More MacBook experiences

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 28, 2014 at 09:17 AM

Hey Franz,
Sorry, I meant to comment on the Mavericks issue earlier. My MacBook Air only has 4GB of RAM, but runs lots of applications under Mavericks with minimum effort. Very occasionally, noticeably after ‘sleeping’, I find that one or two apps freeze and take a long time to reload - but then again, I’m routinely running at least eight different apps, including Safari with multiple tabs open (I was using Chrome, but found it had quite a power hit; Safari is slightly more power-efficient and is pleasant enough to use). I do wonder if Stephen’s issues aren’t indicative of a hardware problem?

With respect to anti-virus software: I was using Avast, but was put off by a couple of things - first, by the impression that it was collecting info about me (some Internet research confirmed that yes, this might indeed be the case!), and second, by its memory overhead. So I’m now using Avira, which appears to run very well and has garnered quite a few favourable reviews.

With respect to outliners: I finally succumbed and bought OmniOutliner for Mac to complement my iOS version. It’s very good, although I’ve had one or two odd issues when syncing outlines to iOS (being unable to navigate to the top of outlines, for instance). I haven’t had time to investigate these fully, unfortunately. I remain very tempted by Curio, but I’ve already got so many goodies to explore (Scrivener for Mac being one of them), and Curio is expensive!

My new favourite info management software is, however, Growly Notes! Ridiculous, because I have extensive databases in OneNote and Notebooks, both of which also run on iPad and iPhone (whereas GN currently doesn’t). But there’s something very… friendly about Growly Notes.

With respect to e-mail: I’m now using Airmail as my preferred client, having tried literally dozens of others. Apple Mail is decidedly iffy if you’ve got lots of IMAP accounts (like me). It appears to work fine, but in actual fact fails to pick up certain e-mails for no obvious reason. Which is disastrous in a business context! I tried Outlook, too, but sadly, despite my earnest intention to give it a jolly good chance (I abandoned it on Windows years ago), it’s still a heap of sh** (constant crashing/rebuilding of ‘Microsoft Database’), and still very resource-intensive. I continue to marvel at all those who use it as their preferred mail/info manager.

Generally speaking: couple of really useful bits of software are: AVG Cleaner and CCleaner (yes, the latter is now available for Mac), and on the file management side, ForkLift and TrashMe. ForkLift is a two-window file manager with tab support - very easy and pleasant to use, and much better than Finder. TrashMe is an excellent utility for deleting apps you no longer want. You drag the app out of ‘Applications’ and onto the TrashMe window, and it finds all the related files and folders and offers to delete those, too. Really Apple ought to buy it and make it part of the operating system! After some, ahem, experimentation (= CRIMPing), I’ve ended up deleting a number of apps and TrashMe has been invaluable in saving SSD space.

Enjoy your Mac Mini. After an unexpectedly lengthy learning curve (probably because I really like to know what all my systems are up to), I’m now thoroughly enjoying my MacBook!