So HOPEFULLY my new macbook pro comes tomorrow with leapord on it but wondering - what must haves or little natty bits of software, widgits do you (or any other of you who use macs) think I should get.

My brother has hooked me up with under his work licence from work for photoshop, illustrator and a few other bits so sorted there

silly question but is there anything in particular you need it to do?

musts?


erm what do you want to do with it?

well I will be using it for my web design and development, do not know a good software to do coding on mind, getting photoshop and illustrator

may need an ftp, best video player? (plays divx etc)

adobe suite, then something to code, for video idvd is pretty good. then again i think you can get vlc on mac.
*edit after quick google*
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

nano + syntax highlighting + screen = GOD LIKE for coding

For proper coding its unix so just pop open a terminal.

Best place for general apps is to check apples website - they have a list of good apps for just about every purpoes youre likely to want.  For the rest mac torrents wont serve you far wrong.

Youre going to want stuffit straight away for compression/expansion (its essentially winzip), toast for cd/dvd authoring, quicksilver possibly (although tiger does 99% of its features for you now).

Tbh the standard stuff that comes with OSX (inc iLife) + MS Office + Adobe creative suite + a unix terminal will do 99% of what you want.  For anything else theres bootcamp/wine/parallax.

Found this on my travels when I was looking into moving to Mac from Windows. Top 100 list of decent mac apps. Its debatable due to it being this guys top 100 but there might be some good apps in the list that are for you

http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/11/06/top-100-mac-apps/

web development... i know iWeb just got released (or bundled with leopard not sure) but its apparently not that great

use macs notepad equivalent and dont be lazy

nano!!! nano!!!

if it aint got it install it.

Create a .nanorc in your home directory and shove a syntax scheme from the web in it. That way its pretty too

Quote from: M3ta7h3adnano!!! nano!!!

if it aint got it install it.

Create a .nanorc in your home directory and shove a syntax scheme from the web in it. That way its pretty too

LOL I do hope this is a joke.

If you want a REALLY powerful editor (and dont want to learn vim or emacs) then TextMate is definitely work a look

Bootcamp and a proper OS?

but why would you do that when you just spent a grand.

You get a nice looking laptop that you can actually use for something useful.

Incidentally, the fastest 17" Laptop you can buy for running Vista on doesnt come from Dell, Alienware, Falcon Northwest etc.... Its an Apple Macbook Pro.

So, it seems they can do something right besides the iPod.

Frankly, the best thing apple have ever done is OSX + iLife.  Which is odd for a hardware manufacturer (and something you seem to have overlooked).

Most of OS-Xs performance and ability comes down to a unix core and a pdf-like rendering engine which are largely accelerated in special co-processors I guess so maybe its not soo suprising.