New Macbook, Time for Change Part I

by Samuel Febres

Well, I’ve probably babbled about this to everybody who’s given me more than a second to talk, but it’s time I blog about it. I am the proud owner of a brand new MacBook,  the new Aluminum casing ones that were recently released. It’s sexy.

So far, I’ve had it one week, and it has been a world of difference. For a little perspective I was running an iMac that I got in January of 2002. It’s a 700 Mhz G4 with 768 MB of RAM. I spent so much time waiting…. ugh. Anyway, that problem is gone now.

This thing is amazing. Stats below.

Anyway, with a new computer comes transferring and installing new software.
I plan on sharing a list of software I have installed on the new computer and recommend you check out. I hope you enjoy it, and If you haven’t checked out the software, click the links and let me know what you think. We’ll start with web browsers.

Safari

Safari is my weapon of choice, and on OS X, it’s the default browser.

What makes Safari special?
Well, it’s fast! It looks great as well. It doesn’t take up a whole lot of real estate on your screen and isn’t a distracting eye sore and lets you surf the web without getting in the way. The way Safari handles bookmarks and the bookmarks bar is very elegant. Let’s say you have a group of websites you like to visit pretty consistently. With Safari, you can create a folder on your Bookmarks Bar, and add all those site there to make a quick drop down of your favorite sites to visit. You can also open all the sites in that one folder in their own individual tab if you’d like. Safari includes an embedded RSS reader, which would be a great way for a beginner to start learning and using RSS feeds.

Some other great features of Safari is that it renders photos the way they are supposed to look natively, allows you to resize text boxes if you need a little more space to type or see, has a web first ‘snap-back’ feature and Safari’s Find Features is the best of any browser out there. Check out http://www.apple.com/safari/ for more information.

Camino

Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.

The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on (Macs, of course). The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine.

What makes Camino special?

Camino includes native Ad Blocking that is ridiculously good as well as session saving. If a page has a search feature, such as youtube or Facebook, you have the option of adding that search to Camino’s search bar secion, re-ordering the search engines added or you can delete them. Camino also natively supports Mac OS X keychain, and maintains compatibility with Safari keychain entries so that it’s easy to switch back and forth and like Safari, Camino has a simple elegant look that let’s you browse the internet without getting in your way. Another favorite feature I love is that Camino supports has the ability to block Flash animation from sites. It’s a beautiful thing.

For more information on Camino, visit http://caminobrowser.org/

Opera

Opera started out as a research project in Norway’s largest telecom company, Telenor, in 1994, and branched out into an independent development company named Opera Software ASA in 1995. Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser, a high-quality, multi-platform product for a wide range of platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products.

What makes Opera special?

Opera has a feature called Speed Dial that allows you to save up to 9 websites that you visit on a regular basis to individual square whenever you open up a new window or tab. You can then quickly click and the select the tab you’re interested in to visit that site quickly without having to type in the address. Opera also includes access to different search engines such as amazon.com, google, and others, and you can perform searches quickly by typing shortcuts in the address bar. Opera has great tab management as well, and if you hover over any tab you have open, you can get a quick preview of the content on that site.

Some other features that Opera provides are customizable skins, widget support, a quick and light mail client, mouse gestures, plug-in blocking and a feed preview (as well as a reader). To get more information on the Opera browser, visit http://www.opera.com/

Opera is fast and actually has a lot of innovative features that were stolen borrowed by Google for their Chrome browser. Google it.

Firefox

Firefox is an open source browser like Camino that is based on the Gecko rendering engine. Most folks have already heard of Firefox in some way shape or form.

What makes Firefox special?

Because of Firefox’s history it is a very customizable browser by having Add-on/plugin support. If there’s a particular feature or item you would like for Firefox to do, you can probably find it by searching their Add-Ons site. Some other features of Firefox include it’s own password manager (as opposed to using Mac OS X’s keychain), a smart location bar that quickly searches through your history of sites for what you are looking for, and 1-click bookmarking of sites. Firefox also allows you to add Searches from sites around the web, and includes a Session Restore feature should Firefox unexepectedly close.

Check out http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ for more information.

These are some of the browsers I downloaded for use on my new computer. There are plenty other browsers out there. What’s your favorite?