Just got my MacBook Air...

Cheetah Designs · 23 Aug 2011 at 15:04

...and in all honesty, it's left me confused; sexually. I'm not sure which I'd rather take to bed, Megan Fox or this beaut.

Now I am in the process of setting it up.

I have Dropbox installed and I have just installed sabnzbd but I am not sure what else I should be installing.

Is it still the case that you don't need a firewall or antivirus?

What do people use for their office applications?

Is Safari the fastest browser? Can I get adblock on it as I will NEED that?

What text editor do people use? Or is there a decent IDE for web development/design?

Also - for videos, what do people do? VLC Player?

I'm sure I will come up with more questions shortly.

Hxc · 23 Aug 2011 at 15:30

VLC is your best bet for a stand alone media player, Plex is a fantastic media centre/hardware accelerated player.

I use Office '12, it's fab on mac.

I cannot stand Safari if only for the lack of being able to click my scroll wheel and drag aroudn with it; I use firefox because I cannot stand 'tabs on top' which chrome and the like force on you.

uniQ · 23 Aug 2011 at 15:49

Is it still the case that you don't need a firewall or antivirus?
av is optional and so is firewall, apple has a decent firewall built in you can activate in the system preference panel under security

What do people use for their office applications?
Office 2011/iWork

Is Safari the fastest browser? Can I get adblock on it as I will NEED that?
Chrome is the fastest by some margin. There are Adblock plugins for firefox/chrome/safari.

What text editor do people use? Or is there a decent IDE for web development/design?
TextMate is by far (IMO) the best text editor for mac, textwrangler is a decent free alternative, what kind of coding do you do? VIM is extremely powerful but takes some getting used to. Espresso/Coda for websites. PHPStorm, Netbeans, Aptana etc for full IDE's

Also - for videos, what do people do? VLC Player?
Prefer MPlayer but sometimes use VLC with the BlackPearl Skin.

Feek · 23 Aug 2011 at 15:50

You don't need AV and if your router has a hardware firewall, you really don't need to bother enabling the built in one.

Install Perian and Flip4Mac and then you're sorted for video goodness. You don't _need_ VLC but it's a handy program to have.

TextWrangler is a good editor but don't get that from the App store as it's a slightly gimped version.

I use Pages and Numbers for word processing and spreadsheets but there are freebies around such as Openoffice.

Cheetah Designs · 23 Aug 2011 at 16:05

For video the most important thing is battery life so do any of the video players do hardware acceleration?

Hmm, can't decide whether to get office or iWorks.

I remember when I was using my mates Mac, he used this: http://www.peterborgapps.coma/smultron/ ...how does it compare? In terms of coding I do everything. Will be using Eclipse for Java, will do most C++ in Windows anyways so its just for PHP, HTML, CSS, JS...etc..

Interesting that you say Chrome is fastest by some margin as I am using Safari at the moment and it seems pretty quick to me!

uniQ · 23 Aug 2011 at 17:05

Looks like firefox isn't that far off actually:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/08/whats-the-fastest-web-browser-in-the-real-world-chrome/

Smultron is OK. (Try Fraise first)

I do the bulk of my dev in TextMate (its a texteditor through and through. Think notepad++ on steroids). I then tweak and refine in Espresso. Coda and BBEdit are other popular web editing alternatives.

On the occasions I need a full blown IDE for debugging then I turn to PHPStorm. But there are quite a few other options of which I mentioned in my first reply best to try a few and see which ones suit your workflow.

Cheetah Designs · 23 Aug 2011 at 18:33

Does anyone know how I can get GMail to play nice with the iMail app? What I mean by this is that emails that are marked important or have a label are downloaded multiple times.

Thanks.

Feek · 23 Aug 2011 at 18:35

I'm just off out so I can't give a link but there was a very good guide to getting Gmail working with mail (NOT iMail, btw) on the mac geek gab podcast a while back, it might be worth having a hunt.

Cheetah Designs · 23 Aug 2011 at 18:37

Sorry, I meant Mail.app ...will have a look now, thanks.

Cheetah Designs · 23 Aug 2011 at 20:59

I can't seem to find a working site for the podcast, is it episode 347?

EDIT: Also, what is the deal with encryption...is it automatic? You also read about these people that track their stolen MacBooks, how is that done?

Gilbert89 · 23 Aug 2011 at 22:29

Anti Virus - I haven't felt the need although I have turned on Apple's Firewall in the System Preferences. Office software decent freebies around the web although I didn't pay for my Office 2011 obviously I didn't download this and my friend gave it me 'ahem' but maybe its worth trying the iWork 11 trial its down to personal preference!

theheyes · 23 Aug 2011 at 22:37

You have to enable FileVault (at least, I did with my upgrade from Leopard). It's worth doing on a laptop if you have anything to keep private in the event of it getting stolen.

And I have to disagree with not bothering to enable the firewall. It takes literally seconds and in all the years I've had it running I've not run into any compatibility problems. In all honesty, short of taking it to a hacking convention you're extremely unlikely to run into trouble on a public network but for the sake of ticking a box I don't see why anybody wouldn't. I don't know why Apple just don't enable it by default.

Ev0 · 24 Aug 2011 at 09:09

Feek said:
Install Perian and Flip4Mac and then you're sorted for video goodness. You don't _need_ VLC but it's a handy program to have.

I'm the same, use Quicktime with Perian installed for 99.9% of all my video files.

I've got one file in some weird format that I will use VLC for, but once it's watched it'll be deleted and won't need VLC

(Until the next time..)

Just prefer quicktime really, it's so simple and clean looking and does the job just fine.

uchuff · 24 Aug 2011 at 09:27

Seems to be a general movement of people towards BBEdit these days as far as text editors goes. I'm currently an Espresso user, it's pretty nice and light weight but at the moment they are building up towards a version 2 release so might not be a good time to buy.

Cheetah Designs · 24 Aug 2011 at 15:06

What do people use for extracting/creating archives?

theheyes said:
You have to enable FileVault (at least, I did with my upgrade from Leopard). It's worth doing on a laptop if you have anything to keep private in the event of it getting stolen.

Do you know what that encrypts? I want to encrypt everything that is useful. Stored passwords and settings, files, etc... (if that makes sense)

Eatchipz · 24 Aug 2011 at 16:09

Cheetah Designs said:
What do people use for extracting/creating archives?

Do you know what that encrypts? I want to encrypt everything that is useful. Stored passwords and settings, files, etc... (if that makes sense)

It encrypts the whole drive!

But I think you can select certain files to encrypt instead of the whole drive.

Cheetah Designs · 24 Aug 2011 at 18:01

Eatchipz said:
It encrypts the whole drive!

But I think you can select certain files to encrypt instead of the whole drive.

What if you have multiple users? Surely it can't encrypt the whole drive because different users will have different passwords to decrypt?

Eatchipz · 24 Aug 2011 at 19:04

Cheetah Designs said:
What if you have multiple users? Surely it can't encrypt the whole drive because different users will have different passwords to decrypt?

More Info here mate

- http://bit.ly/ffkara

Cheetah Designs · 25 Aug 2011 at 22:22

Ah right, so I, as an administrator have to give users access to the encrypted disk...if I don't give them access, they can't login.

Tbid · 25 Aug 2011 at 23:25

Wish I hadn't sold mine now, Was the best laptop that I'd ever had or could wish to have, I'm going to get one in a couple of months again I think I'm just missing it too much!