Moving to a Macintosh laptop
You’re curious, you saw the various Mac Vs PC ads in youtube, some of the regular geeks in the office are carrying it, lotsa people in Starbucks sport it. You want to get one but worried about a big learning curve, and that you might get stomped somewhere along the way because there are applications in your Windows XP machine that you thought you cannot run in Mac.
I got my Mac sometime ago, maybe 8 months ago, as you can see from the photo, it’s no longer the pristine pearly white Mac as it was when it first came out of the box, that’s because this is now my primary notebook. This is by the way, a Core 2 Duo, 2.4GHz Mac Book, it came with the stock 2GB RAM (which I later bumped up to 4GB).
I’ve shied away from the Macintosh laptop for quite sometime because of various reasons; too girly, too white, too pricey, too dainty, too … lotsa things; But I really wanna get may hands on OSX, so I went ahead and got one. Didn’t think anymore about the apps that will be available, a lot of the things that I do requires the command line anyway, and OSX is very close to BSD (Berkeley Systems Distribution of UNIX), so that wasn’t a problem for me, in fact that is the major reason I got the Macintosh laptop.
Initially, I thought I’d use the Macintosh laptop as a second notebook, something I would lug around with me when I’m out on assignment — because it’s light — that I would take it with me when doing mostly sys admin work. I didn’t consider it for doing office work, you know emails and document related activities — but I thought I’d give it a try, here’s the list of apps that I run on this Macintosh laptop.
Apps on the Macintosh
- Microsoft Office – If you really can’t leave behind MS Office, you can still install this, natively, not through some emulations, but the real thing. The speed isn’t bad either. It does look very very different from the MS Office Windows versions, so you need to get used to the different interface before you get some traction, it took me about 30 minutes playing around and finding things I need, like how to format the fonts, how do I do page break, where are the borders etc — the interface is intuitive enough. I got Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Entourage (Outlook) installed without problems.
- OpenOffice Aqua – OpenOffice comes in 2 installations, Aqua and X11, I got hte Aqua. I’d like to keep the look and feel of my Mac a bit uniform, so I’m sticking with the Aqua versions of the apps. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with X11 apps, I do like them and use them too, but this is a Mac, if there’s an Aqua option, I’d go for that. You can find the OpenOffice Aqua here.
- Filezilla – an FTP and SFTP client, you can do your FTP via cmd line but this util will be handy when trying to work with several files, here’s where you can find it.
- TextMate – my new favorite code editor.
- Eclipse - My favorite editor and coding tool (that is before I found TextMate).
- XCode – This is the IDE that came with my OSX bundle, I haven’t really used this, but I’ll give it a try.
- Firefox – you won’t have trouble finding a Mac version of this browser.
- Archiver – for your zip and unzip needs, this came with OSX, didn’t have to do anything, it was just there.
- Safari – This is Apple’s browser, it’s quite fast, I use it a lot actually.
- Preview – This app works like a charm, I didn’t have to install Adobe Acrobat reader anymore, it took care opening up PDFs. This is also the app that you will be auto-launched when you double click image files. It supports lots of image formats, you can find out more here. It’s got rudimentary editing features as well; you can crop, rotate and perform image correction.
- Spotlight – This is the equivalent of Google Desktop or MS Desktop search tool, just press cmd-space to activate it, and type away; works like a mini search engine on your desktop.
- Mail.app – Email application bundled with OSX, it’s not bad; But I still installed Thunderbird
- Time machine – backup software that came bundled with OSX, didn’t bother with this, I have my own config management system and backup system.
- Spaces – Virtual desktops, I just found it there — didn’t have to do anything.
- Skype - You know what this is.
- iTunes — You also know what this is.
- Java runtime and Development kit – JDK 1.5 came with DVD installation of OSX, but after a couple of months, JDk 1.6 was available via the Mac software update.
- Ruby – This came pre-installed.
- Python – So did this.
- Objective C – and this one too.
- Quicktime — Gotta watch some movies sometime.
- iLife - This came bundled with OSX, I don’t bother with these too much, but I guess this willl be important to some other people; it Contains iPhoto,GarageBand,iWeb and iMovie (I think the equivalent in Windows is Movie Maker)
- Apache web server — it’s got a hidden Apache webserver in
/etc/apache2 - Flip4Mac - If you need to play WMV files, instead of installing Windows Media player on Mac OSX, just download this one, it’s a plugin that you can use for QuickTime and iMovie.
- ClamavX - anti virus for OSX, I didn’t think I would need this, but I didn’t want to take the risk, this is the anti virus I found for OSX, I was using this on my Linux boxes before, so I thought it should work just as well on the Mac.
I’ll stop here, there are many more apps that you can use, you can find them here,
Things I can’t get yet on the Mac
- Visio – I downloaded Dia, via MacPorts, so it’s not a big deal for me
- Google Chrome – I ran this using CrossOver, not quite happy with it’s performance on CrossOver, so I’ll wait for the native installer to be released for the Mac.
I’m pretty sure this list is longer for other people, but these are just the apps I was looking for.
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