Blogbarger’s Mac Universe

2007 was my homecoming back to Apple. I grew up on all the Mac’s predessors and then the Mac until around 1990. After about 5 years with PC’s I returned to Apple in the mid-90’s only to be let down by the failure of the PowerPC. Early this year I turned back towards home with a MacBook Pro 15 inch. It has been nothing but pure bliss. The riding a bicycle bit is all truth.

The amount of software that is built into OS X is nothing but amazing. However, I have several Apple and 3rd party apps that I don’t know what I would do without.

• Acorn - The ultimate lightweight photo editor. I don’t need a fully loaded program like Photoshop. My photo needs are pretty limited to creating decent looking jpegs for my blogs or personal prints. This nice looking app from Flying Meat is well worth the $40.




• AppDelete - Get rid of unwanted apps for good with this excellent piece of freeware.




• iWork ‘08 - $79 is all Apple asks for this incredibly slick and clean looking office suite. Numbers has not replaced Excel yet only because it does not support macros. When it does, I will rid myself of Microsoft once and for all (well, sort of). Keynote just looks and feels better than Powerpoint. But the real gem here is Pages. I would have forked over the 79 bucks just for this. It is everything I need in a word processor but it is also a decent page layout app. Now there is absolutely no reason to ever go back to MS Office.




• Licensed - This handy app stores, organizes and displays serial numbers for any of my apps that require those silly little things. Since I use Parallels and use Windows apps that require serial numbers a program like this is invaluable to me…. but I’m not willing to pay money for it. That’s why I chose Licensed. You can’t get any cheaper than free.




• Smultron - A free text editor that is unbelievably useful. This app comes loaded with a Swiss Army knife of tools including syntax coloring. A must have for anyone working on the web.




• Speed Download 4 - Free download managers are a dime a dozen for PC users. Mac users aren’t so lucky yet. $25 is too much to pay for Yazsoft’s Speed Download 4 but it really is a great little too. Downloading would be so tedious without it.




• Yasu - This is “Yet Another System Utility.” Although free, the author accepts donations through PayPal. A great little maintenance utility for OS X. What makes this app so special is that it is one of the few maintenance programs that works with Leopard right now. So if you hate the pain of launching terminal just to launch maintenance scripts manually…. grab this fast.



That’s it for now. Though I do wish I could recommend a superb blogging tool (writer/poster) for the Mac but the fact is there isn’t one. Many of us who made the switch to Mac within the past year are still mourning the loss of Microsoft’s one good program: Windows Live Writer. There are Mac blogging apps out there but they are far less than perfect and way too expensive. My hope is that somewhere out there, in some dorm room, a college student is writing the quintessential blogging app for the Mac. I tip my hat to you.

So I have another wonderful blog. It’s called “When You Look At The World” and for the past three years I’ve had a cornucopia of topics including theology, music, U2, sports :), technology, parenting issues, etc. I also have written deeply personal posts on spiritual longings, friends passing away and other issues of the heart. But throughout the blog I’ve tried to keep my love for all things Apple and Macintosh to a minimum. This is largely due to the fact that most of my readership couldn’t care less about Apple or issues concerning Macs. But my MacBook Pro is too cool not to talk about and there are many geeky things to discuss. So, if you are a Mac lover and and would like to contribute to the discussions, lock this site into your RSS reader of choice and I’ll try to make it interesting and useful. Of course I will continue to crank out posts on my original blog but this one is all about the Mac. Welcome!