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    • Delimiter

    Best Mac OS X apps for a Windows switcher?

    Home › Forums › Everything else › Best Mac OS X apps for a Windows switcher?

    This topic contains 5 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by  rtfmoz 3 months, 2 weeks ago.

    Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
    • Author
      Posts
    • 31/01/2013 at 11:41 am #140509

      Renai LeMay
      Keymaster

      hey guys,

      just wanted to pick your brains for a second. I’ve recently shifted my home PC to an iMac (27″, mid-2011 model), as now that I have both an Xbox and a PlayStation 3, I haven’t been using my gaming PC for that much, and the iMac saves a bunch of desk/office space as it’s an all-in-one unit. I still have the gaming PC; I’ll pull it out when something like Crysis 3 comes out. I also have a Bootcamp Win7 partition for the games the iMac can handle.

      So what I want to know is, what are the best Mac apps I should be using? I’ve recently switched from MS Word to Pages, which is just a better word processor for writing, in my opinion, and less bloated on Mac OS X. I’m still using Chrome but I’ve disabled Flash, which is a performance killer on Mac OS X. I use Chrome Canary when I need to load a Flash page online.

      I’ve got TextWrangler for text/HTML editing, Tweetbot for Twitter, Photoshop Elements for image editing, VLC for video playing and Steam for those games that run on the Mac. I really hate iTunes, but I’m using it at the moment as I haven’t been able to find a decent Winamp alternative for the Mac.

      Anything else I should be using? What are the best Mac OS X apps, in your opinion?

      Renai

      31/01/2013 at 11:56 am #140510

      epal
      Participant

      In no particular order:

      - Alfred (brilliant applauncher/shortcut swiss-army knife)
      - iStat Menus (amazing system monitoring for your menu bar)
      - Radium (beautiful Internet radio streamer)
      - Fantastical (Incredible calendar for your menu bar)
      - PeakHour (monitor your Internet bandwidth via SNMP)
      - iTerm (serious Terminal.app replacement)
      - Reeder (the best RSS reeder I’ve seen on any platform)

      Probably a few more I’ve forgotten…

      31/01/2013 at 11:59 am #140511

      jimbo
      Participant

      iTunes sucks hard, but last I checked there wasn’t much in the alternatives (possibly because of Apple’s iTunes store, not a lot of interest to switch). Alternatives last I looked included Clementine or Songbird, but last I looked they weren’t any better or had separate issues. Personally I just have a smart folder that picks up saved playlists (eg for albums), and set VLC as the default app for those files. Not as nice as browsing through a library though.

      I’ve switched between Firefox, Safari and Chrome, and prefer Chrome.

      AppZapper is a handy little app for deleting everything associated with an app.

      Chicken of the VNC for VNC. Cyberduck for FTP.

      Growl for notifications. Handbrake for video conversion. Onyx for optimisation.

      Quicksilver if you prefer keystrokes to mousing… tis totally awesome.

      31/01/2013 at 12:06 pm #140512

      c41
      Participant

      I’m not a massive fan of iTunes either, but one thing I’ve learnt as a long time mac user is – even if they launch something and it feels wrong, let yourself go a bit and use it the way they want you to. I often end up liking things I initially baulked at – due to discovering neat things I didn’t know were there.

      I use Pages, though I rarely write. If I was doing more writing/collaboration with other writers, I think I’d just get the mac version of Office. Otherwise its just more hassle than its worth.

      here’s the other stuff i’ve become very attached to:

      - Default Folder X http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/ (watch the screencast)
      - 1 Password https://agilebits.com/onepassword
      - Hazel http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php (not a user yet, but thinking about it)
      - Net News Wire http://netnewswireapp.com/ (google reader with a native app)
      - Keyboard Maestro http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (not a user, but thought u might find useful)
      - Postbox http://www.postbox-inc.com/ gmail but with a native app. thank. christ.
      - SuperDuper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
      - Transmit http://panic.com/transmit/ (if you need FTP)
      - VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/ (if you dont want to boot into windows just to test/run something quickly)
      - BlueHarvest http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest4/ (if needed – keeps windows people happy on yr network)
      - and finally – the built in Automator can do some really awesome things and make repetitive tasks actually fun – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2488
      - oh, sorry, 1 more. a great podcast for picking up new things to add to this list => http://macpowerusers.com/

      hope this helps,
      Pete

      01/02/2013 at 4:41 pm #140602

      sim
      Participant

      Depends of course on needs
      iTerm – ssh terminal
      Thunderbird – alternate mail
      Komodo Edit – alternate editor
      svnX – free svn client
      VMware fusion – or parallels
      Handbrake – burning
      Unison – news feeds
      NodeToad – if youve an internode account

      Already mentioned:
      1Password

      Multi platform:
      OpenOffice
      MPEG Streamclip

      05/02/2013 at 6:14 pm #140721

      rtfmoz
      Participant

      Hehe Renai I am in the exact same boat. Mac Book Pro four months old coming over from building win machines for 20 years. In terms of office MS Office for Mac if you want to deal with word documents. Outlook for mail if you are dealing with a exchange work environment otherwise there are much better Mac.mail clients. I use VMware fusion to run those apps that just won’t go on Mac. If you have news feeds through google reader then notifier app send updates to your notification bar on the mac. Quicksilver is very good, just start typing app name, it learns your habits and highly programmable. The mac is amazing, welcome to the white side. :-)

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