Last week Amanda & I went with our friend, Angela, to The Grove to help her pick out a new Mac Book. Unfortunately she had to wait a few days for it to arrive, she wanted a larger hard-drive put in and the Apple Stores don't do any modifying themselves... unless it's to repair something.

But it showed up a few days later, along with a free printer and jet-black 2GB iPod Nano. Angela seemed very excited, it's her first Mac. Last night she sent a text asking if we wanted to meet at the Solar De Cahuenga Cafe to geek it out with our laptops [well... not me, but Amanda's laptop, I own a desktop]. Also Angela wanted to steal some of my music, especially my Faulty Chromosome collection.

Seeing as how it was her first Mac, I knew there was a long list of App's that she wouldn't be privy to yet. For example, on her desktop she had MSN Messenger - so I helped her set up the Mac-only chat program Adium. Which is not only small, slick and unobtrusive - it allows you to sign into to multiple accounts, under multiple services, all at the same time. The only thing it's missing is video chat, but they are supposed to be working very hard on that.

Some other App's I put on her Mac:

Coverflow - which is something I can't even really explain, so I decided to cut & pasted the video from their website:

Firefox - Safari is a great browser, but I still use Firefox for the most part. Although with some of the new features in Safari coming out in the next OS release, I might switch back.

Acqlite - this is my favorite peer-to-peer file sharing program, it's a stripped down version of Acqisition, which I really love, but am too broke to purchase, and it's gotten very naggy the last few updates. But Acqlite is completely free and fast.

It was funny though because she had forgot to charge her laptop before coming to the Cafe, so I couldn't do much for her Mac before it was running red. If you're reading this Angela, here are some other apps' I use a lot:

GimmeSomeTune - this is a tiny plug-in for iTunes, you can set it up to fetch artwork for whatever song you are listening to automatically, and it's usually very good about finding good quality album covers.

PearLyrics Widget - I'm obviously a little anal with my music collection, this widget hides out in your dashboard and works much like GimmeSomeTune, except this fetched the lyrics for whatever song you are listening to and adds them to the song's information.

Virtue Desktop - this is great if you have a small screen to work with. It allows to set-up multiple desktops... which is kinda' hard to explain. Amanda really doesn't like to use it - but I'd go crazy without if I didn't have it. The way mine desktops are set up now - I have three separate [virtual] screens, the one to the far left has my on-all-the-time apps, like Mail, Vienna [my RSS reader], iTunes, iCal, etc... the screen in the center is my main stuff, just whatever I'm working on at the moment, and the screen to the far right, has my internet apps'. And you can rotate from desktop to desktop in an instant... I should have just linked to this YouTube video.

Democracy - the best RSS video player out there [and it's for Windows too], this really opens up a lot of doors for online distribution of people's films and vlogs. And don't forget to add the Four Eyed Monstors podcast - it's the best podcast out there.

Vienna - the only way I manage to keep up with all the blogs I read.

AppZapper - the best way to delete programs and all the hidden junk that comes with them. If you drag, for example, Internet Explorer into AppZapper, it will find every last file that is related to I.E. and erase that also.

SMART Reporter - this isn't really anything I "use", but it is open on my computer 24/7, it hangs out in your top menu and as long as it's green, you can be sure you have no issues with your hard-drive. But if ever turns red, it means your drive is showing signs of corruption or failure and it gives you a chance to turn your computer off and take it in before things get serious and you loose important files. I guess the idea behind this program is 'better safe than sorry'.

I feel very dorky for writing this post - but hopefully Angela and someone else out there finds it useful.