Buying the Beast

So I finally bought my mac. Almost an impulse purchase and certainly not the model that I was originally looking at - BUT I AM VERY PLEASED!

I finally went for the Macbook Pro and I’ve started to set it up with “trial” applications to see what I might use permanently now I’m in the mac world.

The first thing that I looked into was VMWare, which is a package I’ve used on Windows to create virtual machines and it will allow me to operate the few legacy applications that I need for work in a windows environment. I could have used bootcamp, but I didn’t want to have a windows partition on my hard drive, and as I already have a library of VMWare images with different configurations, it won over the Parallels product too.

I’ve been taking a few notes from podcasts and blogs as to the type of things I should be using on my mac to help with productivity. I’ve therefore decided to evaluate the following products
OmniOutliner - this package came onboard my new mac and is great for lists. I’m sure it has more powerful things as well that I hope will become apparent as I use it more. Any tips are welcome.

Quicksilver - this commonly seems to be “the must have” tool. I’ve got the evaluation copy at the moment, but from what I’ve seen it seems to be very impressive. I have got Merlin’s 43Folders post to gen up on to hopefully get towards being a power user. I’ve reduced the items in my dock to encourage me to use Quicksilver more.

Scrivener - Again the trial version is being used, and I’m constructing this post in it now. Not sure at the moment if I can use it full time. I’d like to be able to use it as a project management tool for projects that aren’t writing projects. I’m sure that it can be adapted, but is it right me me?

Notebook - Final trial piece of software, which at the moment I’m using to replace the journal I used in Microsoft OneNote. It seems to offer a similar way of working, but I’m not sure I need it as well as scrivener and omnioutliner.

If anyone has any tips on the products above or alternatives that might suit me, please let me know.