Leopard Upgrade

December 17th, 2008

Leopard OS X

Yesterday I upgraded my macbook pro to Leopard, the latest OS X operating system, over a year after Apple released it.  Whew.  It took me 4 days to organize, clean and backup my stuff (over 200GB), about a day to figure out how to install leopard without a bootable DVD (see leopard dmg install), and less than an hour to do the actual install.  Why now?  Not because of all the new features, but because I wanted to develop an iPhone app. Stay tuned for more on that.  Yay.

After a fresh install, here’s what I add/customize:

  • Firefox 3 [Free] – fast, but I love that it remembers all URLS and you just type any part of the URL or Page Title and it shows you dropdown of possible matches.  Also love these firefox add-ons/plugins: greasemonkey, web developer, firebug, live HTTP Headers, more.
  • iLife ’08 [$$] – new iTunes (love the Genius), new iPhoto (love the auto-grouping of events), and more.
  • Adobe CS4 [$$] – gotta have Photoshop, Acrobat, Indesign, etc.
  • VLC [Free] – best media player out there – avi, mpg, mp3, mov, wav, etc – i love “hot keys” -† its FREE
  • Xee [Free] – Excellent gif/jpg viewer (don’t *need* this in leopard)
  • iSquint [Free] – convert digital camera movies from big file sizes to smaller for upload, sharing, ipod, or iphone.
  • Transmission [Free] – bit torrent client, so you can download movies, tv, games
  • Handbrake [Free] – Rip DVDs – in one-step, create .avi movies for ipod, iphone, etc.
  • iStumbler [Free] – helps you find a good wifi signal when you’re not home or office.
  • SuperDuper [Free] – easy way to back up your entire laptop to external drive or network.
  • Chicken of the VNC [Free] – if you have a windows or linux box, put vnc server on it, then install this vnc client on your mac, and now you can control your windows from mac!

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