Arriving Somewhere

Today I finally found the time to get started on my new Mac. The first thing I did? Shrink the pesky dock and “undock” most of the applications that are on it by default. And move it to the left side of the screen. Then I changed the screen resolution and fixed the mouse speed. Ah, much better! On to more exciting stuff.

I began by installing two critical applications… Firefox (the best web browser!) and Thunderbird (an email client).

Thunderbird was a breeze to set up. Check.

After installing Firefox I installed my favorite add-ons (extensions) as well as a few new ones I haven’t tried yet.

Favorites:

• del.icio.us - to use with my social bookmarking account
• Facebook Toolbar - gotta stay connected!
• fireFTP - an FTP client built into your browser!
• Web Developer - has a handy toolbar
• Zotero - a citation management tool, in your browser! My 2nd fav add-on
• Google Browser Sync - my favorite Firefox add-on. Allows you to sync bookmarks, passwords, etc. across multiple computers. Throw it on a flash drive with Portable Firefox and you can have the same browser experience regardless of where you are.

New (to me) Stuff:

• Firebug - web development tools
• Link Checker - just like it sounds
• Server Switcher - easily switch between live and development servers

Great! One more essential thing to do, set up iChat. Getting my AIM account on it was a breeze. I also added my Google Talk account using Jabber. You can find the instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076