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21 things for a new Mac switcher

I’ve recently made the switch… I’ve finally done it and bought one of these fancy new MacBook Pro’s. It still hasn’t arrived (no wonder it’s free delivery, it’s being walked over from the states), so in the meantime I thought that I’d mail one of my mates who I know is a total Mac geek (and has been for as long as I can remember) and ask a few questions about mail clients, which programs to use, etc… And, bless him, being the Apple evangelist that he’s always been, sent me the following list of usefulness, slightly edited by me for the interweb.

Thanks a lot Bisley for this, and if anybody else has any useful resources please add them to the comments – no Viagra sales though thanks.

General & Games Mac info

Also Leopard is out later in the year and it’s worth checking out the new features or watch the keynote.

Support

Software & Updates

Rumour sites

Email

Generally I find the built in Mail client to be pretty good, however Thunderbird is equally as good – only drawback i Can think of is that TB has no support for the built in Address book (Which will sync with
your mobile, ipod, other macs etc using iSync).

Browsers

I use Safari 3.0 (beta just out), Omniweb whichis great too but it’s not free :-/ I’m sure you’ll want to use Firefox. Although you might also want to check out the native version of Firefox for aqua (Camino), it’s had very good reviews.

Word Processors & Spreadsheets

I use Nisus Writer and I have MS Office for comptabilities sake (although Nisus will open/save word docs). There are a number of cheap WPs out for the mac if you hunt around.

Web Dev

There are two fantastic text editors on the Mac:

There’s also Coda which combines a collaborative text edit (allows several people to work on the same doc at the same time) and has live HTML Preview and FTP as well – it’s very good for HTML. The other two are better for PHP and Ruby respectively.

Project Management

Chat software

  • Ichat AV (Built in) , chat, audio & Video conf. You can use AOL/AIM accounts too (and they’re free)
  • Adium Excellent multi-compatible chatclient
  • Skype

P2P

Use this newsfirerss

RSS

Safari does RSS (and so will the new mail client in Leopard) however
there are 2 great RSS clients in the shape of:

Remote Control

Running Windows

  • Boot camp (Dual boots your mac)
  • Parallels (Virtualisation) – Now has support for accelrated
    graphics so can run games at full speed
  • Vmware
  • DarWine -(free) Runs SOME Windows apps under OS X natively

WMV playback

DIVX & XVid

Most compatible Video playback client

Graphic Tools

Graphic Converter – v. useful converts
and edits 100s of different formats.

Ruby Development (Cool runtime environment)

FTP Software

Other Funs stuff

  • Mark
  • 15 June 2007
  • 1 comment

Comments

Simon B

said on 15 June 2007

I hope you ordered a big hard drive to fit all that stuff on!!!
Useful stuff though - might just tip over the edge to finally buy a mac

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