Making the PC-to-PowerBook Move
My wife’s 10-year-old PC is dying again, and I’m tired of resuscitating it. The solution? She gets my little iBook G4 and I get a new 15″ PowerBook. That seems only fair, doesn’t it? But at the same time, I’ve decided to do what thousands before me have done: I”m moving my life (email, IM, word processing, etc.) from Windows to OS X. It’s both exciting and frightenting for a guy who’s lived on a PC for nearly 20 years and knows virtually nothing about Macintoshes. I’ve mostly used the iBook to make sure IT Conversations works okay for Mac owners, but when I took it on vacation recently, I decided to make the change.
What recources exist to help people with this migration? Any tips? Web sites? Books? And what are the must-have utilities and other apps on the Mac? So far, I’ve found the following:
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I can’t live without:
* Default Folder: gives you incredible navigation control with any file selection or save dialog. (stclairsoft.com)
* MaxMenus: popup menus with lots of options for the four corners of the screen to activate applications, open files, etc. (http://www.proteron.com/maxmenus/)
* Audio Hijack Pro: Given your interests, you need this immediately. It lets you record sound or redirect sound among any application or system input or output device. (http://rogueamoeba.com/)
* Soundflower: free virtual audio device tool that is a great help in mixing with Audio Hijack Pro. (http://www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower.html)
* AirFoil: if you have an AirPort Express, lets you take any audio output from any application and play it over AirTunes to the Express’s audio output. (http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/)
Comment by Glenn Fleishman — 3/5/2005 @ 9:23 am
A couple more:
* ecto, a blog posting program that works with anything that supports the XML-RPC API.
* NetNewsWire Pro (2.0 beta) for syndication aggregation and automatic podcasting downloads (www.ranchero.com)
Comment by Glenn Fleishman — 3/5/2005 @ 9:25 am
Welcome aboard
1) Move2Mac might be helpful. (http://www.apple.com/switch/howto/move2mac/)
2) DevonThink & DevonAgent (http://www.devon-technologies.com/)
Comment by PXLated — 3/5/2005 @ 9:28 am
NetNewsWire is far and away the best RSS aggregator. I love SuperDuper! for backing up to an external firewire drive I have. You’ll need to have Transmit by Panic for FTP/SFTP.
Comment by Ian — 3/5/2005 @ 11:17 am
If you use del.icio.us, you need cocoalicious [http://www.scifihifi.com/cocoalicious/]. Also, I’d second the reccomendations on NNW and LaunchBar- I couldn’t live without them.
Comment by ryan king — 3/5/2005 @ 12:29 pm
QuickSilver has changed the way I use my mac. If you read a few of the posts here (http://www.43folders.com/quicksilver/) you’ll see why.
I’ll 3rd, or 4th the NNW recomendation.
Comment by Michael Koziarski — 3/5/2005 @ 1:02 pm
Much of it already mentioned here, but still: My list is at http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2004/12/19/mac_os_x_software_list.html
Comment by Stefan Tilkov — 3/5/2005 @ 2:45 pm
FWIW, rather than along comment, I’ve written a post on this, but don’t have track backs…
…
You should definitely check out
Others
WordService
TwiddleService
CalcService
Menu Bar Items
Apple Mail plug-ins and tools
Comment by Marc Nothrop — 3/9/2005 @ 7:29 am
Oops, last post stripped the URL… a reply at marcn.blurty.com
Comment by Marc Nothrop — 3/9/2005 @ 7:33 am
A few Mac apps I reallt like:
Text editing
Enhanced Carbon Emacs
jEdit http://www.jedit.org
TextWrangler free lite version of BBedit
Graphics (Other than Photoshop of course)
Graphic Converter (Should come with your Powerbook - it did with mine - good barebones graphics editor)
Gimp 2.0 - free, open source graphics app that does most of what photoshop does. UI is a bit weird but the price is right.Requires X11 to run
Photoshop Elements: Good value for the money if you don’t want to shell out for full version. Comes with some cammeras and scanners
Business
NeoOffice J: is OpenOffice for MacOSX. Still in Beta but I find it to be more than adequate as a replacement for Microsoft Office which is expensive
OmniOutliner: should come with your Powerbook. Great outliner
Omnigraph: also should come with powerbook Great for flow charts and database schema drawings
Web browers: Safari, Firefox and Camino (OSX native version of Mozilla) all are solid browsers
Obviously you will get iLife (iPhoto, imovie, iDVD and Garage Band) as good as advertised
E-Mail
Apple Mail - good enough for me
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mailsmith - from makers of BBedit
Misc
iTerm - Terminal replacement with tabs
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
More here:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
Comment by Geoff — 3/9/2005 @ 12:24 pm