Official Apple Thread

[torgo]

You're also going to want to grab Perian, which greatly helps with other stuff like Flash, Divx, Xvid, etc. Coming from the Windows world, you may think QuickTime sucks, but on a Mac, once you get a few codecs installed, the QT Player is actually pretty decent and will do most of what you need it to do.

I never bothered with Quicktime. Everytime I try to play a video in it, it says it needs codecs that may be on the Apple site. It then takes me there and wants me to buy the codecs. MPlayer OSX plays just about any video you throw at it, including WMV (some newer WMVs it chokes on, and will only play their audio, in that case sometimes Quicktime + Flip4Mac works), and it's completely free.

[mollipen]

I never bothered with Quicktime. Everytime I try to play a video in it, it says it needs codecs that may be on the Apple site. It then takes me there and wants me to buy the codecs. MPlayer OSX plays just about any video you throw at it, including WMV (some newer WMVs it chokes on, and will only play their audio, in that case sometimes Quicktime + Flip4Mac works), and it's completely free.

Filp4Mac is completely free, Perian is completely free, and both make QuickTime open 90% of the stuff you're going to be trying. Only codec I can think of that will cost you money is Apple's MPEG2 codec. If you're too lazy to download a couple of codecs and install them, then don't blame QuickTime for it.

Plus, MPlayer playing the stuff is all fine and good, but that doesn't make FrontRow play those videos, it doesn't make iTunes play those videos, it doesn't make any of the apps that rely on QuickTime for video playback play those videos. Taking a few minutes to beef up QT does.

[Shin Johnpv]

I believe that the latest version of iDVD works with external burners, so she must have an older verison.

Have her check out Burn - it's free, and while it isn't fancy, it can do a whole lot for how simple of an app it is.

Thanks for the help Shidoshi I'll pass on the word.

[kedawa]

...

I use macosxhints forums occasionally. and I find the community there pretty helpful, and noob-friendly.
Stuffit Expander is buggy trash, in my experience, and I haven't come across any .sit files in years.
If it's .rar support you're looking for, unrarx is all you really need.

Also, get used to buying (or cracking) a lot of shareware that would be free on any other OS.
Want emulators that aren't crippled? Most of them cost money.
Want wi-fi drivers? Same thing.
Want an xbox controller hid driver? Guess what? It's shareware on OSX.
I could go on, but you get the idea.

[Rumpy]

That shit with the install/uninstall sounds really bazaar to me. You'd think that'd be one of the first basic things they'd work on to not be retarded.

[mollipen]

That shit with the install/uninstall sounds really bazaar to me. You'd think that'd be one of the first basic things they'd work on to not be retarded.

The problem is, Mac OS pre-X used to be 95% "drag the app to install or uninstall." So, that way of thinking existed. Then came OSX, which is built upon UNIX, which actually has folder permissions and things that go here or there and all of that. So now, some apps need to install things into the system, and now that user accounts exists and things are locked except for admin access, the installers are needed to get the permissions right and get things where they should be. On the other hand, other apps work like old Mac OS apps, where it was drag into the apps folder, open for the first time, and things got done.

Plus, with the amount of apps that are coming over from the various *NIX platforms, those are done with installers and whatnot, and people get lazy when bringing them to OSX and just do things the *NIX way.

I used to scoff a bit at the idea of a global software installer/uninstaller like Windows kind of has, but now, I think it's something that OSX needs. People shouldn't have to buy a third party app to make sure they can uninstall an app and be sure that every last piece of said app was taken care of.

[torgo]

Also, get used to buying (or cracking) a lot of shareware that would be free on any other OS

Absolutely. Just part of the Mac culture. It's always been that way. Mac owners are just more likely to spend money on their computer, which makes sense, they already spent more money on the computer itself.

But at least now that OSX is based on BSD, a ton of open source UNIX apps are now available for OSX for free, where as Mac Classic never had that. It's a much better situation now than it used to be.

[kedawa]

Right. Which reminds of another bit of advice: install the X11 interface.
It's on the OS X install disc, and it'll enable support for a shitload of unix apps that don't support the default Aqua interface, like gimp and openoffice.

[kedawa]

Stable NTFS support in Linux/BSD/OSX/etc. is now out of beta.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
Now all you need is the driver linked on that site, and OSX can both read and write to your XP partitions.
IOW, FAT32 can eat a dick.

[ChaoofNee]

No fucking way.

No.

Fucking.

Way.