Just put OSX on a Dell Mini 10 for my (11 year old) daughter. Apart from it being incredibly cool I could do with a couple of recomendations for apps for her.
She’s mainly going to be using web – I’ve been told that Chrome is brilliant but what’s Firefox like (it’s what I usually use)?

She’s going to want to do some messaging so I presume Messenger is the one to go for.

She’ll be using it for homework too so she’s going to need a decent Word Processor – Open Office or iWork?

Anything else that she’ll need?

Adium is good for messaging (does all protocols, but don’t think it does audio/video).

iWork has a decent word processor (‘pages’) and pretty cheap if you get it on the Mac App Store.

Chrome is good, I tend to use safari tbh, but firefox on mac is the same as firefox on windows.

Numbers is good for a cheap spreadsheet (unless you want OpenOffice).

The iLife apps are good – I use iPhoto a lot, Garageband is good for a laugh.

HTH

Google Apps?

I’d rather she had the apps on the laptop. Anybody tried Open Office? Don’t really need all the options, maybe iWork.

Adium for messaging.
Safari for the web browser
NeoOffice for a free office suite (mac native version of OO), as above iWork is better, though costs a little.

perian and flip4mac to support most video natively in quicktime.

Finally,

Apple menu->system preferences -> parental controls

Might be worth a look.

Oh, and make the admin account just one you have the password for, and make her a regular user account without superuser permissions (system preferences->accounts). Makes it harder for her to break things by mistake.

Thanks guys. Daughter wants video chat so I think its Messenger we need. Have installed Open Office but will look at NeoOffice as well. Pages is only £8.00 from the app store so may even buy that!
Any recommendations for a photo viewer?

picasa is pretty good if you don’t want to go with iPhoto

iPhoto is pretty damn lovely though, it’s the one app I’d really miss if I went back to Windows.

Even as a Mac fan, I must say I MUCH prefer Picasa to iPhoto. In fact it was the one reason I decided to buy a Windows machine for home rather than a Mac (about 2 months before Picasa for Mac came out)

As far as the office suite goes, find out what format her school want home work doing in if she’s going to be submitting it electronically, or working on it at school. I can guarantee that answer will be MS Word. In that case, buy Mac Office and use the education discount because she’s at school. Yes, it costs more than the free options, but at least you’ll know that exactly what is on her screen will be what the teacher sees. Good as the free options are, and Pages for that matter, they still don’t get it quite right.

As far as messaging goes, find out what her mates use. Then install that. At least she’ll be able to talk to people then. Personally I use Skype and iChat/Facetime for video, depends on who I’m talking to as contacts have accounts with both.

I second the suggestion to make your daughter a normal user on it too. You can then do clever things like lock down access to applications to certain times. So if you don’t want her video chatting her mates after 9pm, then you can prevent the app from even running.

Use Safari for the web browser. Firefox eats memory and just generally doesn’t react as fast as Safari. Chrome does react a little faster, but pages seem to render in the same time as Safari. More crucially though, the ad blockers and flash blockers aren’t as good as they are on Safari.

FWIW I tried Neo and Open Office but found them ugly and unwieldy. YMWV.

I second Safari. Its quick, pretty and works, why try harder?

Def make yourself Admin and her a normal user or guest.

If you have an iTunes account make sure she doesn’t know what your password is…