anyone use ichat, mail, garage band?

i'm considering switching to a mac, and i was on the apple website checking out leopard and the interface for macs...and there were significant sections on ichat and mail, for one thing.

does anyone use these applications? seems like all the personalization in mail would be useless unless everyone you email uses mac mail, too. and you can only ichat with other mac users, right?

everyone uses itunes, but what about garage band...i'm not a professional musician so would i ever use it? what about the movie making programs for someone who doesn't do film stuff?

seems like there are a lot of programs included with macs that would be useless to most people. but i don't know. can anyone enlighten me about these things?

 

I use Apple Mail with my GMail account. It works very well.

I would use iChat, but it doesn't support MSN accounts, that's why I'm not using it. And no, iChat isn't limited to only other Mac users; you can use iChat with a .Mac account, an AIM account and a few other IM accounts as well.

Well, I don't really see your point...of course, if you don't use the program, its useless for it being there. But "the digital lifestyle" is increasingly becoming apparent with digital photos and such, and home video editing is starting to pick up with the rise of YouTube. GarageBand is fun to use, and for an amateur musician, it would be an awesome "free" application.

But if you do use the programs, they're really great, considering they're bundled "free".

 

iChat, not so much. Adium is a better AIM client all around. But you can of course chat with anyone who uses AIM or any other supported services through iChat (think it supports MSN and yahoo). The only restriction is you can't video chat with people who don't have iChat, but there are work arounds...

Mail.. yeah, it's decent. Clean layout, easy to use. I'm not sure what personalizations you are talking about. It's email... The only personalizations you can add would be stuff like signatures and background images, which of course everyone would see.

Garageband... if you don't plan on doing some music, recording, or podcasting, you could get rid of it. It's a large install.

There is iMovie and iDVD for making movies. Great programs actually. They're light years ahead of MS's Moviemaker thingie.

 

Mail - very good
iChat - not so good. works with AIM service, use Adium instead which supports all protocols
GarageBand - no you will never use it if you don't make music or are interested in making music.
iMovie - best program for quickly editing a video clip. I had never done it before and was editing video clips within 2 minutes, there's nothing else like it.

All these come for free. I am not sure what your complaint is - if you don't use it, delete it from your HD!

 

i'm just curious how people use them, or if they don't at all. trying to get an idea if i would use them or if i'd end up deleting them. i use yahoo messenger and yahoo mail.

oh, and btw, i was referring to stationary and background on emails. if i send a stationary email to someone who has gmail, will they see the stationary? probably not, right? and i'm not getting stationary from them, right? so when is stationary ever really being used? oh, well, i always wondered why all email programs don't use stationary to make it look a little more personalized.

 

guess i might play around with garage band or imovie at some point. not sure about the others.

 

The new yahoo mail does not work with safari, so you would need to download firefox to be able to use it. There is also Yahoo Messenger 3 beta 2 for mac right now, which is pretty cool and much better than MSN Messenger for mac.

 

Adium doesn't support video does it? Thats whats holding me back.

 

Well, if you know for certain that you'll never need to make movies, organize photos, edit music, create DVDs, etc., then of course iLife isn't useful. That said, it is the best free content creation suite you can get and will have all the functionality any nonprofessional would be likely to need. It is much much better than the stuff that Windows bundles with Vista Ultimate (and Garageband is better than Audigy IMO as well).

Of course, if you had to pay for it, you might consider if it's worth getting over more professional solutions if you intend to use them often. However, since it's "free" - no reason not to keep it on your system until you need HDD space.

You never know - I had long stopped using such applications when time became a precious commodity, but yet just the other day, a friend asked me to make something for them and I was sure glad I'd taken the trouble to keep iLife installed and updated (yay Apple for free iLife 08).

 

Mail = the best e-mail program ever. Brilliantly simple, and simply beautiful. (hmm, where did I get that from haha.) seriously though, it's super stable and very reliable...works very well.

garage band = useless (for me, but not for other people).

iChat = good if you know people with macs or who use aim. my family has mostly macs now so we use ichat every now and then.

 

I believe you got that from the Leopard videos on Apple's site (although its slightly different on that video): the New Desktop video ends with "Enjoy a desktop that is beautifully simple, and simply beautiful" .