I get it now...

[m0nkeyb0y]

Apps- ShiftIt (screen management), Flux (easier on the eyes at night), Quicksilver, Dropbox, LibraryBooks, Caffeine, YouControlTunes, VLC...

 

[Stingray454]

Congrats, and feel free to upgrade to 10.6.7. There was a small patch released that fixed all of the issues. It'll show up in 'Software Update'.

Just to reiterate - no, the gaming performance has NOT been fixed yet. You still get about one third to half of the gaming performance in 10.6.7 compared to 10.6.6.

The solution so far seems to be to stay away from the combo updates and install the updates from Apples website, people had success with that. If you used Software Update to upgrade to 10.6.7, it seems the only way to get it working right now is to reinstall and apply the updates one by one from apples site. There's a lot of other threads about it in this forum, read up on it there

I really hope this gets some attention from Apple soon..

 

[dzigg]

App reccomnedation :



- Launchbar (better version of Quicksilver IMO, but not free)
- TotalFinder ( tabs on finder!, enable 'cut', must have)
- LittleSnitch (firewall for mac)
- Sparrow (lightweight google-centric mail apps with a hint of twitter apps)
- iStat Menus (Show network, temprature, memory, etc on the menu bar)
- Transmission (for torrents)
- Notational Velocity (note-taking app, sync with simplenote)
- Hazel (to help you with file management)
- Tags (for tagging files, works beautifully with hazel)
- Themepark (to customize mac 'visual style')
- VLC (media player)
- XBMC (cross-platform media center)
- Dropbox (must-have,really)
- Awaken (to wake you up in the morning)

hope that helps

 

[ReallyBigFeet]

Thought they were all tree hugging, granola eating, hippies.

Most of THOSE people are now hanging out over in the iPad section talking about the magicalnessosity of the device.



As for good apps on the OSX platform, there are many but it depends on what you do with your MBA.

My list:

Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations: MS Office 2011 for Mac
(also have iWork for Pages/Keynote/Numbers...decent but not as powerful alternatives to MS Office 2011).
Detailed technical drawings (like Visio): OmniGraffle
Project Management: OmniPlan
Video Utils: VLC, Handbrake, Perian, Plex
Dropbox: Cloud-based file storage and synchronizes my work files across all my Mac and Windows PC's. Great, great app...must have if you have more than one computing device.

Not much else needed unless you want Windows apps on there, then get Parallels or VMWare and go to town.

 

[kapolani]

I downloaded Quicksilver last night and played with it a bit. While playing with it I inadvertantly brought Spotlight up. Although I never use spotlight while on my iPhone I've found that it is pretty useful using my Air. In fact, it seems to be able to do everything that I would use Quicksilver for, so I uninstalled QS.

I put Dropbox on all my machines. I don't use it as much as some people, but it is useful. I do, however, use a lot of Google's apps docs/gvoice/photo etc and they take care of most of my cloud based needs. Google Notifier is a great app to use for your gmail and calendar accounts.

I love, VLC have always used it, and recommend it highly.

Downloaded Caffeine and think it's a great little tweak.

The only reason I'm holding off on going up to 10.6.7 is because of the gaming hit. I don't game too much on this machine (I have a dedicated PC for that), but I do once and a while.

Going to have to check out ThemePark when I get home.

 

[lucashungaro]

I downloaded Quicksilver last night and played with it a bit. While playing with it I inadvertantly brought Spotlight up. Although I never use spotlight while on my iPhone I've found that it is pretty useful using my Air. In fact, it seems to be able to do everything that I would use Quicksilver for, so I uninstalled QS.

If you only use QS as an application launcher, the combo SSD + Spotlight will do fine and is one less app installed taking space. Spotlight is too slow on HDDs, but on an SSD is fast as hell.

That said, I know some people that master QS to a level it is hard to imagine. They do tons of stuff through that thing (or Alfred.app). Anyway, I'm happy with Spotlight too.

 

[PatrickCocoa]

Freedom!

Apple is still way too proprietary for me

Enjoy your Mac!

/sarcasm

I, too, am glad that Windows is open source

/sarcasm off

 

[kapolani]

/sarcasm

I, too, am glad that Windows is open source

/sarcasm off

I never really understood that argument either.

 

[tom.bcn]

Any others that I should be aware of?

Actually, I work for a software site. We do Mac stuff, but it's not our main focus. Here's a post I wrote for our blog which you might like, entitled "Why Macs are just as safe as Windows 7 PCs".

There are other sites out there too.

Oh, and a list of essential apps (for my MacBook Air)?

VLC (media player)
TweetDeck (great Twitter client)
Google Chrome (the best browser)
Plex (for playing media on my MacMini media server)
Chicken of the VNC (for accessing and controlling other Macs on the home network)
Fetch (FTP client)
SabNZBD+ (Newsgroups client)
Machinarium (fun little game)
...oh, and I always deactivate the dashboard on a new Mac. Least used feature in the OS for me.

 

[panzer06]

Most that continue to use Windows inside some form of VM are not doing so for that one proprietary program. There are many, many applications that windows simply does better.

Each platform does certain tasks very well. I dont think an Apple will ever come to replace a PC. Its not really Apple's goal.

Apple is still way too proprietary for me

Enjoy your Mac!

Other than games and the occasional web app that requires IE I've completely moved away from using windows. Your statement is too general. Depends greatly on the apps you use. For general business apps the mac is a fine PC that does not need windows.

Cheers,

 

[kapolani]

Actually, I work for a software site. We do Mac stuff, but it's not our main focus. Here's a post I wrote for our blog which you might like, entitled "Why Macs are just as safe as Windows 7 PCs".

There are other sites out there too.

Oh, and a list of essential apps (for my MacBook Air)?

VLC (media player)
TweetDeck (great Twitter client)
Google Chrome (the best browser)
Plex (for playing media on my MacMini media server)
Chicken of the VNC (for accessing and controlling other Macs on the home network)
Fetch (FTP client)
SabNZBD+ (Newsgroups client)
Machinarium (fun little game)
...oh, and I always deactivate the dashboard on a new Mac. Least used feature in the OS for me.

Way to hijack my post...



love your site by the way. bookmarked.

 

[Zeov]

i've downloaded FishTankHD.. its pretty awesome to watch on mah screen ;-)

 

[tom.bcn]

love your site by the way. bookmarked.

Well, someone asked for suggestions. I debated for a couple of days as to whether to spam your thread but then my craven desire for page views took over...

There are tons more sites out there.

 

[MBA13]

In addition to my new favorite torrent client Transmission...

I found Perian as a simple video codec alternative...

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/perian.html