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Mac OSX Apps I use

Posted July 13th, 2010 in OSX

I switched from Windows to Mac OSX just over a month ago after buying a MacMini so I can test websites using the iPhone/iPad simulator (see related posts links at the end of this post for more details about my 30 day OSX challenge). This post looks at the apps that I'm using compared with what I was using before on Windows.

Web browsers

I use Chrome as my primary browser and Firefox when writing and editing content. I also use Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer regularly to test layouts and functionality of websites.

Previously I was running on Windows and ran separate virtual machines using VMWare to test IE6 and IE7 on their native platform, and without the hackery of MultipleIEs which doesn't always render pages exactly as they would appear.

I can still test Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari without having to run a VM but obviously have to in order to test IE. So now I have VMs for IE6, IE7, and IE8. The IE8 one also has other browsers installed so I can check rendering on Windows as sometimes font differences between OSX and Windows can make things look different.

Email and News Reader

My email is hosted with Google Apps and news with Google Reader; I use the web interface for both with Google Chrome. So there were no issues and nothing to install, copy or convert when switching over.

Twitter Client

I had been using TweetDeck on Windows and initially used it on OSX when I made the switch but like all Adobe AIR apps it's a memory hog. I checked out some others and ended up installing Nambu which I like a lot and prefer over TweetDeck. It's not quite as much of a memory hog :)

PHP Coding

I was using Nusphere PhpEd on Windows and it was suggested I tried Netbeans, which is a cross platform Java based editor. I like it a lot - it's easily as good as Nusphere (and better in some respects) but is a huge memory hog... If only I could add more RAM to my MacMini!

Adobe Photoshop

I had been using CS2 on Windows and was pleased to learn I could do a crossgrade from CS2 Win to CS5 Mac for the regular upgrade price. I had been wanting to do an upgrade anyway so this gave me the opportunity to do so.

Office Suite

I don't use Office apps much - almost all the spreadsheets and docs I use are stored in Google Apps but there are some that are a bit too big to work well there so I refer to them with a local office suite.

The trial of Microsoft Office for Mac turned me right off the product, so I quickly deleted it and installed NeoOffice instead.

The only issue with both MS Office for Mac and NeoOffice is they often don't quite render Word documents created in the Windows version quite right. I have had to fire up my old Windows machine on a couple of occasions to print / export as PDF documents sent to me from other people.

Virtualization

The virtual machines I run for testing IE were on VMWare Server/Desktop on Windows. I started off using VMWare Fusion on OSX and then tried out Parallels as well. I've ended up paying for licences for both of them (got a good discount for Fusion, and Parallels gives a huge discount if you are already a Fusion customer). I still need to play around with both before I decide which one I like better.

Web/Database Stack

Previously I had been running a LAMP stack in a VM on my Windows box; I did this initially on OSX but was having issues with too much memory being used all the time.

So I rsync'd all my websites across to the OSX filesystem and attempted to use the version of Apache and PHP that comes with OSX but it didn't include the font libraries which I need for generating images for the Personalised Plates website.

I then tried out MAMP and that had everything I needed and was a trivial install.

SVN Client

TortoiseSVN is SVN client that's integrated into the Windows explorer but there's no Mac version. I tried a number of OSX clients and settled on Versions. Although I have also started to become more proficient at using command line SVN I still like using a GUI and Versions is nice.

Apps with OSX versions

Here's a list of other apps that I use on a daily basis which I was simply able to download an OSX version and work with straight away. In some cases there are other native OSX apps available but I chose to continue using the tool I was more familiar with:

• Garmin ANT (for downloading data for my GPS watch)
• Printer drivers (Canon LBP5000 color laser and IP4300 inkjet)
• PS3 Media Server
• uTorrent
• Filezilla
• Juniper Remote Access
• Windows Remote Desktop

Stuff I didn't need to install because OSX does it already

And here's the beauty of OSX compared to Windows: it comes with a lot of stuff so you don't need to be installing utility software left right and center.

• Terminal / SSH
• iTunes (I never liked it on Windows but it seems fine on OSX)
• PDF reading
• "Printing" as a PDF

Other OSX stuff

Here's some other useful tools I found:

• DoubleCommand which can help you to make the home and end keys work like on a PC. The only catch I found was it also made home and end go back and forward in Firefox's history which wasn't so useful when I wanted to go to the start of a line when editing content and lost all my changes. After this happened one time too many I switched that setting off...
• Alfred for finding stuff. I did try Quicksilver first but liked Alfred better.
• BlueHarvest for removing those pesky ._files and .DS_Store files from USB sticks and network drives. I just used the trial version but haven't bothered to register it.
• Path Finder which is far superior to the OSX Finder. This is a commercial product but I've found well worth the money. The funny thing is I've obviously seen it in the past on other people's computers and had thought that's what the Finder was like and was quite disappointed to find out what the Finder is really like...
• LineIn to play radio through the computer's speakers. I did see in the comments on the page linked to that this is apparantly possible with the Audio MIDI Setup but it didn't work when I tried, whereas LineIn worked just fine.

Any other suggestions?

If you have any suggestions for any other useful apps please leave a comment below.