Hey everyone, today’s blog post (and a few others this week) is a screen cast from my desktop in my study at home. I am currently using a 2.4 GHz iMac. I also have a MacBook Pro for portability (I’m hardly ever without my laptop) and its set up exactly like my iMac.
What do I find to be some of the best applications I tend to use every week? Which are some of the most helpful to me as a pastor? This week I’ll be taking a look at my desktop and sharing with you the apps that find their way into my workweek.
In general, just take a look at my doc (the bar of icons at the bottom of my screen). I don’t have any on there that I don’t regularly use. I’m going to give a quick overview today and then throughout the week, I’ll screen cast some details on those that I find most helpful.
Finder. The way you find your way around the Mac environment is basically through the “Finder.” It’s comparable to Windows Explorer in the Windows environment.
Pathfinder (instead of finder). It is much more versatile and worth the small amount it costs. It makes Windows Explorer and Mac Finder look useless.
Safari (I’ve left Firefox behind for the most part).
Google. For e-mail, calendar, contacts, chat, and tasks. Also Reader. Few Google docs. I will review a number of the web applications (WordPress, Picasa, etc.) that I use all the time.
Dropbox. This is an excellent file sharing and synchronizing software. You can share any files with anyone, including yourself across any platform (Windows, Mac, etc.).
Tweetdeck. This is my Twitter client of choice, especially since it has an excellent iPhone web app.
Ecto. This is the Mac-based blogging software I use. I can compose the blog offline and set it to upload when I want and how I want.
Skype. Who doesn’t use this – if you don’t, you are missing out. This is a free way to conduct video/audio/text chat with anyone else who has an internet connection.
Evernote. I can’t say enough about this application for note taking. I will wait to say more, but this is simply excellent.
iTunes. This is the best music software available and with the recent updates its even better.
iPhoto. This is a Mac application for organizing pictures that comes standard with every Mac.
iMovie. I am stunned that this video editing software comes standard on every Mac. Excellent. Create videos and upload to YouTube, e-mail, etc.
Time Machine. Mac’s automatic back-up material.
Windows. Ha! Yep, I still use Windows, but actually do it through my Mac with VMWare. It actually loads up faster than my PC and works great. I’ll detail the tools I use on Windows and why.
iWork. This is Apple’s word processing, numbers, and presentation software. Keynote is absolutely excellent and worth the cost of the entire suite. Pages and Numbers are good (especially for graphics), but not good enough for serious word processing.
Office 2008. I go with the cheap version here that has Word, Excel, PowerPoint (which I loathe to use) and Entourage (Apple’s shot at Outlook).
Over the next few days, I’ll give a brief overview of each of these and how I find them useful.
Those look like applications that most people might use. I could certainly see myself using all of those and probably a few more, if i used a mac 😉
Yeah, some of them are Mac only: Ecto, iWork, iMovie, & Pathfinder. But the others are apps I've used on both Windows and Mac. But, I must say, they are all a bit more fun when you do use them on a Mac :p