Gifts to get yourself once you get your new Mac home

I have written about what you should give the person getting a new Macintosh. Now I would turn my attention to those of you who received a new Mac for the holidays.

 

First, I would suggest you download LibreOffice 5.x for those instances when someone sends you a file in an format last used in the ‘90s. 

This could include Appleworks & Clarisworks, the precursors to today’s iWork. LibreOffice will open word processing, spreadsheet and presentation

Files for this line of compact office suites written for the old PowerPC Macs.

 

LibreOffice will also read old Word for Windows and Word for Mac formats that the latest versions of Word will not open. It will also open Wordperfect for DOS &

Windows and Mac files. So this is a very handy piece of software to possess. You may use iWork or Office for Mac as your main office suite, but sometimes you need some help.

 

Second, if you have audio &video files in oddball formats that DVD player & QuickTime Player won’t open, you will need VLC 2.x. This piece of software opens an

Amazing number of audio and video formats past and present. It will also play commercial DVDs and allow you to take snapshots of individual frames of the DVD.

 

Third, for Mac owners, I would recommend getting The Unarchiver. You will find this in the Mac App Store under the top free apps listing. It will open more archive formats than the

Buiilt-in macOS archive software.

 

Fourth, when you want to remove an app with all its preference files, use an application such AppCleaner. It is a free basic app. Other apps such as the paid AppDelete will perform additional

Functions. But to just get rid of an app, AppCleaner works fine.

 

Fifth and Sixth, I would recommend either Onyx or Cocktail. These two utility apps allow you to adjust preferences that Apple only lets you change through the Terminal default command. Now you

Can do it through a graphic interface. These commands include changing the screenshot’s file format and which directory to store it in.

 

Onyx and Cocktail come in versions specific to each macOS release. You don’t use the one written for macOS Sierra with OS X El Capitan!

 

Onyx is free and Cocktail costs $19. Try them both (Cocktail has a generous test period) and see which one you prefer.

 

Finally, I”d get Firefox and Chrome in addition to Apple’s own Safari. If you do work on other computers and OS besides macOS, these two browsers can be worth their weight in gold.

 

That’s my recommendations. If you enter a request for recommendations on Google, you’ll get all kinds of suggestions. 

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog