Am I the only one (who doesn't use Apple's applications?)
 

Looking through these threads, I am forced to wonder if I am the only one that doesn't use much of the "high technology" that Apple touts as being so wonderful (and no, I'm not trolling).

For example....I don't use iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD, Automator, Photo Booth, Spaces, Expose, Dashboard, iChat, Time Machine, Mail, Safari or Image Capture.

Of those, the only one I can see myself using is Spaces - when I get back into doing more development - I just don't really need it at the moment.

I hardly ever use iTunes. I loaded up my iPod 5 years ago or so, and really have not used iTunes since, until recently (see my post about trying to make DVDs to play in my car). Once I finish my current DVD making project, I doubt I will use iTunes again for another very long time.

I DO use iSync, to sync stuff up with my Nokia 6120 classic phone...using a hacked third party plug-in because Apple doesn't support my phone itself (so the sync process is somewhat less than perfect). I also use iCal, and AddressBook, and Calculator, and Stickies, but there is nothing too special about these apps.

What interests me is the operating system. I use it because it's UNIX (which I've been running one flavor or another of on my Mac since 1989), and better than the other chief alternative (Windows). I wish you could buy a "lite" version of OS X for half the price that does not have all these apps - make them an optional extra, like iWork, for example.

Am I the only one?

You're not alone.

Chat: Fire or XChat

Photo: Graphic Converter or Photoshop

Backup: Retrospect

Email: Eudora

Browser: Demeter

Calendaring: Remember? <—— which I've used since it was a Disk Accessory under System 4!

MP3 & other Audio playback: Audion




Spaces, Expose, Dashboard, Dock: do not use


OK, I do use iMovie and iDVD, or at least did when I was still digitizing analog (VHS). Plugged in Canopus box and recorded them in iMovie then distilled them into VIDEO_TS folders with .VOB files using iDVD.

And I use the hell out of FileMaker, which although it's not branded "Apple" is still really an offshoot thereof. If I had to be restricted to just one program on my computer it would be FileMaker for sure.

And I use Script Editor to create/edit AppleScript routines.


But no, I don't want my OS to try to choose for me all my other applications. I get to decide. I quite often don't like the look & feel of Apple's offerings. (Is true of Microsoft, too, btw. Except for Excel I don't much care for their stuff)

Same here
Firefox Thunderbird rdesktop and mostly unix stuff in X
vlc MPlayer and most of all emacs
Oh and VirtualBox to run windows and sundry Linuxes plus FreeBSD

I use what works best for me. Prior to getting Adobe CS4 Premier Collection (Acrobat Pro, Bridge, Device Central, Dreamweaver, Drive, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Media Player, Photoshop), I had used some of the corresponding Mac apps and did fine. In some ways I still miss the ease of Pages and iPhoto (for what I do).

I do use Safari, iCal,Mail, Address Book, Time Machine (which by itself has been a life saver), Spaces, other Apple apps as necessary.

the Mac Philosophy (so far as I can tell from looking at things) is to make a Damned Good Operating System, and then provide a bunch of basically functional but not very exciting applications to populate it. at face value, it aims for people who are not particularly tech-savvy, so that they can have a machine that they just don't have to think about too much. and it's a great strategy, I think. if you look at most of the posts on this forum, they are from people (like you and me) who are tech-savvy, and are trying to get their machine to do something cool and tricky, or are trying to repair some major fubar they caused by puttering around with things most people won't putter around with. what you'll find very little of is average, non-technical, every-day sort of people asking how to make their machine do average, non-technical, every-day sort of things. that means that most people buy their Macs, take them home, plug them in, and the damned things just work.

Maybe Mac should make an ubermensch line for people like us (the iDominate system, maybe?), with a whole bunch of super-slick, super-powerful apps. but then everyone would want it (gotta keep up with the Joneses), and most people who got it would get frustrated because the danged apps wouldn't 'just work', and the software would be full of holes and of shoddy attempts at doing tricky, useless stuff that maybe .01% of the population will ever want to do, and... well, we all know where *that* road ends...

I imagine that most people will use the standard Apple programs until they want to do something that these apps can't do. Then they will look at alternatives.
For me, I find many of the Apple progs to be very useful. Address Book and iCal work very well, and synchronise with my Nokia phone. (OK, I did have to build an iSync plug-in....)

iTunes is perfectly good at storing and cataloguing music. The only complaints I've heard is from people wanting to store the music in a different way on the hard disk. I personally don't like the way that it seems to be replacing iSync as the means by which all data is transferred to iPhones, etc. Just keep it for tunes!

Safari I find to be a perfectly decent browser. Earlier versions did have some problems with a few websites, but it's generally fine. I have FireFox, and don't really see any major differences that are worth all the fuss.
Mail is also a very competent mail client - certainly better than Entourage/Outlook. It integrates well with AB and iCal.

There are a whole host of other apps that provide all sorts of very useful capabilities. I probably won't use most of them, but I'm glad that in the rare event that I have some video footage that I need to make bearable, iMovie is there.

Time Machine is another flagship Apple app. It gets the job done, easily, with a nice GUI. Sure, there may be more fully featured backup routines with all sorts of bells and whistles, but as a consequence of Apple including TM, you can bet that there are people who now back up much more regularly than they used to.

What I don't use: iChat, because I don't chat.;)

Yep. That'll be people like me.

Have to agree with that as well. I normally use the MacFormat Magazine forums. Just recently though, our IT department at work have blocked ALL forums as a security risk(obviously they haven't 'cos I'm on here!), which is why I'm posting more on here now. But, yes, the majority of posters here seem to ask more techy questions.

I use Calculator, Preview, QT, Expose', Dashboard Widgets, Safari, Mail, Address Book, Disk Utility... guess I use quite a bit of the Mac software. Have iWorks, but never use it. Nor do I use Garage Band or iPhoto.

Probably use Office and Dreamweaver more than any of the Mac software. Use an old version of Filemaker a whole lot, too.... if you want to call that not Mac software.

I use a lot of apple apps, but I use other ones too. There are also some apple apps that I like, but just don't have a use for, like iWeb. I think it is nice software, but I find it way too limiting for my needs. I also like ichat better then all the other chatters I have used, but I don't use it. I use more than one network, so I can't use ichat. These are just a couple of examples, but I think that there are probably very very few people that use only the apple software. I know that I, personally, use far fewer titles that a lot of other people and I don't even use just the apple software. The reason why I do use the software from apple that I do use is because it is simple to use, like mail. I don't need it to do anything but check my mail. Mail.app works great for my needs.

Interestingly enough, FileMaker Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileMaker_Inc.

To stay on topic, I use iTunes, TextEdit and Safari on a regular basis, and occasionally iMovie for its quick video stabilization.

I'm closely following the development of Songbird, however, and the Opera 10 beta runs a bit lighter than Safari when under duress.

Desperately seeking a decent Address Book
 

I have been a serious Mac user for over a decade with 5 machines at home and at work. For much of this time I was also a Palm Desktop for Mac user and a Palm and/or Blackberry user, both now replaced by my iPhone. As a new iPhone user, I have finally been tempted to transition from Palm Desktop for Mac to the Apple apps that sync nicely with the iPhone. I have successfully shifted to iCal (for the calendar functions, but not for the tasks) though I preferred the look and function of Palm Desktop. The switch to the Address Book is not going as smoothly.

While I cannot say enough good things about the iPhone (it is the most amazing object/product I have ever owned), I cannot think of much good to say about iCal and AddressBook. iCal's limitations are mostly around the marginal ToDo list features and around formatting control, or lack thereof. For example, there is no ability to display 7 days of calendar with each days tasks underneath the day like Palm Desktop.

But my real gripe is with Address Book, which has limited fields, no easy way to handle phone extensions that are typically in their own field in other databases, inability to import into custom fields without having to rename each field all over again, no ability to customize record display format, inability to store more than 3 addresses (designed for Work, Home and Other, but not for Work1, Work2, Home, Mailing Address, Vacation), inability to have multiple Note fields for different purposes, inability to put middle initial in a separate field, etc.

Since Apple is increasingly making these apps core components that link to others' apps, you would think they would have done something to rehabilitate them over the last decade, but AddressBook is only marginally improved over that time period. I have looked at Bento and UptoDate & Contact, but they also have their limitations.

Anyone found an answer here?

I made Address Book much more useful for myself by going into its preferences and making a custom template that is quite long, although it hadn't occurred to me to add custom note fields (just name a field note and type what you want, wish I'd thought of it). You might want to try info.xhead . Very nice app, highly configurable. I recently paid for the family pack.

You can add more address fields and a middle name field for the middle initial in address book. I don't see a way to make multiple notes.

Info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2486

more info here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...0/en/ad31.html

I have found a way to use Bento2 to replace Palm Desktop's address book functions, but with 7502 records with 61 fields per record it is painfully slow on a G4 Powerbook with 1meg of memory. Any tricks to get it to operate faster (other than the obvious of buying a new computer?) Apple's Address Book searches the same database (sync'd for about 40 fields) in a fraction of the time as Bento2.

I've been experimenting - playing with iWeb - trying to give it an honest try and see if it is an improvement over using /usr/bin/vi - and after trying to do two sites with it, I don't think it is.

I'd never buy an iPhone as long as it costs $60+/month and requires me to sign a 2 year contract to talk on the phone. No thanks. Using AT&T's GoPhone service, I spend only $100/year for cell phone service - and no contract! Much better for my purposes.

No, you are not the only one, but it is getting more and more difficult, as Apple plays games to make sure that you use their apps. I know things have changed to where they are no morals at all except the dollar, but it is a shame. Most of Apple's hardware I like, but I really hate iTunes for many reasons. The number on reason is that I use Audion, because Apple tries to control your life with iTunes, and makes it difficult to set things up the way that I want. I have an iPhone, so I need iTunes to make updates, but every time I allow the iTunes to update it seems to shut something off in Audion, so that the sound doesn't work. I somehow fixed it a couple times, but I mistakenly allowed iTunes to update again, and my Audion saound is out again. But I have been playing with it for a couple weeks now, and I can't seem to bring the sound back. If anyone has had that problem, and was able to fix it, let me know at denny@sotae.com

That almost counts as a core Mac app, because Palm bought the software from Apple. It started out as Claris Organizer.

There are a couple of CRM applications that use Address Book data and build on the UI. So you still get the syncing and what have you that Address Book provides, but you also get more options. Daylight is one such product.

http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/

I know there are others as well.

The only thing I don't like about Mac is those stupid Tooltips ! I can't figure out how to get rid of them and what I've found on this forum doesn't help !
Too bad there's no preference setting for turning them off !

I don't use any of Apple's apps to be honest, except for some of the professional ones. This is what I use all day every day:

Groupwise mail client (have to, it is what we got)
Firefox
ARD Admin
TextWrangler
MS Office
Adobe CS4
terminal
server tools
preview
Casper Tools

Sometimes I use itunes, but it hogs up so many resources

If you're running 10.5 or 10.6, you can use something like the free Secrets, a System Preferences pane which allows you to set the delay for this. It accepts changes in milliseconds, so setting it to something like 10,000 would set a 10-second system-wide delay for tooltips. I imagine that would be ample time to prevent them from appearing in a way you find distracting.

If you'd like to adjust the appearance of tooltips on a per-application basis, try the information in this Macworld article. It's a few years old, so I'm not certain if the information is still correct.

If the issue is only the appearance of tooltips in Safari, this Forum thread has the information you need, and it would suggest the information in the Macworld article is still valid.

Looks like it worked !

Thanks !

I'm one of those non-tech savvy general usrs, but I make heavy use of my mac everyday for various purposes.

Apple Apps I like: mail, safari, preview (beats adobe, which I have, and never use), Apple Dictionary, iPhoto, Photo Booth, Quicktime (love this one too!)

Non-Apple: Quark, Word, Excel, Firefox, Transmission, GIMP, Skype

Never found a use for iCal or Address book to be honest. iTunes I use it when I have to but I'm not a big music fan anyway.Have played with iWeb but don't like it much. Prefer to use Quark to write webpages. Expose and Spaces drive me nuts. Maybe I just haven't figured out how you're supposed to use them effectively.

Question: I prefer Safari to Firefox for things like the ease which you can download youtube vids and other content via the Activity window, but I often use Firefox for daily browsing because the three finger trackpad swipe, which will take you to the top or bottom of a page instantly, only works in Firefox and not Safari. It seems bizarre that a native apple probram can't use a native apple action, but a non-native can?

Does anyone else have this problem?

Not me. That "swiping" business is one of the Apple things I don't use. I found it annoying and turned it off. If I want to scroll up or down, I'll use the scroll bar - it's worked fine for me since 1985 or so. No incentive to use anything else. I do wish the scroll bars were on the left though.