whats the best application for..
 

writing a paper, taking notes, etc.

Depends what you need too do really.. If its all simple formatting and very straigh forward, then Text Edit would do very nicely. Otherwise there are apps such as TextWrangler or for a more complete text editor (and yes those are all free options !) look into Open Office. Otherwise there is always MS Office but thats very expensive and comes from an "evil" company that I shall not mention :)

That all depends on what you are writing:

• Simple Reminders / Snippets: Stickies
• Résumés / Term Papers: MS Word for Mac
• Screen Plays: Final Draft
• Programming: BBEdit

edit: pipped by Raven

Word is awful. Slow, bloated, pathetic UI. What you want for this stuff is Nisus Writer Express. Or better yet, a text editor. Never create complex content inside layout!

Final Draft is okay, but technical. It almost saps creativity from the page. Buy a typewriter and your words will love you for it.

BBEdit is indeed hotness. Never leave ~ without it.

AbiWord - faster than OpenOffice, cleaner UI than Word, more options than TextEdit, cheaper than Nisus writer (free), and fast (written totally in 'cocoa').

http://www.abiword.org/download/

Scroll down a bit.

But for more complex stuff, NeoOffice(openoffice for mac) is better, but slower.

And for everything else, try this software site:
http://www.pure-mac.com/

EDITL Wrong site. Corrected.

From the educator's perspective.......
 

All of the suggestions given are fine and can be made to work, but at a University, you may be requested to submit papers in particular formats, and I've found that about 85% of the time, that is Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. These may all suffer from the problems mentioned of being "bloated" and "slow", but they are the de facto standard, cross-platform, and can be had reasonably either through educational discount programs or school site licensing. As for a typewriter......well, sometimes I have a need for one, I admit, but it just isn't a practical solution these days. So you will probably have to use something that is at least highly compatible with the Microsoft products, at least for projects. Macs still make up much less than 20% of the higher-education market at this time.

Joe VanZandt

Hey, its not Apple's fault that people have been inclined to by a sub-par OS! :)

As per notetaking, I just attained my MS in Telecommunications and for my thesis, I used MS Office X for the paper/notes, and Acrobat Professional for more notetaking/finalizing the electronic form of my thesis. I am SO happy that Universities are allowing electronic submissions now. It saved me about $200!! Cheers!

At the school district I work for they make up about 6ish % total population. They are only in the highschools and only for certain things, ie design, graphics, digital media, robotics, etc, everything else is PC.

Not really an OS preference, exactly...
 

No one exactlly loves the Windows environment in and of itself, but Mac hardware has been, and remains, fairly expensive compared to PC equipment. This is only PARTLY due to the quality of Mac equipment; it has a lot more to do with somewhat uncompetitive control by Apple of pricing of systems and something of a monopoly on the hardware. The result is that the Mac Mini is the first reasonably competitively priced model available. Therefore, only people with special affinities for the Mac (and a little leverage) or special needs have typically been provided with them by their institutions. The result has been predictable: a few people with a technical bent adopt Linux on their own, people in graphic arts or journalism (and, often, computer scientists for some reason) tend to get the higher priced product. Combine that with what was, for many years, a huge gap in the available software for the platform and the result is determined purely by economic realities in education: it's too expensive to adopt Macs, whether you love them or not. Apple did a superb job of getting into the educational market in early grades, but it has not had the effect of carrying through to higher education, and I'm not close enough to elementary education to know if they still maintain their presence there as they once did.

I'm surprised that people aren't more interested in the question of whether you could coax OS X to run on a cheaper Intel machine rather than the question of whether you can get Vista to run on your expensive Mac!

Joe VanZandt

JDV

I have been preaching that for like ever. Mac hardware is over priced. The mac mini was their first attempt, but the duo core one is still 799$ ? I mean for 800 dollars I can build a better PC than the mac mini, granted it won't be as small, and it won't run OS X, but I do think apple needs to drop their prices on hardware.

As for a good cheap text editor, I would just use open office. MS office has really nice features, especially if you are going to intergrate it with a handheld device, one note or one touch or whatever its called intergrates nicely with it. However, it is definitely not the end all be all of text editors.

As has been said many, many, many, many times before, you shouldn't compare build-your-own-box with buying top quality hardware.
Yes, the size does matter. So does the case. These things cost money. And the extra cost is worth it to some (most?) people - hence Apple hardware is not overpriced. It is merely not cheap.
And of course OS X is also something that is a net cost to Apple. The hardware subsidizes OS X development - don't imagine that Apple would make a profit on $129 OS X sales if it didn't sell the hardware to go with it.

I have to disagree with the overprice argument for most of Mac's hardware. I spend a good deal of time at Engadget (too much time considering it's really just an ad site) looking at the new hardware. The price differences for a Mac notebook compared to any other brand is nominal. Sometimes PCs are even higher for the same basic configuration (i.e.: 2GHz Core Duo, 1GHz 667MHz RAM, 100GB @7200RPM HDD). Even if a PC notebook is a little less, it still doesn't come many of often overlooked hardware features like GB Ethernet, webcam, remote control and all the other Mac niceties.

The low-end Mac is still the eMac.

As for the Mac Mini, it's certainly not priced like a low-end computer should be, and component-wise it's a high-end notebook. It's has a mini-circuitboard and a 3.5" HDD crammed into a slick little box. It also has many features low-end computers tend not to have (e.g.: DVI port, optical/digital audio-in & -out, bluetooth, wi-fi, 1000MB Ethernet, Core Duo CPU, 667MHz RAM, SATA HDD, and, of course, OS X and accompanying software.


I'm open to the fact that I missed have something. Please, feel free to point out where my logic may be faulty.

I repair macs for a living i know their parts cost, its ridiculous, 1200 dollars for a laptop screen, where i can buy laptop screens from other companies that support the same or similiar resolutions at around 450ish per a screen. lack of third party hardware support forces you to pay for apples prices or just buy a whole new system, which is sometimes feasible, but usually only if its over three years old or older. If a machine is 18 months old, it still has at least another 1.5 if not 2 good years out of it. Of course this is more from an enterprise level, and not necessarily from a consumer perspective. They offer apple care for an extra 250 per a machine, where as HP business class machines have three warranty standard, no extra charge.

emac = out of production

mac mini = new entry level mac

I've worked in a university before, so I totally know the drill. Nisus saves to .doc, .rtf, and you can print to .pdf. Rarely had complaints. Excel and PPoint, however, you usually can't avoid. :(

As for AbiWord: Yeah, it's free, but the interface is WORSE than Word for OS X. Free isn't free when it's a pain to use.

Thanks for pointing this out hayne and solipsism... Return on investment is very important when dealing on a largs cale... And yes I do have something to add that solipsism missed... Thinks of servers... Just Windows 2k3 server is around 2000$ if you have more than 100 users... and thats just for the basics... No sms, no exchange, none of the tools kits... The server machines are priced about the same as Apple does have to compete with others in this field. However... OS X server unlimited is around 1000$ for an unlimited amount of users... and than includes email... and welll Exchange is quite expensive and its not part of win2k3 server... Add in ARD from Apple (500$ more or less for unlimited computers)... and just the server software sinks windows as in the end it offers the same benefits but at a much higher price... and MS Corp support is more expensive too... So hope this helps with the global picture.

As for the original subject... the softwares I mentionned were there because they were at the same time free and all offered minimally to save as rtf or doc format. And add to that that for those who need pdf... its built-in on Mac... On PC its either buy Acrobat ( EEK !) or jump through loops to get the PPDs to work through printing to PDF but then again no way to edit the files after the fact...

Besides the fact that resolution is only aspect of a LCD screen to consider, I don't feel replacement hardware is a good example of cost ratio. Apple, like the automotive companies, would prefer you to buy anew than upgrade.

Apple still sells new eMacs but they are no longer available outside educational facilities.
http://www.apple.com/education/emac/

I agree that the Mac mini is Apple's current entry-level machine, I feel that it's a misnomer to refer to it as "low end."

I don't know whether this is hi-jacking this post or not....
 

I don't know whether Macs are over-priced (although I DO know they very strictly control the pricing available from vendors, limiting competition), only that they are expensive compared to PCs. The difference may be smaller between notebooks, but for desktop machines, it is considerable, and even if it were much smaller, purchasing decisions can be affected by a 10% difference or less. There still is way too little money allocated for technology (and its repalcement by newer technology) in most educational institutions. One has to stretch it as best one can. I was responsible for such purchasing decisions at a major university for some time, and I can tell you first-hand how much easier it is to negotiate pricing on PCs than on Macs. So, whether they are priced as they are because of the quality of their components, the elegance of their design, or the strength of their OS is rather secondary; they are expensive. It is therefore unlikely that they will take over a large market share in higher education (or most businesses) in spite of some of their strengths.

For what it's worth, I use both, and have no really distinct preference of one platform over the other. OS X has certainly made me more favorably inclined toward the Mac, because the pre-OS X operating sytems were a bit fragile, and I freely grant that there is a lot of elegance about Mac design, but I must also say that a good PC-AT case is a LOT easier to work in, because they aren't built to such close tolerances.

Joe VanZandt

Macworld just posted an article about Mariner Software's new script writing software for OS X. They also have many other word processing products. I'd never heard of them before , but so far their script writing software, Montage, looks a much more user friendly than Final Draft.

http://www.pure-mac.com/textword.html

Some aren't text editors, but theres dozens of different apps, free, shareware, demos, etc.

Why spend so much $$ for less compatibility?
 

That's not a problem for users of OpenOffice/NeoOffice. You can use non-evil software to save your creations in evil formats. However, i can't see why professors are supporting a monopolistic empire. I can't imagine any reason why it would be any harder to grade a paper in a .rtf file than a paper in a .doc file.