Journal: News & Comment

Useful resources if you have a new Mac

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A few people at work got new PowerBooks to replace their old Windows PCs this week. (The reasons they got Macs are various, but they boil down to, (a) they're harder to screw up or get infested with malware, and (b) the boss likes Macs.)

Anyway, I gave a little introductory seminar for new Mac users, and as part of it, posted to our intranet a list of some useful free/shareware software and other resources for Macs. So I may as well post it here too.

UPDATE: How could I have forgotten Miraz Jordan's excellent Mac and Eudora Tips Archive and Mac Learning Centre? Silly me. She also notes a couple of other good links in the comments.

• uControl - keyboard remapping and reconfiguring if you don’t like the stock Mac keyboard layout or behaviour
• VersionTracker and MacUpdate - the main Mac sites for software (free, shareware, commercial)
• TinkerTool (free) - more advanced settings and configuration for the Finder, Safari, etc.
• FTP/SFTP/SCP clients: Transmit (the best - $30 USD), Fetch ($25 USD), Interarchy ($40 USD), Vicomsoft FTP ($35 USD), Cyberduck (free, GPL), RBrowserLite (free - pay Pro version available), Fugu (free, BSD), and of course the various command-line tools.
• WebServerX Kit - Apache 2, PHP, and MySQL in one convenient installer (Apache is already included with Mac OS X, but here you have the whole deal)
• TextWrangler - a free relative of BBEdit, a great text editor (without all the HTML plugins that BBEdit has, alas) with regex and all sorts of other funky stuff
• PDFlab - Join and split PDF files, otherwise work with them—note that you can save a PDF from any Mac OS X File > Print dialog natively
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for Mac - so you can test on a networked Windows XP PC running RDC, with Windows showing up in a window on your Mac
• X11 for Mac OS X - in case you want a Unix X Windows environment on your Mac
• Free Mac OS tutorials
• Trackpad hacking pointers
• A nice list of indispensable Mac software. Oodles of goodness there.

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