Built in Apps
OS X comes with a selection of build in applications, the infamous "iApps" and a selection of other utilities. As the year progressed and OS X was updated a few new apps also appeared such as iCal and Safari. I don't use or even know all the functions of these programs but I'll tell you of my experiences with them.
iTunes
iTunes got a lot of use from me. I have a lot of CDs and listen to music pretty much all the time unless really deep concentration is required. I filled 15GB with music and that's less than half of my collection.
iTunes also has the music store now and it looks pretty interesting but I buy CDs as they are not compressed, until I can buy uncompressed files the store is simple of no use to me. iTunes compresses music into MP3s or AAC files and these are fine for headphones or PC speakers (they've since added an uncompressed format to iTunes).
When importing music iTunes gets the track names from an online database but it sometimes messes up, sometimes there is a selection to pick from and there's no way to tell which is which so you just have to pick one and hope it's right. It usually is but it's sometimes found the wrong results but this is pretty rare. I do have one Fleetwood Mac CD which iTunes is convinced is a Chris de Burgh CD, I have both so that can be a bit weird. This is easily fixed though as you just select the tracks and change the info for Album / Artist.
One oddity I discovered was when ripping CDs which were scratched, iTunes can sometimes have a hard time dealing with these and produces some strange audio files. I found however that if I was to copy the files to disc as AIFF files they would usually copy fine without problems even if they were scratched. I could then rip them and the resulting files would be fine.
iTunes never had any problems and did it's job of playing music. It organises the music in a sensible manner allowing you to select whatever you want quickly and without a fuss. All in all iTunes is an excellent piece of software. There are reasons Macs cost more, iTunes is one of them.
iPhoto
iPhoto is another one of those reasons. I plugged in my camcorder (it has a built in still picture function) and it recognised it first time allowing me to download the files. When I got a new camera I plugged it in and again it worked first time.
iPhoto allows you to put your photos into albums and generally organize them. You can see all files at once or just the last downloaded ones (which is useful). You can also edit photos but I prefer to do more advanced editing in Photoshop.
To be honest iPhoto runs like a dog on this machine but both it and OS X has since been updated so it should be faster now. Apart from the speed issue iPhoto is another excellent piece of software, then again I've been using it with a couple of thousand 6 MegaPixel images so perhaps I'm just asking a little too much of it.
Other Apps
You also get apps such as iMovie, iCal, iChat and a few others but I didn't use them much if at all so I can't really say anything about them other than the fact they are present.
There are a selection of other small apps which I did make use of however:
Preview
This just displays images and PDF files, it seemed to have problems with some PDF files so I just downloaded Acrobat reader and used it. I never used it for reading PDFs after the first couple of months so I don't know if it got any better.
The picture viewer worked fine and it's display is better than iPhoto so I generally use it to have a good look at pictures though it is considerably slower at actually displaying my images than iPhoto. Anti-aliasing is also supported but it's a bit over the top for my liking generating blurry images.
TextEdit
It's a text editor, what can I really say? It does it's job well and I used it a lot, preferring it after MS Word managed to annoy me. Pretty much everything I've written for the last year (including much of this) was done in TextEdit.
It also has spell checking and you can switch rich text processing off in rtf and HTML if you want to get your hands dirty (I also used it as an HTML editor).
My only gripe is the fact the file name gets deleted if you convert from rich text to plain text.
Safari
This is the new KHTML based web browser Apple introduced. I also used Internet Explorer and the Mozilla based Camino but I soon switched over to Safari for 99% of browsing. I do a lot of on-line research so I'm a heavy web user. Safari is a bit flaky at times but as before I have an older version, the newer versions don't seem to work on Jaguar.
The tabbed browsing and pop up ad killer work fine and the ability to add a button which opens a series of pages in different tabs was immensely useful (you can do this in Mozilla but this works better).
- "A year with a Mac, Page 1/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 2/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 3/4"
- "A year with a Mac, Page 4/4"
