It’s funny, I use to be a “PC Guy” and hated console gaming and Mac. Now if you asked me, I’d consider myself a “Mac Guy” and 99% of the gaming I do is on a console. My, how times have changed.
A year ago next month, will be when I purchased my first Mac. It was intended as an experiment, me and some friends had delusions of grandeur and planned on making some iPhone apps. That hasn’t happened, not to say it will never, as there are a couple of apps that I’d like to see, but I’m not there yet.
Over the past year, my Windows rig (Vista, C2D @ 2.53 GHz, 2 GB RAM, ATI HD 4870 512) has been neglected, only turned on to run Quicken when I’m balancing the checkbook. Even that came to an end as I found something that fills my needs on the Mac. So, what software do I use? What Mac software replaced my Windows software? Let’s take a look.
- iBank – After reading countless reviews about how much Quicken for Mac 2007 sucked, I was holding out for the next version, which has seen several delays. I find it odd that Quicken for Mac would be so neglected considering Bill Campbell, the Chairman of the Board for Intuit, is also on the Apple Board of Directors. What’s the deal Bill?
- 1Password – Passwords, they are everywhere. I can’t tell you how many of them I have. They only way I can remember most of them is via this app. This replaced RoboForm on Windows.
- Adium – I don’t use the IM networks like I use to. These days, I’d rather just get a text message or an email, but some people still insist on using it. This replaced Trillian, though I had hoped Trillian Astra (which I was beta testing on Windows) would have been released on the Mac a long, long time ago. For IM on my iPhone, I use Beejive.
- Colloquy – Because I’ve never found an IM client with a decent IRC client, I’ve always opted to use a stand alone IRC program. This replaces the good ole mIRC. They even have a nice iPhone app. Not that I use IRC much these days.
- OpenOffice.org – Ok, it’s really cheating listing this app. It’s been my main office suite on Windows and Linux systems for years now. I’ve not played much with Apple’s iWork suite, and I found MS Office for Mac to be slow and cumbersome. To be fair to MS, I’ve not tried the recently release SP2 for Office.
- TextMate – It’s an awesome text editor. I wouldn’t call this a Dreamweaver replacement, because let’s face it Dreamweaver is just wonderful, too bad it costs an arm and a leg. This app replaced Notepad++ for me, which in itself was a replacement for Windows Notepad.
- Transmit – A very nice FTP client that replaced FileZilla. Sure, FileZilla is available for OS X, but it just didn’t feel right for some reason.
- Delicious Library – Ok, I really didn’t have an app on Windows that did this. Except maybe a bunch of spreadsheets.
- Evernote – I had used this to replace Google Notebook long before Google decided to kill their project. This just replaced a bunch of text files and documents. With an iPhone app and web-based service, I can get my notes anywhere. They even allow you to post notes from Twitter, for some reason.
- Pixelmator – It’s not quite Photoshop, but it’s close. For me, this replaced GIMP and Paint.NET. GIMP isn’t bad, and has an OS X client as well, I’ve just always found it to be slow.
Sure, there are other apps that I use. But these are the main thins anymore. Talk to some friends, surf, edit an image or do some coding (PHP, SQL), or… well, that’s really about all I do these days.
Tags: 1Password, Adium, Apple, Astra, Colloquy, Delicious Library, Dreamweaver, Evernote, iBank, iPhone, IRC, Mac, OpenOffice, OS X, Quicken, Trillian