Tuesday, February 27th, 2007...1:18 pm
A New Day is Here
Following up on my previous post, A Brand New Day is on the Horizon, I wanted to let you, readers, in on some good news.
I am now the Proud Owner of a MacBook Pro!!
I ordered the machine today from Apple, Inc. I am so excited. I was going to wait for Leopard to come out, as well as the new Apple Store in Birmingham, Alabama. But after talking to BBP friend, Emory Williamson-Lundsberg and he said to GO GO GO!!! and buy that machine! Since there is no release date in sight for Leopard, nor any opening date for the Apple Store, I went ahead and pulled the trigger. I went with a refurbished model (since it was $500 cheaper than new). The specs are
Refurbished MacBook Pro,
15-inch, 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 15.4-inch widescreen display (1440×900 resolution)
- 2GB (two SODIMMs) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- 120GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive
- Slot-load 6x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
- ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB GDDR3 memory
- Built-in iSight Camera
- Front Row and Apple Remote
It should ship this week, and I should get it early next week! And as Emory told me
Emory: welcome home, michael ramm.
I am really excited about the world of Mac software that will be open to me now! That will also give BBP a Mac slant that we have not had before.
So, please tell me…what are the ESSENTIAL Apps that I have to get?? Not necessarily GTD software, but anything and everything software! I know that Quicksilver is #1 on most lists, and I plan to utilize that. Emory will say DEVONthink and I will probably check that out for reference support.
Also, Jason and I have been banging on between 3 and 4 GTD web apps, and finding a lot of good stuff in each of them. Unfortunately, there are some not so good things in each of them also. We are in touch with the developers of the apps to see what it coming that would address our concerns. I don’t want to name names as of yet, but if you want to suggest your favorite, we will be glad to take a look at it. We are using the list at the Ultimate GTD List for Online Software as a guide.
In conjunction with the recent interviews of BBP founders on Cranking Widgets, we will soon have an interviews of Cranking Widgets founder, Brett Kelly. Hopefully that will be up tomorrow or Thursday.
That is all that is going on here at BBP. Thanks for stopping by.
- Michael
11 Comments
February 27th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Bravo. Good choice.
GTD orientated Software: journler is a “free” outliner (http://journler.com/); try mymind (http://www.sebastian-krauss.de/software/) a mindmapping app (donationware), I dayly work with Circus Ponies Notebook and DEVONthink Pro and recommend them.
You’ll find a lot off information at:
http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml
Cheers, Dany
February 27th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
I was going to wait for the iPhone to come out before I bought my MacBook, but I went ahead and got one. Not quite a MacBook Pro like yours, but a Mac nonetheless.
I’m also new to the Mac and I wanted to make sure I could use MS Office docs, but I didn’t want to pay for the Mac version. I’ve been using OpenOffice.org on my PC for awhile so I got it for the Mac. It works great. Another Office alternative is neooffice.org.
Dany: I likes the look of that Journler program. I’m going to check that out.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Congrats Michael - you’ll be having all sorts of fun in no time. I’ve returned to the Mac recently (although I have a lovely Lenovo X60 Tablet PC as well) and have been thoroughly enjoying the exploration you’re about to venture into. There is a whole ne world of very inventive software for you to look into.
Here are a few suggestions for tools I believe I’ll be sticking with (still in hunter gatherer mode):
MindManager: (I know here are less expensive alternatives but I simply love this application on both platforms and it’s an all-day, every day app in my work so well worth the investment). Freemind comes highly recommended if you need a no-cost mapping tool.
Adium: a great unified IM tool.
Newsfire: A drop-dead gorgeous RSS aggregator. I tried NetNewsWire (I’ve been a NewsGator user for years) but really prefer Newsfire for managing my 400+ feeds.
PathFinder: A serious Finder alternative. Merlin dd a great videocast with Leo Laporte about this app and I literally downloaded and installed it while I was still watching the video. Invest a bit of time in evaluating this one – there’s literally nothing it can’t do in terms of managing your files, folders, and applications.
That should get you started. Have lots of fun. I am.
February 27th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Well we should bid you farewell for a while a you fall into the pit of fun.
I like NovaMind (http://www.nova-mind.com/), TextMate (http://macromates.com/), Hazel (http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.html), Candy Factory (http://www.panic.com/candybar/), man the list can go on and on.. there are some beautiful apps here.. track your app usage with OnLife, AlarmClock Pro for all sorts of alarms, AppZapper for scrubbing those apps to the core, Chicken of the VNC is you VNC a good deal, Colloquy for irc, ComicLife for an afternoon of cartoonery, CSSEdit (the ultimate), Curio’s another neat dossier capture/note/mind tool, Delicious Library for your books, Handbrake for dvd archiving, OmniGraffle for your Visio needs, Pzziz for naps, Quicksilver for machacks, TinkerTool & Cocktail for controlling the os/more…
hehe.. -a
February 27th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I just wanted to drop in and say that you shouldn’t run away when I mention unix software.
I personally find the underpinnings of OsX to be invaluable for my work in Science. ha ha ha. 
With the new packaging systems (http://www.finkproject.org/), unix is a lot easier to handle than it used to be in the past. Installing a unix program that has the package system setup is as simple as “fink install mutt”. Bammo, it figures out the dependencies and installs them. Oh, and if you know a bit of applescript, you can even make your own programs with apple’s Xcode Tools. Wonderful stuff. Gimp is a wonderful unix program almost as powerful as photoshop (even takes their plugins- doesn’t do CMYK though). The list goes on and on. The X side of things doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s been invaluable to my work. No longer can the Mac claim there isn’t much in the way of software… with X installed, almost the full world of OpenSourced linux software is available.
A site I love to use when searching for software is:
http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/
Oh, I also love jhead- a little program that takes info out of the EXIF headers of photos. You can make jhead rename your photos with the date and time they were taken. Makes sorting them extremely easy.
Image-magick is also wonderful- translates almost any image, and can do some more complex tasks all in the commandline. Benefit of that- you can do a whole mess of folders all at the same time if you want. Powerful stuff.
But, if you’re like me- the command-line is a strange world. I used to use it a long time ago, but usually to do extremely simple things. I’m slowly learning how to do more complex tasks… like running a database of genealogy information for my family (lifelines).
So, just wanted to sow a small seed here… the Mac is extremely powerful. The X side of things makes it two computers in one, really… the underpinnings of freeBSD make it extremely secure and reliable. I think this is a major reason for why the Mac is doing so well.
Another little one for you (although it’s not perfect), rsync is a little unix utility that can be scripted to do all sorts of wonderful things- daily backups of your hard-drive… backups of your keychain USB drive when you plug it in…
Ok, I’ll shutup now.
Go get Quicksilver, install it- you’ll never look at the machine again.
-Allen
ps- never hesitate to get in touch if something is stumping you. Oh, and if you find the keymaps for the arrow keys and pgdn pg up etc., frustrating, there’s a fix for that as well… (to be more like what you’re used to on the PC).
February 27th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Ach- you need Growl as well. It’s just plain useful. Love it to death.
February 28th, 2007 at 4:30 am
A new day is here, but probably it won’t be a very productive one having this new gadget to fiddle with…
February 28th, 2007 at 8:43 am
@Everyone
Thanks so much for all of the suggestions.
@Marc
I watched the MacBreak with Merlin and Leo about Path Finder. It looks very cool. I think that, for now, I am going to get to re-learn the Finder [I started on Mac back in System 6, 7, 8 and 9].
@Allen
I looked at Growl and it looks pretty cool. I still don’t fully understand the relationship of running Linux apps on the Mac, but that is something that I am sure that I will learn about.
@Jeroen
You, my friend, are very correct. At least, not until I get reacquainted back to the Mac.
Please keep the suggestions coming. I am going to also need a money program for the Mac. I use Quicken on the PC, and may use it on the Mac (if it is available)…but I would like to know what is out there.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:50 am
You’re going to love it. I, too, was waiting for Leopard, but when my 12″ G4 PB died an untimely death, I debated long and hard between the Macbook and Macbook Pro. All in all, I loved the form-factor of my PowerBook so I decided that since I’m not a gamer or doing anything more graphics intensive than tweaking pics of the family and the occasional home movie, the Macbook was the way to go. I’m hoping it will be my faithful companion through my entire Ph.D. program.
As for what’s on my machine, I have been trying to keep it lean. I posted a page on my wiki to help me keep track as well as to answer questions like this.
http://selias.wikispaces.com/macbook
March 11th, 2007 at 9:30 am
If you are looking for a simple, effective GTD implementation for projects, contexts and next actions, you might give Ghost Action a try. It’s clean and syncs beautifully with iCal.
http://ghostparksoftware.com/
I paid $20 for my copy, but there’s a 14 day trial period and the developer is giving free lisences to popular blogs in order to encourage reviews.
March 12th, 2007 at 4:52 am
This is so cool.
I’ve been doing the same in waiting for Leopard to come before moving over to Mac from a long long relationship with Windows.
What has helped me decide this is software like parallels and their app called Coherence. It claims to let you run Windows applications within the Mac OS. This means that I’ll be able to run Microsoft Office 2007 on my Mac. I’m also hoping the Outlook Add-in too and OneNote.
Information on this can be found here : http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/coherence/
There is a pretty good post on this over at lifehacker on how to get this working: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/parallels/hack-attack-how-to-run-windows-and-mac-apps-sidebyside-with-parallels-221002.php
I’m interested to know about the refurbished Mac and how that works for you. Wonder if this is something that is also available to us in the UK? It would certainly make the switch less painful.
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