I’ve had a G4 mac for a year now. The thing is, I haven’t used it since I bought it. That’s mainly because I don’t know anything about Macs. I mainly bought it cause when I start college in Sept. I’m gonna be studying protools on Macs and I’m gonna use mine for that program, but other than that, I have no idea what I’m gonna use it for.
Umm, everything? :rolleyes:
I have no idea what you normally use other computers to accomplish but there are equivalent software packages available for the Mac in nearly every field. Not the same range of games though, but that is easily solved by installing Windows on a separate partition (assuming your Mac is recent enough to have an Intel CPU).
I use Macs and FreeBSD (or Linux) exclusively here.
Ignore these guys - on my box here I have loaded the typical stuff:
Mandatory: Fink and/or Darwin Ports!
Firefox
Thunderbird
iTerm
MythFrontend (for watching TV off KnoppMyth box)
X-Chat Aqua (IRC)
Boycott Advance (GBA Emulator)
NeoOffice (Open Office/Java Port)
iTunes (!!! Not to be underestimated, with proper tweaking)
iSync (again, awesome)
Big Bang Board Games
Burn/CDRevolution (Burning Software)
Flickr Uploadr
Flip4Mac (WMV Playback for Quicktime)
GarageSale (eBay Auction Creation)
JBidWatcher (eBay Auction “Sniper”)
Gawker (Remotely view and Record iSight cams)
iUSBCam (Use any USB cam as an iSight)
HandBrake (Super slick DVD ripping)
HexEdit (Excellent…Hex Editor)
iNdependence (iPhone unlocker and manipulation)
Inkscape (Vector Image Editor)
Gimpshop (Bitmap Image Editor)
iSerial Reader/Serial Box (you figure it out)
iWork (Better than you’d expect!)
Chicken of the VNC/JollysFastVNC (Both great VNC viewers)
GhostAction and ThinkingRock (Great GTD Apps)
Noise Ninja (Cleans the noise out of messy images)
Darwine OR Crossover Office (Only good on Intel, but runs Windows apps nearly flawlessly)
OmniGraffle Pro (Layout organizer)
PDF Shrink (Shrinks PDF files)
pdf2svg (Uh…)
PDF2HTML (uh…)
Q (Mac QEmu)
Quartz Desktop (Lets you put screen savers AS YOUR WALLPAPER! Freaky looking. )
Remote Desktop Connection (Windows RDP)
sshfs (mount remote ssh logins as drives)
StarCraft (an oldie by a goodie)
UnRarX
Wireshark (Packet Sniffer)
RapidSVN (software checkin/checkout tool)
Combine PDFs (hard to find app, PM me for it - good for merging single page scans into a multi-page document)
MediaRage/MP3 Rage (mass tagger/renamer/etc)
Doomsday (Doom with high-res textures, audio upgrades, etc)
Audacity (Audio Recorder)
Airfoil (Capture any audio source and send it to Airport Express units)
7zX (Graphical 7zip extractor)
Acqlite (p2p)
Damage Isolation (Fix broken .dmg files)
JXplorer (LDAP Browser/Editor)
KisMAC (Kismet for Mac, capture and crack Wifi keys)
Nestopia (NES emulator)
Songbird (if you get tired of iTunes…)
That’s it for this box. I have several others though.
care to clarify exactly which G4 mac you have? powermac, powerbook, imac, cube, etc?
i guess my universal 1st suggestion is max out your system’s RAM. no question - it must be done. OSX is a memory hog & you’ll want every bit of it you can get your hands on. it’ll probably be PC100 or PC133.