A few months ago, I bought my friend Dave's old Mac Mini from him. This was the same Mac Mini that I sold to HIM a couple years before when I upgraded to my Powermac. He bought my Mini because he had heard me raving about how good the Mac was and he wanted to try it. The problem is, the Mac Mini is a sadly underpowered computer for all but the most basic of tasks. That's why I got rid of it in favor of the Powermac. The Mac Mini did do its intended job though - it convinced me to try a Mac. It didn't take me long to go from buying a Mini to buying a full blown Powermac. At the time, when Dave sold me back the Mac Mini, I understood his feeling that the Mini wasn't adequate. I shared that opinion. I was just disapointed that Dave had 'lost his mind' and gone back to Windows. Looks like Windows Vista finally pushed him over the edge though.

Yesterday, I went with him and he bought a Mac Pro! This is basically the same Mac Pro that I ordered that will be arriving in a couple days. He loves this new Mac! I can see why. This thing is much more powerful than the Mini and it can easily keep up with things. I'm glad Dave came back to his senses! :)

In the interests of getting him up to speed on the Mac as soon as possible, here are a few apps he might find useful. Note that MOST of these apps are free.

Cyberduck: A great drag & drop FTP program. Source code is available for this if you want to learn some Mac programming.

Quicksilver: You MUST download this now! If you are a typist, this program makes it VERY easy to run any program (and do many other things) without once touching the mouse. Source code is not available for this yet, but will be once Leopard ships.

Vienna: A good, free RSS reader. It may not hold up against NetNewsWire, but it is free and quite capable. Source code is available for this.

Unison: A great newsgroup reader. $24.95 from Panic Software.

Coda: Supposed to be a great web page builder application. Costs $69.

AOL Radio: America Online's free online radio program. They FINALLY came out with a Mac version!