Initial Software
Oct 23rd, 2009 by mark
The following is a list of the software I installed on the new MacBook Pro in the first 24 hours.
- Dropbox : A drop-dead simple piece of the “cloud.” 2GB for free and clients for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
- Adium : Hands down the best multi-protocol chat client for Mac OS X
- Tweetie : A twitter client. I had been using Twitterrific but decided to switch. Not sure I entirely like the user experience.
- iPulse : The most organic, and beautiful, system activity gage/ monitor you’ll ever see.
- TextMate : THE code and text editor for Mac OS X. Also the PlasticCodeWrap theme.
- OpenOffice : Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, et cetera. For free.
- XCode Developer Tools : I don’t use XCode, but I do build open source software an consequently use the included compiler.
- Mercurial : A distributed version control system. So I can keep my code at bitbucket.org.
- Synergy2 : A software “KVM” that allows multiple computers to be controlled from one keyboard and mouse.
- DynDNS Updater : Software that enables me to use a name rather than an IP address to access my laptop
- GeekTool : A preference pane that allows files, images, or command line results to be displayed on the desktop.
- VirtualBox : Sun’s free operating system virtualization tool. No guest OSs installed yet.
- Click To Flash : A Safari plug-in that prevents embedded Flash from running. Highly recommended.
- Growl : A unified notification framework for Mac OS X
Taking advantage of a brand new machine, and my willingness to re-install applications and copy data rather than blindly migrate, I am taking care on where I put things. I created an Applications folder inside my home directory, ~/Applications, and for all pieces of software that install by dragging the image file to the Applications folder, I install it in my personal folder rather than the system one. My hope is that this will keep the root-level application folder (/Applications) from becoming cluttered with dozens of applications.
There are some tools (VirtualBox being a good example) that insist on installing themselves in the root application folder, and I am content to allow that to happen. It means my /Applications folder won’t be pristine, with only Apple provided applications, but it will be much cleaner than the hodge-podge of nearly 300 applications my old machine had collected.
In addition to these installs I also imported 8,652 pictures via FireWire from the PowerBook. I also imported 7,081 MP3 files to the new machine. I setup Mail to read my IMAP Gmail account, and I imported the latest Address Book backup, via Dropbox, to enable email and chat.
The new machine is amazingly fast and responsive – importing pictures from the digital camera was astonishing. The whole process was over in less time than it takes the PowerBook to recognize that a camera is attached and to prepare the import. It also synchronized my 30,000 or so email messages relatively quickly, having more than an 802.11b wireless card makes a huge difference.
There are still a couple of outlier programs to install, and some development tools to download, build, and install, but by and large the machine is ready for 95% of my daily use. Now I need to focus on the 50 GB of documents, spreadsheets and other data files on the PowerBook to determine what to migrate, and how to better organize it on the MacBook Pro.