New to macs - recommend some essential software

Bengaboy

Bengaboy

Bengaboy

Soldato
Joined
1 Sep 2007
Posts
3,902
Hi guys.

New to macs and was wondering if you could recommend some essential software that you cant live without.

eg : a unzipping tool would be great.

Also - I have downloaded a wmv file and tried to play it , but it just opens text edit - tried selecting quick time to play the video, but it just says the file is not a video?

Thanks guys :)
 
www.flip4mac.com - this will sort out your .wmv woes

www.perian.org - this'll handle the rest of the codec issues with any luck

I use unrarx www.unrarx.com - people seem to think there's better, but meh. I click on archives and stuff comes out of them, it does me.

iSquint is dead handy if you can lay your hands on it, it's been recently discontinued. (It's a converter for making stuff play on iPods, but that, of course, is also handy for getting pretty much any video to play nice with pretty much any Apple or Apple-esque software, so it's worth having)

Edit: found one still working: http://download2us.softpedia.com/dl...48fb7614/400010649/mac/Video/iSquint1.5.2.dmg

Main thing to advise is DON'T write off the bundled software, i.e iLife! It's really very good indeed.

www.pure-mac.com is a good place to find software for specific needs, they list freeware, shareware and paid software for all sorts of crap.

Skitch - www.skitch.com is dead handy for quick edits and uploads to screenshots and pictures and so on for forums. Couldn't live without it now.
 
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If you like RSS feeds, check out NetNewsWire - brilliant reader. It will also sync with an iPhone or iPod Touch :)

Transmission is a nicely polished Bit Torrent client.
 
Cybertronic said:
Forgot to mention, the bundled compression/decompression application is good enough if you are using Zip files and any other related Mac OS files such as DMG files. However, if you require to decompress Rar files, the above suggestions will do :p
Click to expand...

Yea it was rar files - thought macs were just supposed to work? :p
 
I use torrents a lot so thought that rar was the default these days but when I told the IT guys i work with this they thought I was stuck the nineties.
 
Any kind of compression container on media torrents (music, videos, ..) is annoying because then you can't selectively download files. Plus media is so well encoded that ZIP/RARing it often won't make much difference to the total file size :)
 
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