Mike,
How about a list?
I am struggling with this decision.
Joe
Joe,
Looking through my apps, here's what was free with the machine, in alphabetical order. Note that these are full-featured apps, not "demo versions." There may be a demo version of MS Office and/or iWork, but all of the apps I've listed below are full versions, not bloatware.
* Address Book (full-featured, integrates with Mail and other apps)
* AppleScript - For scripting!
* Automator - Another tool to automate your common workflows, only easier than AppleScript as it's not a programming language. The two can work together also.
* Calculator - Duh.
* Dashboard - This runs many free "widgets". You can enable it with a hot corner, F-key, or whatever. Apple has a site where you can find widgets, and a couple dozen are included. I use the weather, dictionary, etc. ones quite frequently.
* Dictionary - This is the application, not the widget. Not sure of the source dictionary, but it's a very good one. The widget has a thesaurus as well, so I assume the app does too but due to the existence of the widget I rarely use the app.
* DVD Player - Duh.
* Font Book - Wow, I never saw this before but it's by Apple. Appears to group your fonts, shows the various characters, etc... I'm really not sure what all this is capable of because I'm pretty sure I've never opened it! LOL
* Front Row - This is a program that you generally would use with the Apple Remote should you choose to spend the $20 to get one. You can sit across the room or whatever, and watch DVD's or downloaded movies, show pictures from iPhoto, play music out of iTunes, watch TV shows from iTunes, etc.
* GarageBand - Multi-track music application. You can record tracks of music you play (though I recommend plugging a mic into the sound in port rather than using the built-in mic), and you can easily create tracks using a USB or MIDI keyboard and the dozens of built-in instruments, or you can use the hundreds of included "Loops" to easily make yourself a backup band. I've made all of the various Pilotcast intro/outro/interlude announcements and themes with this. In fact, I'll attach an MP3 of a song I made without ever playing a single note.
* GraphicConverter - This opens and saves basically every graphic format there is, and has many editing tools. Joe, between iPhoto and this, you should be set for your graphics needs and never miss PaintShop Pro.
* iCal - Calendar app. Multiple calendars, can set alerts for events that will appear even if the program is closed, synchronize with online calendars via MobileMe, and subscribe to calendars published online (for example, I subscribed to a "US Holidays" calendar so that they're automatically shown.)
* iChat - This is a chat client that works with AIM and also works through the "Bonjour" auto-networking features of the Mac OS should you have them enabled, so you can chat with others on your LAN without using AIM as well.
* iDVD - This is a DVD mastering program, so you can make DVD's out of your iMovie creations.
* iMovie - Video editing software.
* iPhoto - Import (from files or digital camera), catalog, sort, rate, geo-tag, categorize, and edit your photos. Now has facial recognition built in, so you can search for all pictures of a specific person!
* iSync - Synchronizes Address Book contacts, iCal events, etc. to mobile devices OTHER than the iPhone.
* iTunes - You should be pretty familiar with this, but... It plays MP3, AAC, AIFF, and a number of other audio formats, purchases songs/movies/TV shows/etc from the iTunes store, synchronizes your iPods and iPhones, etc.
* iWeb - Visual web page app. Being a geek, I've only opened it once out of curiosity so I'm not sure what all it can really do.
* Mail - E-mail and to-do list app. Recognizes various formats of things - for example, if someone sends you their snail mail address, it will be recognized as a snail mail address and you can click and add it to Address Book. Same with phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Dates can be added to iCal. etc.
* OmniGraffle - Kind of like Visio.
* OmniOutliner - Outlining program. Mike uses this one a lot more than I do, I think.
* Photo Booth - A fun quirky program to use with the built-in camera - Has all kinds of interesting effects that can be applied in real time ("Comic Book", mirror, B&W or Sepia, etc.) Fun to play with, probably not all that useful.
* Preview - A graphics and PDF viewer that is WAY faster than Acrobat Reader.
* QuickBooks - Yes, the accounting package. This is the "New User Edition" not "Pro" but if you don't need payroll, it works just fine. I've been using it for the flying club finances for several years now.
* Safari - Web browser
* Stickies - Basically, electronic post-it notes for your screen. There's also a widget to put the same style of notes into your Dashboard.
* Time Machine - THE easiest-to-use backup solution EVER. Plug an external hard drive in for the first time, and the Mac will ask "Do you wish to use this hard drive for time machine backups?" Click "yes" and it will automatically back up your hard drive every hour. It saves the backups every hour for the past 24, every day for the past month, and every week basically forever (or until you fill up the backup drive). You can configure it to not back up certain things if you want, but it's so ridiculously easy to set up, I actually use it. On a laptop, it'll automatically back up whenever you plug the external drive in, and it'll warn you if you haven't plugged the drive in in the last 10 days (I think it warns you once every 10 days - One warning on day 10, one on day 20, one on day 30, etc.)
In the Utilities folder, there are a bunch of geeky goodies. Terminal, of course, which gives you the UNIX command line. Activity Monitor which is kind of like the unix top command but much easier to read and with more data available. There's a very good 2D/3D graphing calculator program called "Grapher". There's some other things in there too.
Note that I think a couple of these may no longer be on the newest Macs, so if you think one of the above will make or break your decision, be sure to double-check that they're still including it.
Phew! I think I got it all. Wow - I had forgotten how much software is included!
