Decorating Your Mac OS X

Are you new to Leopard, then this post is for you, now read on...

In Thoughtworks, I was given MacBook Pro just few weeks back. I always heard that MacBooks are great. But I was really skeptic about it. I had questions like when Apple can do it why not Ubuntu or Microsoft guys. So this post is about how my MacBooks is and few must-know shortcuts for MacBook.

Though I have experience working with Ubuntu, I cannot actually say Ubuntu is best after working with MacBook. It is not an underestimating statement about Ubuntu. Ubuntu very well provides the animation capabilities exactly similar to MacBooks. The reason is that Ubuntu lacks several things naturally like rendering of windows, fonts etc. The color it has chosen for windows looks so gloomy. In psychological terms, the brownish color brings you a nice sleep even if you are very much awake. Here Microsoft windows wins to its extent. So let's request Canonical to bring Ubuntu with the color that is very pleasing to our brains. We should be already thankful to Canonical for its effort to bring Ubuntu as a delightful Linux distribution, and the best choice of operating system next to Mac OS X.

As you are a beginner, let's decorate our MacBook with the following applciations.
Firefox - World's best browser with extensions of your choice.
QuickSilver - It is like SpotLight, once you use it, You will never uninstall it, this application is quite great.
Folx - The only good download manager with resume support, though still in beta.
Real Player - The one of the good players apart from ITunes and QuickTime. It comes with media download manager, which automatically provides great integration with Firefox. So you don't have to install any special download manager extension for Firefox. Whenever you encounter an media file in the page like youtube site for example, it automatically notifies whether you wanna download that file. So it is fantastic applicaiton.
Vienna - It is the best open source RSS application
Adium - The best internet messenger for Mac, it support yahoo, gtalk etc.
VLC - The unbeatably best media player on the earth.

If you are a programmer, you might prefer to install the following applications too
Smultron - good html editor.
TextMate - The best mac Editor for almost all the languages.
Eclipse - All in all better and open source programming IDE.
Netbeans - The best dynamic languages IDE.
VirtualBox - the platform agnostic open source virtual player from Sun Microsystems. Install this, if you prefer to install Windows or Linux in your Mac Machine.

These are some of the reguarly and very frequently used shortcuts in Mac

show the desktop - F11
Show the dashboard - F12
Force Quit - Command + Option + Escape
Logout - shift + command + Q
Logout immediately - Option + shift + command + Q
Minimize Window - Command + M
Minimize all Windows - Option + Command + M
Inverse the color - Control + Option + Command + 8
Hide the Dock - Option + Command + D
Move the File - Command + Drag
Screenshot - Command + Shift + 3
Shutdown Dialog Box - Control + Eject
Restart the Machine - Control + Command + Eject
Sleep - Option + Command + Eject