Are you wondering what the best software for your Mac is? Are you a Mac power user and want to get the most out of it?
After almost three years working on a Macbook, I can definitely say I have my personal response to this question. There are multiple factors which led me to the following results, basically a mix of speed, features, resources consumption. I limited this analysis to five categories only, but there could be much more.
1) Browser
Opera is way faster than Safari and Firefox, uses less CPU (much less) and almost half the RAM used by the other two popular browsers, Firefox and Safari. If you are brave enough, I would recommend to use Opera 10 Alpha. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks and it doesn’t like certainly an alpha version. Crazy fast, too.
2) Email
I’ve been using Gmail for a long time, basically since its launch, and I haven’t found a better client so far. You can use any email account you want, from Gmail or from your own provider/company. If you want to get the most out of it, you can use Mailplane, a standalone app which offers you an advanced Gmail experience. Unfortunately I found out it’s much slower than Gmail used under Opera, so after many months using it, I switched back to the browser version.
For me, Tweetdeck is a love/hate affair. My choice would go to Twitterrific, much lighter and fast, but it lacks of essential features you cannot stay without and it seems they are focusing on the iPhone app right now, forgetting there are lots of Mac users waiting for an upgrade to the current version. At the end of the day, I always find myself opening Tweetdeck mostly because of the number of features provided and the ability to open tabs which contain tweets filtered by specific search criteria. This feature is fundamental, in particular in a business context.
4) IM
It’s the best, period. You can have all your IM accounts together plus Skype and Facebook chat too. No competitors.
5) Newsgroups
If you are a NG power user, then Unison is the right app for you. Very powerful, it has everything you need to interact with newsgroups of any kind. Alternatively, if you want something easier, you can be happy with the newsreader integrated with Opera (not that bad).
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