I've just bought a MacBook Pro....

1st off don't get Libre office.

If you need a free 'office' type just use Google Docs etc.

VLC
Sparrow to replace Mail
Firefox
Adium
Handbrake
Textmate/Coda for decent text editing
 
I also Recommend Sparrow.

Read Later is now free on the App Store. Perfect for reading articles offline.

I use Firefox now, as my Chrome was getting incredible slow for no reason at all.
 
A few things I use most on mine:
- Microsoft Office 2011 (other office packages are available including Apples own stuff but none of them are in the same league as MS Office. Microsoft did a nice job on the 2011 Mac version).
- Parallels 7, this is great if you want to run any Windows apps (I launch the Bootcamp partition as a VM) or have a play with Linux or various other OS's.
- Steam, yup, you can actually play games on it!
- Sparrow, great mail app
- Skitch, great screen grabber
- Pixelmator, nice little graphics app
- MAMP, sets up the Apache, MySql, PHP environment for you
- Handbrake, get your DVD's into iTunes
- iBooks Author, get your novel on the app store
- TextWrangler, nice plain text editor
 
I'm going to be the slight oddball in this thread and say, do try the Mac OS X programs first. I use Mail, iChat, Safari and Pages, and all apart from Safari are absolutely fine. Safari seems to be playing up a bit at the moment, but when it works, it is absolutely fine. Chrome is better and faster, I will admit; I merely use Safari to keep my bookmarks in sync between both my Macs and my phone, something I can't do with Chrome.

And LibreOffice is bloody awful.
 
DefiantAsh said:
I also Recommend Sparrow.
Click to expand...

See, I've been using Sparrow and I really like it for what it is, a nice simple mail client, but I have run into problems with it, mostly regarding pictures. Whereas Mail will let you put say 20 pictures into an email, but the email will be huge, and you're free to use Mail to resize them by a quick drop down box, Sparrow just says it's not interested.

It's not a huge deal, but the fact remains I drop 5 or 6 pictures into Mail, and I can resize them as I wish by a really easy drop down, but in Sparrow I'm left with no choice but to export them from iPhoto or otherwise resize them by myself, save them somewhere, then drop those into Sparrow, then delete my resized files.

It's only one bugbear but it bothers me enough to make me want to change. I currently only use Sparrow to separate my work and home emails because I'm a dopey bugger and can't be trusted not to send personal emails from my work address and vice versa!

Edit... TL;DR, Sparrow is nice, but is different as opposed to better. My recommendation: keep your £7 to yourself and use Mail.
 
As a separate post, my recommendations:

For office work - if it's possible use iWork, if you collaborate with Windows/Office users to any extent then Office 2011 is the safer bet - as said above they have done a nice job with it and it's the best Office for Mac yet by some margin.

For video watching - VLC and Perian between them have you pretty well covered.

Skitch is great, dead handy.

Handbrake for video conversion, tip top

Adium for your IM client, it handles everything most people want

I recommend against replacing Safari - ask why you really want to replace it... Safari integrates great with OSX which is a big advantage in and of itself.

And one last thing - if you find yourself wondering how to do task X, check you can't do it with iLife first. You see quite a few posts asking how can I make a ringtone how can I join two videos together how can I make a picture slideshow, and so on. While iLife is very much a consumer app suite, it's actually very good so try and see if it can do what you're after before you start running around trying to find freeware video/music/picture editing apps :)
 
Thanks for the hints and tips.

The only bugbear I have at the moment is with iTunes and iCal automatically starting at login, I couldn't see the options to stop that but a lad at work says you can see it in Systems Preferences.

I'm going to stick with Safari for now, but can you have add-ons like an EXIF viewer for example?

I think I'll stick with the default mail for simplicity but I will need to import 3 mail accounts, can these be seperated rather than all in one big inbox? Something to check out tonight when I have a real play.

Also, I don't want all my installed programs in my dock, can I have a folder or something to have the programs I won't use often in there rather than filling the rather beautiful screen?
 
Lead_Head said:
Thanks for the hints and tips.

The only bugbear I have at the moment is with iTunes and iCal automatically starting at login, I couldn't see the options to stop that but a lad at work says you can see it in Systems Preferences.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't open automatically, possibly synching with a phone? If you go to System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> your username and then click login items you can untick and/or hide which programs start up there.

I'm going to stick with Safari for now, but can you have add-ons like an EXIF viewer for example?
Click to expand...

Do not know about an EXIF viewer but you can install safari "extensions". Popular ones will be ad-blocker and click to flash, have a browse of them here

I think I'll stick with the default mail for simplicity but I will need to import 3 mail accounts, can these be seperated rather than all in one big inbox? Something to check out tonight when I have a real play.
Click to expand...

Think you can have one big mailbox by clicking on Inbox at the top and then click the accounts on each one on the left and expand them to show seperately.

Also, I don't want all my installed programs in my dock, can I have a folder or something to have the programs I won't use often in there rather than filling the rather beautiful screen?
Click to expand...

Think you can put them into a "stack" which expands to show them all. Just drag the applications folder to the dock then right click on it I think to set it as one.

Personally I would only have the essential day to day stuff in your dock for ease of access. Otherwise hit cmd+space and type in the name of what you want into spotlight. So much quicker :)
 
MplayerX is better then VLC with Perian
Upgrade Safari to 5.2
Sparrow to replace Mail (as already mentioned)
 
I have a MacBook Pro and triple boot mine with OSX, Windows 7 and Ubuntu. OSX for general use, Windows 7 for gaming - Seriously if you have any thoughts on using your MacBook for gaming use Windows 7 via bootcamp, games will run far better under windows and this includes Steam games. Ubuntu is for general tinkering with Linux it's not needed but it's free and why not, it's quite a polished OS these days :)
 
lamboman said:
I'm going to be the slight oddball in this thread and say, do try the Mac OS X programs first. I use Mail, iChat, Safari and Pages
Click to expand...

+1

i used mac for everything (uni,work,business) atm and paired with my iphone and soon iPad 3 (fingers crossed on funds and march 7th) the mac os x programmes are great especially if you have the ability to have them on your other devices :D
 
Xee said:
MplayerX is better then VLC with Perian
Upgrade Safari to 5.2
Sparrow to replace Mail (as already mentioned)
Click to expand...

I moved from VLC to MplayerX, prefer it myself now.

Would certainly give Mail a go first before going for Sparrow, its free so why not.
 
BetterSnapTool and Hyperdock are absolute essentials if you want to be productive.
 
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