So my new Macbook just arrived and as a first time Mac OS user I was wondering is there any essential software that I should get such as antivirus software, etc.

Thanks in advance for any advice and suggestions.

@freezyfrog: You took the plunge at last, huzzah! Sadly I know nothing about Macs, so can't help you with that. Although for coding, the vast majority of people at my Uni use Sublime Text. Warning: It's not cheap.

For writing get Write Room.

If you're going to be making presentations then Keynote is vastly superior to Powerpoint.

Excel is pretty much what everyone uses for spreadsheets, as Numbers, OpenOffice and Google Docs are all lacking.

Disc Inventory X is a pretty good tool that will show you how much of your drives are being taken up by what kind of files. I discovered a 5GB text file hidden somewhere once.

F.lux is pretty useful.

Most of the time deleting an App will uninstall it. For those rare instances where you have some app that doesn't remove all it's files upon deletion then you'll want AppDelete.

If you're going to be downloading large files at any point get InsomniaX 2 to disable idle and lid sleep.

Dualboot it, get normal Windows programs for sane people.

I second sublime text. Its really great. Aside from that if you want to get into developing linux style you should probably look into

• MacPorts (https://www.macports.org/) for your linux tools
• MacTex (https://tug.org/mactex/) for typesetting stuff with latex
• Java (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html) in case you write Java programs. Eclipse might come in handy too (https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/)
• Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/) or VMWare fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/features.html) for using windows without dualboot
• Adium (https://adium.im/) for your instant messaging needs

Etc. It really depends on what you actually plan to do with your mac.

If you want to use Outlook on the Mac? Parallels. Run Outlook in Coherence mode. Outlook for the Mac Office suuuuuuuuuucks.

Not know what you're planning on doing on your fancy new Mac..

If you're in school and use Blackboard, Firefox or Chrome are a must. Maybe it's not bad for students, but for instructors Blackboard is broken as hell in Safari.

Audacity and Handbrake are free and have their uses. You never know when you'll need to reencode your educational, public use MKV files into another format so you can put them on your 7.3" iPhone 6.

@jgf said:

These are good recommendations if you're getting into development. If you're okay with using unfinished software, Github's Atom editor is similar to Sublime Text, but more promising in my book. I'd also recommend Homebrew over MacPorts, but there's not a huge difference between the two.

@jgf: It'll mostly be for development and such so thanks for the recommendations and I'll definitely check them out.

What about antivirus software, (I get a certain comfort knowing it's there) any particular brand you recommend? I've been running McAfee for the last few years but I've heard Sophos is also pretty good but if there's any others that you can think of I'm open to suggestions.

@freezyfrog: You really don't need Antivirus software. OS X is, for the most part, extremely secure, and it's still obscure enough that it's incredibly unlikely you'll even encounter software that targets it. Just keep Gatekeeper on and you'll be fine.

I'd recommend BetterSnapTool if you're going to be doing anything with multiple windows. Really handy for my law practice when I need several windows of a decent size up at the same time.

As far as anti-virus stuff, I'd echo what others have said - it really isn't a huge deal on Macs. I've actually had problems with anti-virus systems screwing my system up in the past - Kaspersky was so bad I had to reformat my drive it caused so many issues. So yeah, stick with the defaults.

I agree with the Sublime Text recommendation. The Atom editor that @conmulligan mentioned could at some point overtake the position as de facto editor, but I think it still needs a little more time to cook before I can unconditionally recommend it over ST.

I also second the recommendation of Homebrew over MacPorts. I'd also suggest getting comfortable with using NPM - there's a lot of convenient Node packages out there that can simplify a ton of tasks.

Holy crap sublime text looks awesome. And freakin expensive!

Get BOOM. It's not free but it's a preamp and equalizer that will actually make the puny speakers on your Macbook usable from across the room.

http://www.globaldelight.com/boom/

@conmulligan: @chaser324: As I never tried HomeBrew - guess by the time I installed MacPorts it wasn't even a thing - why do you recommend it over MacPorts?

Another thing that came to mind: If you use the version control software GIT, SourceTree (http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/) is a very nice and free gui for it.

@jgf said:

The big one for me is that it installs packages into user space, so there's no messing with sudo or the PATH environment variable. It also just generally plays better with OS X's built-in libraries.

The most obvious one is Alfred. It's pretty great. I like iterm2 for my terminal emulator, Fish for my shell, and I use SublimeText3 with emmet.io and a bunch of other plugins for words, virtualbox for virtual machines, macports for installing stuff good, other than that I can't think of much except for a replacement file manager. Can't go wrong with midnight commander, but at least get something like Finder+. Finder on it's own is damn near useless.

Oh, and if you want to do any video stuff, check out the free version of lightworks, it's good stuff. Also Blender3d is the second thing I install on all my computers for all my modelling, animation and terrible game prototyping needs, but I don't know if I'd classify it as essential.

It's the Winrar model where you can use it as long as you want without paying but it'll keep bugging you until you do.

I think I paid $50 for ST2 and it was well worth it. Fantastic application.