What must-have software for a new mac owner can you recommend?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 12, 2012 at 10:12 AM

Here are the applications that reside in my Dock Bar:

Finder
Mail
Safari
Scrivener
Tinderbox
Bento
iPhoto
iTunes
Sandvox (an easy to use web site builder and manager)
MacJournal
DevonThink Pro
Bean (a lightweight, free word processor)
Pages (Apple’s word processor)
Voila (a screen capture program)
TheBrain
VMWare Fusion (so I can run ConnectedText)
Yojimbo
OmniOutliner
Evernote

As you can see, there’s a bit of redundancy here (good luck with avoiding CRIMPing). If you have heavy-duty research material to manage, then DevonThink is probably the class of the info managers. But if you’re not going to amass tons of research, then a more lightweight program like Yojimbo or Together might work better.

For lightweight structured data, I like Bento, a very easy to use database.

Since you’re trying to avoid CRIMPing, I won’t recommend Tinderbox (although it is still my favorite Mac program, even if it isn’t the one I use the most).

Steve Z.