Zeb

A lot of friends have asked for my help setting up their macs lately. I decided to post the key points I recommend time and time again. These are the essentials that I get the most from, and that I would hate to have to live without. A lot of these work on Windows as well. They are great apps, free apps, and settings I use to get the most out of my mac and the internet. A lot of them also help you share files and work from the cloud.

Here are the apps that I add to my macs, and to my friend’s macs. All the apps are free except for a few at the bottom.

Dropbox This is the best little hard drive in the cloud app out there, IMHO. Sync across computers, across platforms, share with friends and clients, backup, share public links to individual files — it’s a swiss army knife. 2+gb for free.

Flip4mac Windows Media Components for QuickTime Typical for Microsoft to use obtuse language to say - be able to play windows media video on your mac (in QuickTime).

Safari 4 Upgrade to the new Safari. It wipes the floor with the old one.

Google’s Chrome for Mac will be standard for me once it’s released for Mac. It should make Google’s sites, like docs and gmail, work crisper. For now it is an unfinished dev release available for testing. Among other things, Flash does not work in Chrome for Mac as of writing.

Firefox A brand new FF is being released now - 3.5 3.6. The ability to use extensions with FF makes it indispensable for me, but with the new Safari and Chrome on its way, I wonder if this will stay true.

Evernote If you take advantage of it, this app will slowly take over as one of your most used apps. It makes editable, shareable notes available to you anywhere. It takes a bit of getting used to, but you will soon not remember how you did without the Evernote clipper in your browser, the client app on your mac, and the free app on your iPhone — where you can also edit notes (even offline). It will also take photo, audio, and video “notes”.

Skype I find the screen sharing an essential tool, not to mention video calling.

Adium My chat client of choice, connects to all networks except skype (skype does not open their network). Themes let you really customize the design, and professionally — not jerry-rigged. See a screengrab of mine.

Which brings me to another favorite app, Jing. For anyone savvy enough to want to share a screen grab, this app is a dream. It’s got dead easy markup tools, and one-click sharing that saves the url of the posted grab to your clipboard. It comes with a generous free account on their sharing site, screencast.com, and allows you to post to flickr, to an ftp, save locally, or copy to your clipboard. It also takes movies (rendered as swfs, with or without Mic recording), with a pro version uploading straight to Youtube. (I change the UI to a regular menu bar icon in preferences, otherwise it’s this funky sun in the corner of your screen.)

uTorrent is the best mac bit torrent client available, hands down, IMHO. I used to use Transmission, and it’s solid, but once uTorrent came out for mac, I have not looked back.

If you installed Skype or Adium, then you probably already installed Growl. If you haven’t, you should. It’s the premiere notification system for the mac. Simple, open goodness.

Adobe Air This is Adobe’s application platform. I use it for Twitter apps (Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop) and site specific apps, i.e. Facebook’s air app, Tokbox, the NYTimes Reader, and then their are dashboard style tools. You can browse through apps here.

Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) I use Xmarks for Safari to sync my bookmarks across computers, AND to sync across browsers with their Firefox extension.

PTH Pasteboard ClipMenu I love this little app that remembers my last 100+ clipboard items, lets me pull them up from my menu bar and paste them as plain text.

XMind Mind Mapper Only certain ppl like this kind of stuff. I am one of the weird ones. Great for mapping out ideas or taking short notes, like during a call. Also a genuine mind mapper geek’s tool.

Carbon Copy Cloner If you don’t use a time capsule or a Mozy style backup, use this amazing free app to create a bootable clone of your mac hard disk drive.

VLC Media Player If this can’t play your video, your video is broken or an extremely rare format. It’s a great playback UX to boot, and there’s even a free remote for the iPhone.

Handbrake Best video ripper/encoder for mac. Want to save a copy of your DVD? Put it on your iPhone? This is that app.

The UnArchiver lets your mac tackle .rar files and other strange compressed file types.

Smultron Despite its unwieldly name, it’s my text editor of choice for the Mac.

Since Smultron is no longer in development, I like TextWrangler.

Google stuff: I generally move everyone to google for mail, calendar, contacts, voice, docs (if their willing), apps for their domain (if they need it)… Google deserves it’s own category.

Gmail Notifier for Mac Most like this app. It allows you to send mail via gmail in our browser, if you like, and keeps you updated via the menu bar. It’s not necessary, but most find it a nice add.

Google Quick Search for the Mac I’ve moved to this tool from Quicksilver. Traditionalists may not like this. But it works great for me. I use it primarily as a launcher for apps not in my dock, and a universal search for docs, emails, etc. I was never a quicksilver power user, so I don’t miss that stuff, and this new(ish) project seems to be getting developed actively. I think this is a lighter, nimbler version than what comes with Google Desktop. Please let me know if I am wrong in the comments.

Picasa for Mac I still use iPhoto primarily, but Picasa does not create it’s own copies of photos, so it’s not a space hog. It allows you to upload to your Picasa web albums seamlessly to Google Photos, and it let’s you download the full res photos, too. This makes it a nice photo sharing and backup service. Sort of the opposite from Kodak (Ofoto) or Facebook in that respect. If you know you only need to upload, there’s a separate uploader app still available for mac.

Google Software for your Mac is a one stop landing page with a lot of Google Apps for Mac. I already mentioned the ones I use, but some will find a couple additional apps useful.Earth, SketchUp, Picasa, Picasa Uploader, Toolbar for Firefox, Notifier for Mac.

Google Calaboration is an app that sets up sync your Google Calendar and iCal.

Google Mobile Sync for iPhone
Google Sync allows you to choose up to five calendars to synchronize with the Calendar app on your iPhone.
To select which calendars to sync to your iPhone, follow the steps below:
1. Open the Safari browser on your phone and go to http://m.google.com/sync.
2. Sign in with your account and select your phone from the list of devices you’ve set up for Google Sync.
3. Bookmark this page so you can return to it easily.

Set up Apple Mail with Gmail via imap Finish this process by following these Google recommended settings.
From the Mail menu, click Preferences > Accounts > Mailbox Behaviors
Drafts: Store draft messages on the server > do NOT check
Sent: Store sent messages on the server > do NOT check
Junk: Store junk messages on the server > checked
Delete junk messages when > Never
Trash: Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox > do NOT check
Store deleted messages on the server > do NOT check

PAID APPS

I don’t like to pay for apps, but some are very much worth the moderate cost. I recommend the following apps for pay.

Blogo I don’t want to love this app, but I do. My trial expires tomorrow. I bet I buy it after trying not to. It’s the best blog editor I’ve used, and it gives you this great fullscreen view, too. Really simple and fun UI. Works with a ton of blog platforms (no tumblr as of writing, but they are working on it).

Things Amazing ToDo management, iphone synchronization

Forklift Stellar ftp client, clean app uninstaller, and more

1Password Bulletproof password and wallet management that integrates with your iphone and you browsers.

Little Snitch Use this if you are a security freak, or when you’re worried about apps phoning home. Normal users may not need Little Snitch. But if you do need it, it’s the best, and a life-saver.

TextExpander Great tool to create shorthand codes that automatically expand while you type.

Podworks For when you need to upload music off of an iPhone / iPod Touch/ iPod that iTunes does not recognize as linked to that library. I haven’t used this is a while, but it worked better than all the rest a while back, and was the 1st to work with the iPhone.

AppZapper Do you install and uninstall a lot of apps? Appzapper catches most of the straggler files that deleting an app can leave behind, giving you a clean uninstall. I got this as part of a software bundle. AppZapper was a bonus app that I have grown to love.

Macheist, MUPromo, & MacBundleBox all put together great deals from bundled apps. Sometimes none of them are compelling for me, and sometimes one anchor app alone makes the deal worth it for me.

That captures it, I think. Let me know if I missed anything, or if you have suggestions.

What’s next?

Update June 25

Lifehacker published their Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Mac Downloads. It’s in the same light as this post, with some overlap. On our different choices, I stand by my picks. Lifehacker is a great blog.

Added uTorrent (bit torrent), Blogo (blogging app), and AppZapper