Software FAQ
From Applepedia
I want mac software and I don't want to pay for it, do you hear me?
VersionTracker, MacUpdate, Pure Mac Software & the newcomers iusethis & Find Mac Stuff.
Why does Firefox not work the way I expect it to™?
See the Firefox page for tips and a FAQ.
Why does Stuffit Expander take forever to open?
It's probably trying to phone home and see if there's any updates available. Open a terminal and punch this in:
defaults write com.stuffit.Expander allowVersionChecking -bool NO
It may also be that you're running it on an Intel system, and it's running under Rosetta. If that's the case, a Universal Binary BETA release is available from Stuffit's Website.
Is there a free Office Suite for OS X?
Yes. You can run OpenOffice.org in OS X's built-in X11 server, but it's far better to use the Aqua-native version you can get from NeoOffice . If you don't need a full suite and just want a word processor, AbiWord is very nice. If all you need is a text editor than can count words, try installing the CharCounter service to allow you to count characters in any application.
I installed Microsoft Office, and now some of my fonts are funky
Microsoft Office likes to install some of it's own copies of fonts such as Arial. It installs them in your User Fonts folder, so it should be trivial to open Font Book and disable the User folder version of any duplicate fonts.
What's the default install location for the Developer's Tools?
/Developer
What should I use to wipe my hard drive before giving away/selling my computer?
Disk utility has options to erase your entire hard drive, as well as write multiple passes of random data to prevent anyone from recovering your erased files. You will need to boot from another computer, or boot from the OS X setup disc.
