Top 10 Ways To Use A Mac-- No Email Or Browser.

It’s a simple question, but the answer requires a bit of thought. What do you do on your Mac? There’s email and browsing. What else?

What are the Top 10 Ways To Use Your Mac? iTunes? iPhoto? Business or pleasure? Fun or profit? Can you name 10 ways beyond email and browsing?

If I exclude using email and browsing the web, perhaps the most common uses of a Mac these days, what else do I do regularly on my Mac?

The Mac is the most personal of all computers, so I don’t expect all of us to use it for the same purposes, business or pleasure. Compare my Top 10 Ways with your list (not in a particular order).

iTunes For Music, TV, Movies
Your mileage may vary, but Jack and I find we’re using iTunes more these days, not less.

First, we use iTunes to play music on our Macs and keep the iPods filled and happy. Duh. Over the past year or so we’ve added TV shows and movies to iTunes, and look forward to AppleTV and a new wide screen LCD TV.

iPhoto For Photos
Apple’s iLife will take a few spots in the Top 10 List, and iPhoto rates high, both in use and importance. All our digital photos show up in iPhoto.

Photoshop And Fireworks For Graphics
Our part-time graphics and design business depends on a variety of tools to make work efficient, high quality, compatible, and affordable.

We use Photoshop less and less these days, as it has become a necessary and expensive behemoth.

QuickBooks For Managing Money
We have a list of favorites for handling money, but have dumped Intuit’s Quicken for personal use, but still rely on QuickBooks to handle accounting tasks.

Once you get locked into using one of these applications, the annual tax can become a burden in and of itself. We update every couple of years now.

FinalCut Pro and iMovie
We’re somewhat a divided household here. Jack has a new Sony miniDV cam and has been a FinalCut Pro user for a few years. I prefer iMovie.

We’ll let them share the spotlight for the moment, though both of us use iLife’s iDVD to finish up videos for work and pleasure.

Microsoft Office For Compatibility
I hate to admit it, but Office is here to stay, though we do not upgrade as frequently as in years past.

Office is what everyone uses in most businesses, and a surprising number of our Mac friends use Office as their personal suite of, well, “we buy it because we always have” applications.

RapidWeaver For Web Pages
I create plenty of web pages for the school, and this nifty tool just makes it easy.

Creating web pages isn’t for everyone, but if you have to do it, more as a chore than a choice of occupation, look for a tool that does most of the work for you. That’s probably RapidWeaver.

iShowU For Screen Capture
One of the easier ways to create instruction videos on the Mac is simply to record what you do; open, close, point, click, and record audio as you click.

iShowU is affordable, quick, easy to use, and works better than some screen recording applications at twice the price.

NetNewsWire or Vienna
Jack and I differ on which we use and why, so both are on the list. RSS feed management is a must-have application on the Mac.

The Print Shop
iPhoto has some great photo printing capability, but nothing else beats The Print Shop. Period. It’s just too easy to create cards, posters, business cards, letterheads, announcements, and much more.

That’s 10, but my list could go on for another 10 Mac applications that I use often and consider essential. For example, how about Skype? Or Chronosync for backups?

See? We use our Macs for far more than email and browsing. So, the question of the day is, “Besides email and browsing, what else do you do on your Mac?”

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