I list the following apps with the caveat that they might not be must-have for everyone. Someone who doesn't use their computer often might only need Finder, an adequately featured web browser, and a text editor. I use my computer for much more. MAC Fluidline for me represents the transition from high school makeup user to Real Adult Woman makeup user. It’s one of my favorite things ever. It’s a pot of eyeliner liquid, essentially, and use can use a skinny brush to use it for the easiest, most dummy-proof winged eyeliner ever.
Mac applications make the world go around! And although Mavericks gets much of the glory for its elegant design and power, you can’t really do much, productivity-wise, from your Desktop without a snappy application.
Read on to get acquainted with ten iMac applications you can’t do without. Even if you don’t use one or two of these great tools now, you’ll likely realize that you need and want them in the future.
Some of these applications are built in to OS X — read that as free — whilst others you must buy. You’ll see here which is which, along with a ballpark price for the commercial stuff.
DVDs and CDs on your iMac
If your iMac has an internal SuperDrive (or you’ve added an external USB optical drive to your iMac), come explore the best two DVD applications around for your Mavericks machine.
Watching DVD movies with aplomb
Face it — that gorgeous widescreen 21.5” or 27” flat-panel monitor on your iMac is perfect for watching DVD movies. Thanks to the good people in Cupertino, you’ll find that the Mavericks DVD Player does a great job at screening all your favorite DVD films:
By default, DVD Player runs automatically when you load a DVD, including those that you create yourself.
There’s even a feature that remembers whether you viewed a disc already and also gives you the opportunity to restart the film where you left off.
Yes, they really named it Toast
Need to record audio and data CDs or DVD-Vs on your iMac? The Cadillac of recording software for the Mac was, is, and will likely always be the unlikely named Toast, from Roxio. The latest version is Toast 11 Titanium, available online for about $80.
Mac Must Have Lipsticks
The built-in audio recording features in iTunes are certainly fine, and the discs that it produces are compatible with any audio CD player or DVD player that you’re likely to find. You can also burn files to data CDs and DVDs without a separate application. However, you’ll need Toast to record specialized formats like
Management and communication with an iMac
Both Calendar and Apple Mail are mighty applications, bent on organizing things: your time, calendar, and/or your Internet e-mail traffic. Defender hd app for mac. (They do a great job, too.) Apple provides both in OS X, so you can keep your credit card in your pocket or purse.
Staying on top of things with Calendar
Calendar is one of those oddities in the computer world. Unlike iTunes or iMovie, it’s not particularly sexy (in a multimedia way), and it doesn’t get oodles of coverage in the glossy Macintosh magazines. Still, everybody eventually ends up using it. Sooner or later, every Mac owner appreciates Calendar as an unsung hero. (And a free unsung hero to boot.)
Unfortunately, Calendar can’t enter events for you. The Data Elves aren’t going to show up and magically type for you, so you have to create events manually. After they’re in the Calendar database, however, you can
By default, Calendar includes two calendars — Home and Work — but you can set up as many separate calendars as you like, for scheduling everything from soccer seasons to DVD releases.
One doggone good e-mail application
Ask yourself this question: “Am I taking my e-mail application for granted?” Sure, e-mail might not take center stage in the computer magazines these days, but consider what your life would be like with a substandard, whip-and-buggy e-mail application — almost as bad as no e-mail at all.
The best e-mail applications (like Apple Mail) have powerful, trainable spam filters that improve automatically as you manually check your junk mail. A first-class performer (like Apple Mail) offers fully automated scripting for common tasks, snazzy backgrounds, fonts and colors, and the ability to create HTML-format messages with embedded images and objects. Are you seeing a pattern here?
One great feature in Apple Mail is the ability to organize your messages by threads. (In plain English, a thread groups replies so that they can be read as an actual discussion.) Anyone who frequents Usenet newsgroups or web discussion sites recognizes a threaded view as easier to read than a traditional sequential display, especially when your mail is heavy on replies and includes ongoing conversations with several folks involved.
It’s free, it’s fun, and it’s fashionable — go, Apple Mail, go!
iMacs and productivity
Sooner or later, you’re going to need the ability to create flashy, professional-looking documents from your iMac, or you might need to run an absolutely-gotta-have-it application that’s not available for Macs. This section covers two productivity applications — Parallels Desktop and iWork — and the serious stuff they can do.
Windows 7 or 8 on your iMac without rebooting
Okay, there are fewer applications available to Macs than PCs running Windows, and practically every Mac owner on the planet has one or two PC programs that make life easier. Sure, you can use the Mavericks Boot Camp feature to set up a Windows system on your iMac, but you have to reboot to use Windows, and it’s very difficult to share Mac data with your Windows applications (even though they’re actually on the same computer).
More information on Boot Camp is always available from the OS X Help system, but you can start the ball rolling by double-clicking the Boot Camp Assistant icon in your Utilities folder (which is tucked inside your Applications folder). The Assistant provides step-by-step onscreen instructions. Just make sure that you have your Windows 7 or Windows 8 installation discs handy.
What if you don’t want to reboot, and you want to share data easily between your Mac and Windows applications? Luckily, Parallels offers a solution: Parallels Desktop for Mac. The program sells for about $80, but this doesn’t include a licensed copy of Windows. (Yeah, you have to provide your own.) However, this nifty program can easily run virtually all Windows XP, Vista, and Seven programs — without rebooting your iMac — complete with support for external USB devices, Ethernet networks, the Internet, and your iMac printer.
Parallels Desktop simulates everything necessary for you to get the full functionality out of Windows. For example, this jewel automatically (and transparently) handles your Windows Internet connection, network tasks, and CD and DVD access. You can run full screen or run Windows in a window (pun joyfully intended).
As if that weren’t enough, you can also run multiple operating systems. So if you need Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu, or Windows 2000 along with your Windows 8 system, no problem — all it takes is the install disc for those operating systems and the hard drive space to hold’em. Outstanding!
Naturally, performance is an issue — and, to be honest, Parallels Desktop isn’t for the PC gamer, even with the newest Macs and their super-duper GeForce and Radeon video cards. Because today’s most demanding PC games push an actual PC to the limit, they just run too sluggishly on a Mac emulating a PC — they do run, just slowly. (Also, virtually all of today’s blockbuster PC games are also being ported to OS X, so why not just run the Mac version?)
If you must run a Windows game on your iMac, consider using Boot Camp to boot directly into Windows, which will allows your system to devote all its resources to the game at hand.
The more memory installed in your iMac, the better Parallels Desktop will run!
You can install
Parallels Desktop for Mac makes it easy to shut down a simulated computer — akin to a laptop computer going into hibernation — while keeping your open documents intact. When you reload your “virtual” Windows machine, you’re right back at the exact same point when you shut down.
iWork Suite
Some say that the Macintosh version of Office should be an automatic purchase at the moment you buy your computer — it’s that indispensable to every Mac owner. The applications that make up Office may be superb, but every owner of a brand-new iMac should try the three free iWork suite applications before jumping onto the Microsoft productivity bandwagon. (Note that owners of older iMacs will still have to buy the iWork applications from the App Store.)
Most computer owners simply don’t use or need all the features and hoo-hah that’s built into the Mac Office applications! For example, if all you produce on paper are simple letters, typical schoolwork, or brochures for your home business, Word might be an expensive case of overkill. Plus, the three iWork applications produce documents that are as good-looking as anything from the Office suite!
You can exchange Word documents with others who use the Pages word processing application, which is part of the iWork suite. The same goes for Excel and PowerPoint. Respectively, Numbers and Keynote are powerful alternatives to their Microsoft counterparts. In fact, all iWork applications offer the same ease-of-use and simplicity you’ve come to expect from OS X Mavericks and iLife favorites such as iPhoto, iTunes, and GarageBand.
iWork applications offer templates and assistants that are similar to those in Office, so creating all sorts of specialized business and personal documents is easy. New templates and clip art are always available online as well.
System stuff to consider with your iMac
The utilities in this section help keep your hardware, software, and files in tip-top shape.
Maintenance
The following two applications are indispensable utility tools that every Mac owner should master (no matter what type of Mac you’re using).
If you’re not already using Disk Utility, you should. On a regular basis. Really.
Most Mac owners think of Disk Utility only for checking internal and external hard drives. But don’t forget the most important function that Disk Utility offers: the ability to fix file and folder permission problems. Launch Disk Utility and check your OS X startup drive on a weekly basis. Enklov w10 app on mac. Permission problems can cause your applications to act like they’re on mind-altering drugs or even lock you out of using those applications altogether!
Of course, there’s more to Disk Utility, but you’re not likely to use heavy-duty functions very often, such as partitioning or RAID management. These are advanced features that one typically uses only when initializing a new hard drive.
Protecting your iMac from viral infection should be a top priority. Get yourself an antivirus application — one that automatically checks the discs that you load as well as the stuff that you download. Check out VirusBarrier 2013 or the excellent freeware application ClamXav 2. Set your antivirus application to automatically download the latest virus definition files from the Internet and scan your entire system once monthly.
Files
Care to compress a folder full of files to save space on your hard drive or maybe send them via e-mail? Perhaps you’d like to use the keyboard and the power of Unix to perform file manipulation miracles that are practically impossible by using the mouse. Either way, the following applications have you covered.
In the Windows universe, the WinZip archive file is king, followed by WinRAR and a host of other archiving formats. Mavericks has built-in support for compressing and decompressing Zip archives.
Mavericks can unarchive a Zip file when necessary — just double-click the archive icon — and you can right-click a file or folder and then choose Compress from the menu to create a Zip archive.
However, there is another archive format that’s popular among the Mac set — the Stuffit format, which is handled StuffIt Deluxe, from Smith Micro Software. The application will set you back $50, but it’s worth every penny for the convenience and flexibility that archives bring to your Desktop:
If you’re interested in doing the command-lines dance, know how this must-have application is a little different from the others: You have to type your commands manually, and there are no icons or fancy graphics. You’re in the character-based Twilight Zone, and only the bravest of Mac novices will venture there.
However, when you launch the Terminal application, you open a window into the Unix core that lies underneath OS X. Suddenly you can do wondrous things that you can’t do from the Finder menu:
Setting up your brand new computer can be a big task that can take you hours to personalize and get to know. Most of my time is taken finding the perfect background image and little thought is put into exactly what programs and applications I even have on my computer.
If you’re like me and seemed to miss the part where you suddenly become an expert in technology, you might appreciate a list of five apps for your MacBook that will enhance your experience and unlock the endless potential of your device.
To have a look at Macbooks, Domayne Online have the largest range of Apple products including MacBook Airs and Apple MacBook Computers.
Shazam
You may not realize that one of the world’s most popular apps is available on your computer. Not only is Shazam useful for identifying music and lyrics but you can also follow what your favorite artists are ‘Shazaming’. With links through to purchasing artists and albums, you can add songs to your repertoire instantly so you never miss a beat.
Pixelmator
This program is a graphics editor optimized for Macs to give you a creative release. Whether you want to edit, touch up or create your own image, Pixelmator has your covered with various tools, colors effects, and extension possibilities; this app is one of the most comprehensive editing programs.
Share your designs easily through common formats that can easily be exported through the app itself. The Apple MacBook Pro 13.3-inch is a perfect laptop to host the use of this app. Its brilliant retina display will make your graphics come to life and bring clarity to the images you haven’t seen before. Its seventh-generation dual-core Intel Core i5 processor will have your computer glide through functions without dropping speed and maintain its brilliance through its 10-hour battery life.
Spotify
Get all of your music in one place with Spotify. Not only can you store your music to listen to it even when you’re offline, but you can also explore an array of genres and styles recommended to you based on your likes and dislikes. You can keep up to date with the top charts and your favorite artists so you can stay in the loop, discover new music and create an infinite number of playlists to suit any occasion.
Franz
The number of messages we receive can be mind-boggling sometimes. With hundreds of messages pouring in through various apps, it’s hard to keep on top of all of your communications. Franz is a free application that combines your inbox across a variety of apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, HipChat and many more, all in the one place.
If you want to experience this program on your MacBook but you need an upgrade, grab an Apple MacBook Air in Gold for under $2000 from domayne.com.au. This laptop combines functionality, design, and power with its lightest and sleekest model which still features an all-day battery life. With 8GB of memory and a Dual-core eighth-generation Intel Core i5 processor and UHD Graphics 617, you are promised speed and efficiency demonstrating that Apple didn’t sacrifice a lot when making their lightest build yet.
Hocus Focus
When doing research or completing a task, it’s common to have a whole number of apps and programs open that can end up being super confusing rather than helpful. The Hocus Focus App helps to declutter your screen by hiding applications that have been inactive for a period of time. With the ability to block certain apps but allow others, means you are in control of what you keep in your sights and what can be minimized for later.
Admittedly, these apps don’t even scratch the surface of must-haves for your computer but they do give you a good base to then explore the App Store for yourself. With unlimited possibilities, you can personalize your computer and unlock its full potential through a whole number of programs.
With apps that take you from organization through to editing, protecting and even entertaining, it is easy to get lost in the ways that you can improve your computer. So while I go and make a playlist for each day of my week, find your niche in the App Store and make your computer into the companion meant for you.
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