Just bought my first Mac. Now what?
 

Well, this die-hard Windows user has finally bought his first Mac. Rather than learn everything the hard way, I'm hoping to leverage the experience of all you Mac users out there and get some advice on the best apps, utilities and widgets to install.

What are your favorite programs and tools for the Mac?

personally its gotta be firefox (obvious I know), smultron (its a text editor which handles multiple files has line numbers and does syntax highlighting) and cyberduck (FTP). Other people will tell you different things but these are the 3 things I use the most. The best thing is that they are all free too!

Thanks, Kerry-Anne. I use Flock on Windows (based on Firefox), but not having used Safari much, I'm curious -- why Firefox over Apple's own Safari?

I just find some of the things in safari strange but that is probably because I don't use it very often. Its like why use FF over IE on Windows? I've used FF for the last 5 years or more first on Windows then on Mac when I switched over to Macs nearly 2 years ago.

Personally, I use Safari. I fell like it is the only "mac" styled browser. FF3 has come quite a long way, but not far enough. And yes, Safari does have it's quirks. The only reason I would use FF over safari would be plugins.

Now for FTP I use a paid client. It is called Transmit FTP by Panic, Inc. It for me has been the simplest to use and has some amazing features. For file editing (as I do it heavily) I use another paid solution. It is the best of the ones I tried, but I have only used 2. Coda has a truly nice UI and has some nice features.

Widget wise, not many, as for me, dashboard hasn't had much use for me. Some other apps I have installed to do specialized tasks that most don't do, so I won't go into those.

Flock 1.1 has a Macintosh version available on the Flock Website.
http://www.flock.com/get-ready-to-flock/?platform=mac

Great thread. I'm gonna try out smultron on Kerry-Anne's advise. I normally use BBEdit but wouldn't mind trying something else.

I also use Transmit. I've been using it forever and have never found it lacking in anyway. I like the interface. I've never tried anything else, other than fetch though.

What is Flock? I have never heard of that.

me too ... :)

anyway i heard some 'rumors' about Safari, it seems the fastest browser in the market ... but i still prefer FF, especially with the new releases ...

I didn't know you use a Mac. :) But yeah, Panic has a great support team!

It is the "Social Networking Browser". It has a sidebar that interacts with the Social Networking sites like Facebook.

It is pretty speedy.