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.

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!

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.

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?

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)

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?

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.

Cheetah Designs · 8 Sep 2011 at 16:38

In case it's useful for anyone I went with the following:

Office: iWorks - Paid
Image editing: Photoshop - Paid
Text editor: TextWrangler - Free
Notes: Evernote - Free
Screenshot: Skitch - Free
Video: VLC - Free (Also installed Perian and Flip4Mac for thumbnails also free)
Firewall: Inbuilt - Free
Virtual Machine: VirtualBox - Free
Browser: Firefox - Free
Cloud Storage: Dropbox - Free
Mail: Inbuilt - Free
FTP: Filezilla - Free
Chat: Inbuilt - Free
Calendar - Inbuilt - Free
Archives: The Unarchiver - Free
Application uninstaller: AppCleaner - Free
Usenet: SABnzbd+ - Free

Cheetah Designs · 9 Sep 2011 at 14:56

mrbell1984 said:
I use TinyExpander.

Ive just found out that unarchiver can't handle encrypted .7z files...can tinyexpander?