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what programs to buy?
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Junior Member
Join Date: Mar 2005
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I'm about to get my first Mac, and i'm just wondering what kind of programs i should go out and buy? I'll be a student in college next year, and I have no idea what to get, as i'm switching from PC to mac. Any help?
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Junior Member
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Ceres, Calif
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One program you will need will be a good word processor. I would recommend iWorks, that will give you Pages for word processing and Keynote for presentations. Both very nice programs.
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PowerMac G5 - 2.0 4 1/2 Gig Ram - Tiger 10.4.2
30" Apple Monitor - LaCie d2 Tripple 320 Gig
iMac G5 1.8 1 1/2 Gig Ram 20" - Tiger 10.4.2
Amd64 - Gamer - Water cooled
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Feb 2001
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Post the programs you use on your PC, and we can give you the Mac equivalents.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: May 2004
Location: on 650 cc's
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What type of Mac are you getting? Some find it handy, myself included, to have a little app like Hardware Monitor to keep an eye on their Mac. It monitors CPU, HD and more temperatures along with other data. I find it very handy.
Maybe you can give is an insight in what you plan on doing with the Mac. Then people can give recommendations, as suggested by ' tie '.
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stuffing feathers up your b*tt doesn't make you a chicken.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Mar 2005
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Well, i'm just getting a new Powerbook. I just plan on using it for school, mostly simple stuff like word processing and surfing the net. There'll be a fair amount of music usage with it too. Maybe teh occasional game or 2. You know, just standard stuff. Like...the only thing i can think of that i might have to buy is Microsoft Office for Mac, and MAYBE Adobe CS (for a bit of fun).
everythign else i THINK (not sure) is downloadable soemwhere?
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Nov 1999
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For very basic word processing you could get by with TextEdit (a basic text editor which comes with OSX), but if you're going to be doing school papers then you'll probably want something more substantial. Word and Pages (part of iWork) both work as far as this goes, though I use Nisus Writer Express myself.
Few things beat a good outliner for taking notes in class. I discovered OmniOutliner late in my college years, and it worked great. There are several others, however, so shop around and find one that fits your style.
Graphics-wise, many Macs come with a registered copy of GraphicConverter these days, but if yours doesn't then you should get it. Although its tools for creating new graphics are very basic, nothing on any platform beats it for converting images between formats and running batch operations. If you also use the GIMP (which you may have used on Windows) to create new graphics, then the resulting power comes close to Photoshop's, and even beats it in a few areas.
Other than that, you're pretty much set. iTunes works very well for music, Safari and Firefox both work quite well for Web browsing, and games are games no matter where you go.
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You are in Soviet Russia. It is dark. Grue is likely to be eaten by YOU!
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: great northwest
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Instead of buying (and supporting the MS evil empire), why not try the free, open source NeoOffice ? I haven't used it myself (my Mac came with appleworks, and I mostly use it and TextEdit except when forced to use Word, which I got from my office), but the early reviews have been good. It lets you open, save as, and exchange files freely with Word, Excel, etc. users.
If you don't like it, MS will always be happy to take your money.
Also, if you save your word processing docs as rtf files (regardless of the app that created them), then you won't be locked into Word's format -- any word processor can open them.
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: great northwest
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Sorry, should have added this info from the Neo website:
"NeoOffice/J is a full featured office productivity suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, database, and macro functionality. It can be used as a free alternative to Microsoft Office:Mac. You can exchange documents with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org users, even on other platforms!"
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2005
Status:
Offline
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Speaking of switching, what is the mac equivelent to "notepad"? TextEdit seems to be it, but i can't save unformatted text. There doesn't seem to be a "save as plain text" option. Is there or should i get another program?
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Powerbook - 15" / 1.67GHz / 1 GB / 80 GB / 128 MB video
Mac Mini - 1.42 GHz / 512 MB / 80 GB / 32 MB video
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Forum Regular
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Bill Gates' Basement
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Originally Posted by meefin
Speaking of switching, what is the mac equivelent to "notepad"? TextEdit seems to be it, but i can't save unformatted text. There doesn't seem to be a "save as plain text" option. Is there or should i get another program?
You must have missed the plaintext only option. TextEdit-> Preferences-> Plain text radio button
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