…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 (later on the list will be re-structured to clearly differentiate between free and commercial software).
| Application | Mac OS X Replacement(s) |
|---|---|
| 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 apps/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 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) |
| 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) |
| 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. |
| Norton Ghost | If you really want to completely clone a disk, there is nothing out there able to beat SuperDuper (highly recommended by a lot of people). |
| Launchy, AppRocket, etc. | If you want the best keyboard-based application launcher in the Universe, get Quicksilver. |
| Microsoft OneNote | There is no direct replacement. Try VoodooPad, FreeMind, etc. (mind you, OneNote file formats are proprietary, and have changed between Office 2003 and 2007) |
| Microsoft Office | There is an Office 2004 edition for the Mac that is roughly equivalent to Office 2003, but since the 2008 version is due soon, you can also try NeoOffice, which has been significantly improved over the past few months and has an Aqua UI. 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). |
| 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. |
| 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 | 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. |
The list will be updated at somewhat regular intervals and will be a bit unstable at first while I figure out the best way to lay out and present things (I might even end up doing a TiddlyWiki version of it for people to download and share).