…a pragmatic follow-up to my HOWTO on switching to the Mac.
This page will hold a list of Applications and activities to help people switching to Mac OS X, in a way similar to (and inspired by) Rich Burridge’s great Linux application list.
As such, most of the application listed here will be freeware (I will eventually re-structure the list to clearly differentiate between free and commercial software).
| Application | Mac OS X Replacement(s) |
|---|---|
| Audio editing | GarageBand comes pre-installed on new Macs and can do basic audio editing, but Audacity is the one application that you ought to go out and grab. It has some kinks (adding MP3 support might be a bit fiddly, depending on the version), but it is an excellent general-purpose audio editor that can do just about anything. |
| Adobe Acrobat | Mac OS X ships with the ability to print anything to PDF and view PDF files in Preview, and there are several tools to manipulate them, like PDFLab. But you can install Adobe’s own reader. If you really, really want to. |
| Ahead Nero | There are plenty of options beyond learning to use the Finder “burn folders” or Disk Utility to burn ISO files, but here are two that I have used at one time or another: Burn (straightforward and to the point), FireStarter FX (known to be able to handle CUE, BIN files and overburning). On the flip side, if you want to do heavy-duty ripping/encoding, grab HandBrake. You can’t go wrong. |
| File Transfer (FTP and SFTP) | Besides the (rather lacking) FTP support in the Finder), you can try Cyberduck (my current favorite), Fugu, or Transmit (commercial). If you need to mount remote filesystems via SSH, I really recommend ExpanDrive. |
| BitTorrent | I get asked about this a lot, so here goes: Transmission. You can’t beat its feature set, which now includes a web UI for remote control from your “iPod””:iPod/Touch or iPhone. |
| Notepad | This one depends on what you really need a text editor for: TextEdit is built in, and works fine, BBEdit has a legion of followers, TextMate is probably the most sophisticated programmers’ editor out there, and VoodooPad will do a lot more than just text editing. |
| Backup, Norton Ghost, etc. | Time Machine comes with Leopard , but some people prefer straight-up disk cloning (which you can do via apps like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). I also have some generic resources that might be useful for the techie crowd. |
| Launchy, AppRocket, etc. | If you want the best keyboard-based application launcher in the Universe, get Quicksilver. |
| Microsoft OneNote | There is no direct replacement, even though Word 2008 has a “notebook” view of sorts that tries to emulate it on the Mac. Try Evernote, VoodooPad, FreeMind, etc. (mind you, OneNote file formats are proprietary, and have changed between Office 2003 and 2007) |
| Microsoft Office | There is an Office 2008 edition for the Mac that is roughly equivalent to Office 2007, but you can also try NeoOffice or OpenOffice 3, which has been significantly improved over the past few months. Of course, there will always be minor issues when converting Windows metafiles and other Windows-specific formats – not unlike moving documents between two different versions of Office or between machines with different sets of fonts installed. |
| Microsoft Outlook | There aren’t that many options, and you may want to try Leopard’s Mail.app, which now has pretty decent To-Do and iCal integration, and Entourage, which is shipped with Office for the Mac, but it does not have the same feature set (there are several utilities to migrate Outlook data in my Outlook page.) |
| Microsoft PowerPoint | Keynote (from the iWork suite) will be a more than adequate replacement for just about any purpose (and will handle PowerPoint files, with a few limitations). You can, of course, use Office 2008 |
| Microsoft Project | There are several options, by no particular order: GanttProject is a free cross-platform Java application, that imports .mpx files, but Merlin is rumored to be the best at importing and exporting Project .mpx files flawlessly (search for reviews to confirm this). Then you have OmniPlan and Project X, which has a built-in web server for team members to file progress reports directly. |
| Microsoft Word | Pages (from the iWork suite) will be a more than adequate replacement for most purposes (and will handle Word .doc and .rtf files, with a few limitations). |
| Microsoft Excel | Numbers (from the iWork suite) will be a more than adequate replacement for most purposes (although it has some limitations in terms of formulae and no macro compatibility) |
| Microsoft Visio | OmniGraffle can import Visio files in XML format. Not the native binary format, so you’ll have to export your files, but it is the closest (and most say best) possible alternative. I’ve proven to my own satisfaction that PowerPoint 2008 has “good enough” diagramming tools, but it can be a little frustrating at times. |
| Photoshop or Fireworks | Yes, there are native versions for the Mac. But there are lighter, cheaper alternatives. For instance, I have of late adopted Pixelmator for all my image editing. There’s also Seashore, which is free (even if development appears to be stalled since 2007). |
| Microsoft Messenger, Yahoo, etc. | There are a number of alternatives: Adium is most likely the only IM client you’ll ever really need, and supports all popular IM services. But there’s also Psi and the built-in iChat, which will connect to Jabber networks. There are, of course, official Mac versions of most IM clients, but why use more than one app? |
| Microsoft NetMeeting | Again, there are plenty of alternatives: XMeeting is able to talk to corporate H.323 videoconferencing equipment (your mileage may vary, of course), iChat is proprietary, but works better between Mac and Skype can also do video on the Mac (proprietary, but cross-platform). |
| IRC | I personally prefer Colloquy, although lots of people like X-Chat Aqua. |
| Windows Media Player | In terms of media support, there are many Quicktime plugins and standalone players to enable you to view pretty much anything out there. Here are my favorites: Flip4Mac will enable you to play most popular Windows Media formats, Perian will add support for a lot more formats (including DivX), and VLC is a great standalone player for just about anything you throw at it. |
| WinRAR | UnRarX will unpack those for you. But there’s no real point in using RAR files these days, no matter what people say. |
| VNC, Remote Desktop | Mac OS X ships with a working VNC server (and a pretty decent client in Leopard). I have several VNC clients and an alternate server listed on my VNC page, and a Remote Destkop page (Microsoft has a Mac RDP client for download). |
The list will be updated at somewhat irregular intervals, but I will try to keep it in sync with some of my HOWTOs.