Your Mac comes filled with plenty of very useful applications courtesy of Apple. The various iLife applications, iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, iMovie, iDVD and iG er Garage Band mean that straight out of the box your Mac can do loads of really really useful stuff. Also included on the hard drives of new Macs is Apples productivity suit iWork 08. Purchasing an online unlock code gives you access to a fantastic word processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers) and a presentation application (Keynote). These three apps virtually mirror Microsoft's Office suit and for most people will be all you need. They can all open and save to Office standards so sharing your work isn't an issue, while the price (£49) makes this a virtual no brainer for every owner. Mail.app rounds off the list of applications you'll need to use. All in all this represents stonking value, especially since so these applications are not light weight cheap and cheerful apps such as come bundled with most PC's. This out of the box productivity means that many Mac owners will not venture far from these applications, however this doesn't mean that there aren't some applications that every Mac owner should seriously consider having on their Mac. Here are five applications that I think every Mac owner should have, and why:
1) SuperDuper - Backup utility. Apples Time machine backup application finally means that regular backup comes to most owners (and believe me I know that most people don't back up). However it's not going to solve every problem, particularly for Mac owners not running (or not able to run) Leopard. Time Machine backups are also not bootable. Luckily SuperDuper, is here to help. This $15 app allows users to back up a complete copy of their boot drive to an external volume. This backup can be automated to run every night so, should the worst come to the worst you are only a format and restore away from having your entire Mac back. Quite frankly indispensable. Get it now.
2) WhatSize - Space saver. No matter how you try to stop it, your hard drive will eventually fill up with large amounts of rubbish. Old files, forgotten downloads and often unused system files. At some point even the most capacious drives will start to creak and fill up. And a full drive means slower OS X performance. The answer is WhatSize a free app that shows you in easy colour coded ways what files you have and where, making deletion of Gb upon Gb of data easy and safe.
3) MacTracker - How much RAM can your Mac hold? What type? What sort and size hard drive do you have? If you need to know any fact about any model of mac from the very first Mac 128K to the brand new Air, then MacTracker can help. Free to download, this app is not only useful but the potted histories of each model make fascinating reading. And you can even play the distinctive startup chme that each model makes. Joy!
4) Firefox - web browser. Just because Apple wrote safari and included it with every mac doesn't mean that it's the best web browser for the Mac. It's good, and for a lot of people it will get them through their daily web life. But it's not the best. Firefox is a free download. With masses of plug ins available that extend it's usefulness in all sorts of directions it makes browsing the web a better experience than Safari does, especially if you need your browser to fulfill specialist tasks. You can customise nearly every aspect of Firefox.
5) Vuescan - scanning software. It's taken a long time for scanner drivers to mature for OS X, and even now some of them are pretty ropey affairs. Many older scanners have never been properly supported. Luckily, back in the early days of OS X, intrepid programmer Ed Hamrick gifted Vuescan to the Mac community. Put simply Vuescan supports nearly every make and model of scanner on the market with an interface that offers fantastic control of both your scanning and saving. With plenty of options to control all aspects of the capturing of both transparencies and flat originals, Vuescan will take most of the chore out of scanning your documents and deliver top quality results. It's not free but the basic app is only $39.95.
