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Get started with your new Retina MacBook Pro: Find wallpapers, apps, and more.

by Morgan Williams on July 23, 2012 in Gadgets, How To

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Thanks to the 2-3 week backorder, many of you are finally getting your Retina MacBook Pro.

What are you going to do with it?

Wallpapers

Trust me — you want a high-resolution background. Delete all the backgrounds you thought were pretty and replace them with retina backgrounds.

Photos that are 2880 x 1800 are a bit harder to find, but here’s where you can find them:

Interface Lift
Google search: Search with this link to find retina-quality images on the web.

Install apps

The Retina MacBook Pro doesn’t have an optical drive. Here’s how to get the apps you want onto your new Mac.

The Mac App store
Amazon’s Mac Software downloads
Games: Steam or or Amazon’s Mac game downloads.
Install it using a remote disc drive or an external optical drive.

Retina-ready apps

Apps: Acorn, Aperture, Chrome, Coda 2, Final Cut Pro X, iMovie, iPhoto, Mint Quickview, Parallels Desktop, Pulp, Reeder, Sparrow, TextExpander, Transmission, Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, VLC, VoodooPad.

Games: Call of Duty, Civilization V, Doom 3, Prey, Quake 4, Call of DutyStar Wars: Empire at War, Star Wars: Jedi Knight II.

(list via Macworld and Wired)

A few of the many things I installed were:

Apptivate for global app keyboard shortcuts
Perian video plug-in — Lets Quicktime play just about anything.
BackBlaze unlimited online backup
Clean desktop cleaner
GrowlVoice Google Voice client
Xcode
Spotify
Sparrow
Adium chat
iWork: Pages word processor, Keynote presentations, Numbers spreadsheets.
- Do you really need Office? Odds are, you don’t.
Google Drive
Steam Games

More things I do with a fresh Mac

Measure my computer’s speed with benchmark software such as Xbench or GeekBench.
Change screenshot directory so they don’t clutter my desktop
Disable the empty trash warning
Remove most of the icons in the menu bar (command+click the icon and drag it out)
Hide the dashboard space.

You know what the beautiful thing is? Thanks to iCloud and iTunes Match, most of my mail, calendar, bookmarks, and music was synced right off the bat.