Transition to Mac

With the increasing popularity of MAC, more and more people are considering a switch to MAC but are still bewildered as to what this would entail. I wanted to share my own experiences in this regard.

First of all, most current hardware works with MAC with very few exceptions.


Also, most software products have their mac counterparts. The first thing to do is to get used to the MAC counterparts for the software that we use in windows. Here are some which I found very useful:

The iCal and Contacts applications in MAC are perfect for their intended needs. The ability of iCal to obtain different calendars even from the internet is awesome. I view my normal calendar with all my appointments along with a calendar of all US Holidays, another calendar that has my wife's engagements etc. all in iCal. When I look at the entries they are color coded differently so that I know which entry came from which calendar.

Many users of ipods are already used to itunes and hence it should not be a big deal to start using iTunes. However to play wmv files i have installed flip4Mac as a plugin to the Quicktime movie player.

Of course the command line tool is different for Mac. The Terminal which ships with MAC is pretty good especially since it is all bash!!! Woohoo! Love the UNIX command line environment. You can also download iTerm(free) for a better terminal. It supports multiple tabs and can be made more transparent. Cool!

Here is a list of software that works in windows and has its mac counterpart:

Yahoo messenger(free download) - which is almost identical to its windows counterpart except for the fact that it does not support yahoo chat

Microsoft Office for MAC (purchased software)- This was essential for me since most of us have standardized on excel, word, powerpoint and Microsoft outlook for documents.

Safari is good for browsing for the most part but you might want to go ahead and grab Firefox for MAC (free software) so that you can have a more "standard" browser. But there are certain websites that work better with Safari for me. Besides, Safari is a much more lightweight browser.

Google Picasa web album uploader (free download) is very useful to upload your pictures into picasaweb. I use it extensively.

Skype has a mac version.

Finally, there are some things that are exclusively in mac and are way toooo cool.

Download pixen(free) for a free picture editor. iPhoto(shipped with MAC) also has a very decent editor but pixen has some cool features like allowing you to work with layers. Picturesque(free download) allows you to decorate your photos with some cool effects such as adding a reflective pool below the picture etc. Very pleasing effect indeed.

The MAC dashboard is an awesome thing. It allows various widgets to be added to accomplish various activities. The widgets shipped with MAC are great. Check out their clock, stickies, calendar etc. One of the coolest dashboard free widget available is the one available at widget-foundry.com. This one allows you to download the album art for any song that is currently being highlighted in iTunes. It fetches the album art from amazon.com and allows the user to set the found album art to the selected song(s). Check it out. I think it is very cool.

Marsedit (purchased separately) is a great software to upload your blogs to various blog sites. Most of my blogs (including this one) are written using Marsedit.

Cyberduck is an awesome FTP tool to do en masse uploads into my website.

TextWrangler is a great text editor. The best feature of it is that it can edit a remote text file (from an FTP server) and save it when the COmmand + S button is pressed as if you are saving it locally.

Growl(free software) is great for notifications. It hooks with most softwares (iTerm, yahoo messenger, cyberduck etc.) to pop up tiny windows when significant events happen. For instance, growl gives you a notification when a user from your yahoo messenger buddy list comes online. It also notifies you when you have uploaded a file successfully into an ftp site using cyberduck.

There are more tools besides these. Will add them as I learn more.