Chicken of the VNC is actually a pretty good client from what I can tell (but I’m only an occasional VNC user).

I’d be interested in knowing what you find for image viewing, I haven’t searched much but I could definitely use one.

Meteorologist is a nice little app to put the current temp and weather in your menu bar. There is also Glucose Weatherpop which seems more popular, but it isn’t free and so I haven’t tried it.

Coming from Linux, I’ve gotten very used to seeing my CPU load on screen at all times. MenuMeters lets you put graphs of CPU load, memory usage, network traffic, etc. in your menu– very nice.

X-Chat Aqua is the best IRC client I’ve found thus far.

A few other nice things to have are…

VLC for video playing– there is a lot out there that QuickTime won’t play and keeping Windows Media Player off the system seems like a good idea to me :)

Watson isn’t free but it does some nice things. Sherlock (comes with OS X) does some similar things but you should definitely try both.

This was supposed to be a quick comment but there’s just too much stuff out there!

Web browser: Safari is the king for OSX. Other stuff is slow and dumb compared to it. It has tabbed browsing and lots of other cool stuff. I’d only add the automatic picture resizing to it.

Mail Client — pine and mutt are for cool people. there’s a reason that you are given terminal built into OSX!@!

Word Processor – OpenOffice.org sucked on Mac. I would rather use TexShop than it. In fact, I did until I bought a (employee discounted) version of Microsoft Office. Maybe the newer version of OpenOffice is better. I know Microsoft is evil and everything (speaking of which, you’re the one that was too wussy to run Linux, whereas now I run MacOSX and Debian) but it works well and fast whereas OpenOffice was slow, didn’t work effectively and was slow.

AIM — iChat is awesome!@!@ when I use it, it has the other person’s buddy icon “speaking” their lines and my buddy icon “speaking” mine. At least try it!!@

FTP — Fetch works pretty well. scp also works from the command line.

Text Editor — try the built in one.

Image Viewer — try Preview or iPhoto. Preview is probably closer to what you want.

Fink — install Fink! I don’t use it that much, but you get some sweet debian like commands like fink install. it has definitely been useful.

Honestly, don’t plan out every little application before you use OSX. A lot of the built in apps are really good.

here’s a pretty good resource of various OSX apps:
http://mit.edu/matsakis/software/recommendations/

here’s an article about panther typographic features:
http://www.codepoetry.net/archives/2003/10/24/panthers_major_text_services_upgra
de.php

okay. that’s all for now.

the 12″ is so ueber-portable, by the way, that it’s the way to go. the 15″ is nice but too big to stick in your back pocket and climb up a mountain.

as for when to buy an apple computer, buzz said something a while ago that there are to the fact that there are two options. buy at the start of a cycle or buy at the end of a cycle to get the price savings. i chose the former since i didnt want to be “left behind”.

>Remote Viewing
or you could go the virtual pc route. :)

>purchasing a mac
if i werent impatient for apple to stock other retail stores, i would have bought from best buy and gotten an extended warrenty. i’ve already dropped my laptop while it was in my backpack. unfortunately, my backpack was open and the lower left corner of the laptop now has a small little protrusion. i really hope that warrenty news on thinksecret is a valid rumor. i would so go for that.

also, i need to set aside time to visit an apple store and drop off the mac for some lovin. i’m a victim of the infamous white sploshes on the lcd screen. it doesnt really annoy me, but i’d like to have a perfect laptop (sans the protrusion) for the price i paid.

But, Adrian, I must agree with you on the 12″ PB. Two months in and I still love it!

As for an image viewer, you’ll probably do well with Preview. If you select multiple images and drag them onto preview, it will open them all up in a drawer. You can then cycle through. It reads everything from .PSDs to .GIFs.

For FTP I am liking Transmit (www.panic.com), but if you just need to drop some quick files, you can do FTP right in the finder. Just hit command-k and type in the addy, it will prompt for your log-in. It will mount the server as a disk. Pretty sweet.

For text, TextWrangler is a sweet deal right now (BBedit’s little brother). But you can also still snag BBedit Lite for free. Hydra/SubEthaEdit lacks regex which can be annoying at times.

I need to get those kinds of freelance gigs. :)

Good to see you finally running a machine where you can’t wuss-out and use Windows, though. :) I’m proud to say I’ve been Windows-free for over 6 months now (as in haven’t touched it except at work). Woohoo!