes, I know the obvious Mac-geek solution here would be 'ditch the handheld and get an iPhone'. ;) That is not yet an option. For one thing, it'll take a while to save up again so I can get an iPhone. For another, the iPhone's lack of a text editor means it's still a bit clunky for purposes of writing, so it's not yet my ideal handheld device. I am definitely paying attention to see whether this changes some time in the near future.)
  
  
• Scheduling stuff: I expect that the correct answer to this is iCal. ^_^
  
  
• Graphics editing: Right now I have an old version of Paint Shop Pro on the PC laptop. In the past I have used this for making basic graphics for my web page; more recently, I have used it for making icons. ^_^ So I need a good Mac-side equivalent; Photoshop is way too powerful for my needs. spazzkat has discovered Pixelmator, reviewed here.
  
  
• Checkbook balancing: Quicken seems to be the obvious solution here, but if anybody has any other ideas, sing out!
  
  
• IM client: I'm totally up in the air on this. My PC-side client is Trillian, which I have historically liked except for the part where it takes approximately six years to load every time I reboot the machine. Suggestions welcome.
  
  
• LJ client: Anyone have suggestions besides Xjournal? I loves me some Semagic, and am sad it has no Mac version.
  
  
• LJ archiving tool: How about something for archiving LJ entries?
  

I think that's everything, aside from "well duh" stuff like putting Nethack on the box, which just stands to reason. ^_^ Thanks in advance for any help, folks!

Comments

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

I use Adium for chat; it's treated me well. As for an LJ client, I use iJournal, since XJournal does not seem to get along well with Intel Macs; it crashed on me all the time at login.

Pages works pretty well; I don't have the most recent upgrade, which I'd like to see, partially because there's a very annoying quirk with large files -- occasionally, even if you're typing accurately, apostrophes will show up at the wrong spot in a word. I'm hoping they've fixed this. ;) Office is... well, Office. Tip one: Office 2008 comes out in very short order, so if you're interested, either wait a few weeks or buy it now and use the $6.99 upgrade offer. Tip two: the academic version is a whooooole lot cheaper (around $150, as I recall) and everyone sells it. Including catalogs. And when I bought mine, even though I did happen to be legit, no one checked my credentials. Wink, nudge.

[annathepiper]

solarbird, being an ex-Microsoftie, can actually get software cheap at the company store--so if desired, I can go get MacOffice for not-half-bad prices. But I don't know yet if I want to commit to MacOffice. I may wait until there are reviews. (Though if I have to get Entourage anyway to make my email sync up between the Mac and my handheld, I may just ctrl-alt-fuckit and get MacOffice anyway. I'd certainly use both Word and Excel.)

Dara says she's using Adium now and finds it suitably groovy, so perhaps I'll install that. :)

Noted re: iJournal, I'll check that out! Thanks all around!

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

I've had my Macbook since October, here's my thoughts:

* I tried openoffice, but it was very slow, and kind of ugly, on the Mac. Pages and Office both came with a free trial already installed. I liked both of them, and iWork is half the price of Office, and seems to be able to import and export Office format without trouble. A lot of my job is writing documents, so I plunked down for Pages and am using it without my coworkers noticing in their Wordland. Since you can try them all, though, let that guide you!

* I'm too addicted to some Firefox extensions, particularly ones that make tabbed browsing nicer, to give it up. Safari isn't bad, but FF is so great I still use it. Can barely notice the difference from a PC, which is a good thing.

* I like the default Mac client, but I don't have to sync to Exchange. The entourage plan is the right one for that. I don't have a handheld, can't help you there.

* iCal is pretty good, meets my needs as a personal calendar just fine.

* I haven't tried it for Mac, but Gimp is an opensource graphics program that's very mature. I've used it a tiny bit on linux and windows, so give it a look? It's a photoshop-esque product.

* Quicken exists for the Mac, as well as several other Mac-native products. I read some reviews, though, and the general consensus is that the best product is Quicken for Windows running under Parallels. :-/ There's a lot of features stripped out of the Mac version. Probably fine for simple users, though.

* Which reminds me that I want to play around with Parallels, which lets you run windows binaries in an emulated mode alongside native mac apps. Good idea, and people say it's good, so nice to know it exists. :-)

* Mac ships with iChat, which works pretty well. I've hooked it up to google's gchat successfully. I don't know if it has the breadth you need, though, I'm not a big IMer.

* I haven't felt the need to add a ton of software. Firefox (though Safari'd be fine if I weren't so used to FF), Pages, a few games, Microsoft's Remote Desktop tool (so I can connect to my work PC in a window - works great!), that's about it. (And you can totally compile nethack, I'm sure. I'm running angband. And compiled tf with no issues.) It ships with a much more complete solution than Windows.

* I really love Time Machine, so recommend an external USB drive as an add-on for Super Easy Backups. Basically plug it in, and the Mac will ask you if you want to use the drive for backups. Say yes. Then, whenever it happens to be plugged in, it will do its thing in the background from time to time. Lovely! I always meant to back up PCs, but rarely did more than once a year or so.

[solarbird]

I hate the gimp. h8 h8 h8.

[annathepiper]

Dara has mentioned that I'll get demo versions of stuff on the system, yeah, so I'll poke at Pages and MacOffice both just for giggles. We'll see if either of them click with me.

I use Firefox and Safari on the Mac regularly at work for testing purposes, so I've had exposure to both browsers on that platform--but yeah, I still tend to default to Firefox for my own personal use. Unless Safari 3.0 proves to be super-cool (and so far I haven't noticed much difference playing with it at work), I'll probably stick with Firefox. But I'll need both of them available anyway. :)

Duly noted re: Gimp. :)

Hrmm, duly noted about Quicken, too. If there's a demo version on the box I'll play with that; it may be that the Mac version will be sufficient for my purposes. There are a ton of features in Money that I don't bother with using; I just need it to balance my checkbook, really.

I'm aware of Parallels, yeah! stickmaker has been running it on his Mac and has told us about it on the MurkMUSH. I'm not sure if the box I'm getting will have enough muscle to run that, though.

I'm aware of iChat too via Dara and Paul; I'm not a huge IMer either but I am on several systems, just from the various IDs I've accumulated over the years. From what I'm hearing, Adium is probably the route I'll go there.

Ooh yeah, I'll need the Remote Desktop tool. I'll need that for connecting to my work system. Thanks for the reminder.

Tinyfugue is optional, though I'll probably install it anyway; Dara did so on her Mac. Usually I just ssh up to newmoon and run TF from there, but if for some reason newmoon falls over, I can always use a backup install.

And hee, there are several precompiled versions of nethack for the Mac already. ;) Same situation here as with TF; I don't really need it, since I usually ssh up to newmoon and play there so risu and I can share bones files. But it's good to have an install on the system myself so I can play if I'm offline, too!

We already have a household plan for Time Machine going, yeah. :) Dara's prior Mac laptop is probably going to get repurposed as a Time Machine server.

Thanks for all the input, very much appreciated!

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Remember that OS X is much closer to Firefox' native Linux than Windoze. It'll probably be much happier there.

[annathepiper]

It would not suck if it behaved better memory-wise. We'll see what happens. :)

[annathepiper]

MacOffice, I think, is going to remain as a possibility. If I have to go ahead and get Entourage anyway to properly sync up my mail with the handheld, I may as well just shell out for MacOffice in general since solarbird can get it from the company store. I think I'll make a final decision on that when I see some reviews of the 2008 version. :)

You're quite right, the UI on OpenOffice is more primitive compared to Word--though I think it'll tide me over until I decide on MacOffice one way or another. I must admit that the revision marks and comments functionality is pretty awesome. I'm a bit worried about whether I'll like the whole "ribbon" thing that they introduced with Office 2007, and which I assume will show up in MacOffice 2008 too.. we'll see!

If I didn't have to have multiple browsers for testing purposes, I'd stick with just one on the box myself. :) But I do need to have multiple browsers handy, since I need them in case I'm doing work-related stuff on the Mac. Which is likely to happen at least occasionally! I've used both Safari and Firefox on my Mac at work at this point, and so far Firefox still is where I default. Maybe I'll give Safari a stronger run though, since I'll be getting Leopard on this system and that'll mean Safari 3.0.

I'm going to check out that Pixelmator thing that Paul suggested; I'll post my findings. :)

Thanks for your commentary on all of this stuff! I'll refer back to this post when the box gets here and I start installing stuff this weekend!

[annathepiper]

It turns out that I can't even use the test drive version of Mac Office 2004 yet to sync up with my frob--it's too old a version for the syncing software. Annoying. It does that watermarking thing that Pixelmator does, too!

So I think I'll probably just have to suck it up and get MacOffice 2008 when it comes out. Until then, I'll just have to read my mail on server, and use OpenOffice if I need to edit something.

Noted about Pixelmator, too. Dara was playing with it and noticed the watermarking thing. Aside from that, she was amused that it behaved a lot like a stripped-down, older version of Photoshop.

[annathepiper]

Good to know, thanks. Though I think I'll probably stick with the plan of just using OpenOffice until MacOffice 2008 is available. I can deal with that for a few weeks. :)

And I figured the file wasn't actually altered, yeah; one of the files I was playing with showed no sign of alteration when I then opened it up in Pages, checking out the demo version of that too.

[avram]

Quicksilver: A unified interface for working with a wide variety of apps and data. Allows you to launch apps, append to text files, do Google searches, control iTunes, look up contact information in Address Book, send email, do calculations, and lots of other stuff, all with a few quick keystrokes. (free)

For Photoshop-style image editing, there are a few low-cost Mac-specific options: Pixelmator ($60), Acorn ($40), and Draw-It ($40), all three of which are reviewed here. Draw-It is actually not very Photoshop-like, being a vector-based app, and if that's what you're looking for, you may also want to check out Lineform ($80).

For writing, TextEdit, the Mac's built-in low-end text editor and word processor, isn't bad, but it's probably not up to the task of writing a novel. For novels, plays, and the like, I've seen people rave over Scrivener ($40). One Windows-using friend of mine said he wished he had a mac during NaNoWriMo just for the sake of Scrivener. Or, for just writing with no distractions, there's Writeroom ($25), which takes away all the menus and palettes and just gives you a block of text in an otherwise blank screen. (I think Scrivener has a Writeroom mode.) Or look at Mellel ($35-64), which has a built-in outliner. Me, I do my writing in a text editor: TextMate (€40), highly extensible with modes for all sorts of tasks. Also check out TextExpander ($30), which lets you define abbreviations that get automatically expanded as you type.

For IM, I used Adium (free).

I've seen a few finance apps, but never gotten into the habit of using one. Money² ($40), Cashbox (free, still in beta), CheckBook ($18, but ugly), Cha-Ching ($40), Liquid Ledger ($60-80), and many more.

For LJ posting, I use XJournal (free) like just about every other Mac user. I haven't found a particularly good archving solution, but ljdump (free) is a Python script that claims it'll handle the job.

[annathepiper]

Wow, a plethora of linkage, thank you very much. :) Some of these recommendations are getting echoed by others, so I'll be installing Adium and probably also XJournal at the very least.

I'm already aware of TextEdit, but you're right, it's not really the proper tool for writing a novel. I find it perfectly acceptable for editing text files or HTML, but eh, don't want to write a novel in it.

Scrivener sounds potentially very interesting! I'll check it out.

[ellerisse.livejournal.com]

Antennapedia's LJ migration tool (http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/266462.html) works just great as an archiver. I have no idea if it will do everything you could wish for, since it's the only tool I've used. Results are stored in xml and html formats. The html formats are very simple, basic basic goodness. Maintains comments, threading, etc. with each entry as an html page.

[annathepiper]

Cool, thanks for the link!