Hey folks, I just wrote my second blog post ever around the steps I take to set up a brand new Mac. If this kind of self-shilling isn’t welcome here, just let me know and I’ll delete this post. That said, I thought it would be fun to share a collection of my most used apps and tools and why I use them.
I do this (too) frequently. My standard procedure is to go into the applications folder of the prior machine and do a Select All and then a Copy. I then paste to a PLAIN TEXT editor (TextEdit works well as long as it is set for plain text and not RTF). As easy as that, I have a list of every app on the old machine. Using the text editor, I can then delete any built-in Apple apps and apps I don’t want to use any more. I will then usually order the list by how I want to install them (or at least a high, medium and low priority). Makes a clean install as painless as possible and is more flexible than using a default list that is maintained over time.
