Installing Stuff On The MacBook Air
MacBook Air arrived; am putting through paces before writing a review, but here’s a list of stuff I install on every new Mac these days:
- Chrome
- Firefox
- TextWrangler — free text editor from the makers of BBEdit
- VLC — video player
- Tweetie — my personal favorite Twitter client.
- Flash — didn’t come preinstalled on the MacBook Air.
- Notational Velocity — increasingly essential text editor that syncs with Dropbox.
- Dropbox
- Flip4Mac — play certain PC centric videos in QuickTime.
- MobileMe — keeps bookmarks, iCal in sync across several computers.
- ClickToFlash — lets you choose when Flash loads, preserving battery life.
- Silverlight — for Netflix Watch Instantly.
- InstantShot!
Most of these sync to the web, keeping the MacBook Air light and backup-free. I might install Adobe CS4 but need to figure out how exactly to do this without a DVD drive.
Random settings:
- Double-click window to minimize, set trackpad secondary click to the bottom right corner.
- Dock: Scale effect, no magnification.
- Upper right corner: turn off BlueTooth, set battery to show percent.
- Finder Preferences: show hard disks, new Finder window opens the computer, show all filename extensions.
- Set dock folders stacks to appear in list view.
- Need to find a good MacBook Air icon for the hard drive.
- Need to change the desktop picture to something cool, too.