gb2000ie
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People who are new to the Mac often find it hard to get the best replacements for the Windows tools they were used. It's not that there is any lack of equally good tools for the Mac, but they are different, so you have to spend some time looking for what you need. I thought it would be helpful to post a short list of what I've found to be the best tools.
Joining & Extracting Files
The Mac has built in support for zip files, but not for RAR files or for joining files that end in .001, .002 etc..
There are lots of options out there to do each of these things, but I find that the free app 'the Unarchiver' is the best, it will both join files and extract RARs and zips.
The Unarchiver: http://refhide.com/?http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html
Playing Videos
The built-in QuickTime player in OS X is very good at playing the file types it understands, but saddly it understands too few of them. If you just wish Quick Time could play more files, then what you need is the free Perian extension for QuickTime.
Perian: http://refhide.com/?http://www.perian.org/
With Perian installed you will find that almost everything now plays in QuickTime, but you may still have issues with the occasional file. A nice alternative media player that has a nice interface and the ability to skip forward or back 10 seconds with the arrow keys is the free Movist. I've set this to be my default player and use it 99% of the time. (it has a really crappy website, but it's a lovely app)
Movist: http://refhide.com/?http://code.google.com/p/movist/downloads/list
Finally - a great catch-all player to have on your machine as a backup just in case the odd video won't play in either QuickTime or Movist is the Mac version of the free cross platform VLC.
VLC: http://refhide.com/?http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Viewing Lots of Images
If you download a lot of images, it can be nice to have a quick browser for flicking through the images quickly or playing them as a slide show. You can use QuickLook in the Finder for a lot of things, but sometimes you want a little bit more. This is where the free app Xee comes in.
Xee: http://refhide.com/?http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee
A little tip is that if you go to your Applications folder and find the Xee app, you can drag and drop it into the toolbar ar the top of your Finder Window. When you hover it over that toolbar for a second you should see that it will let you drop it there. Once you've done that, you can browse a folder of images simply by dragging and dropping it onto the Xee icon that is now in the toolbar of every Finder window.
Hope this is helpful, and perhaps the mods could consider whether or not there are enough Mac users for this to be worth making sticky?
B.
Joining & Extracting Files
The Mac has built in support for zip files, but not for RAR files or for joining files that end in .001, .002 etc..
There are lots of options out there to do each of these things, but I find that the free app 'the Unarchiver' is the best, it will both join files and extract RARs and zips.
The Unarchiver: http://refhide.com/?http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html
Playing Videos
The built-in QuickTime player in OS X is very good at playing the file types it understands, but saddly it understands too few of them. If you just wish Quick Time could play more files, then what you need is the free Perian extension for QuickTime.
Perian: http://refhide.com/?http://www.perian.org/
With Perian installed you will find that almost everything now plays in QuickTime, but you may still have issues with the occasional file. A nice alternative media player that has a nice interface and the ability to skip forward or back 10 seconds with the arrow keys is the free Movist. I've set this to be my default player and use it 99% of the time. (it has a really crappy website, but it's a lovely app)
Movist: http://refhide.com/?http://code.google.com/p/movist/downloads/list
Finally - a great catch-all player to have on your machine as a backup just in case the odd video won't play in either QuickTime or Movist is the Mac version of the free cross platform VLC.
VLC: http://refhide.com/?http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Viewing Lots of Images
If you download a lot of images, it can be nice to have a quick browser for flicking through the images quickly or playing them as a slide show. You can use QuickLook in the Finder for a lot of things, but sometimes you want a little bit more. This is where the free app Xee comes in.
Xee: http://refhide.com/?http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee
A little tip is that if you go to your Applications folder and find the Xee app, you can drag and drop it into the toolbar ar the top of your Finder Window. When you hover it over that toolbar for a second you should see that it will let you drop it there. Once you've done that, you can browse a folder of images simply by dragging and dropping it onto the Xee icon that is now in the toolbar of every Finder window.
Hope this is helpful, and perhaps the mods could consider whether or not there are enough Mac users for this to be worth making sticky?
B.