Recently I got an opportunity to use a MacBook. I was amazed by its speed and the cool graphics. Vista looked like a reproduction of Mac OS X Tiger to me. The sidebar of vista seems to be inspired by the Dashboard Widget system of Mac. The new integrated instant desktop search and powerful indexing integrated with Vista was available in Mac Jaguar since 2002.
As with windows, the first thing I did was stuff it with as many softwares as I can. I always love trying out different softwares. After 2 weeks of constant use, I found out that I cannot live without the following programs.
- QuickSilver – QuickSilver is an application that is a must for all Macs. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is, you will have to feel its power by using it. It is an unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. You can search for files, lauch applications and files, open webpages, search the web, search your browser history, send mail, resize / convert images and do much more things with it. The list is endless. The most important feature is the integrated plugin system which further extends its power. LifeHacker provides some excellent tutorials and screencasts on QuickSilver. If you have a mac and is not using QuickSilver, I highly recommend you to download a copy now itself. Unfortunately, there is no comparable software for windows. Launchy seems to be the nearest match but is still way behind.
- NeoOffice – Macintosh lacks an office suite as powerful as Microsoft Office for windows. Even though Microsoft Office is available for Mac, they are not fully compatible. NeoOffice, a fork of the Free and Open Source office suite OpenOffice.org, is a better alternative than the original OpenOffice.org office suite for Mac.
- AppZapper – After installing a number of programs, I searched for the uninstaller utility for Mac. That was when I found out that Mac does not have a built in uninstaller utility like the Add / Remove Programs utility for Windows. My search led me to this application, which its developers describe as “The uninstaller Apple forgot”. AppZapper is not freeware.
- Zipeg – Windows Explorer counterpart of Mac, Finder, has built in support for zip files. But it does not recognize some other formats like Rar. Also it lacks the ability to preview the contents of the archive without extracting it, because opening a zip file in Finder extracts the contents to the same directory. Furthermore, it cannot be used to create new archives. This made me think about an alternative and I found Zipeg. Zipeg is a simple and free compression and archive utility. It supports a number of formats like ZIP, RAR, ARJ, LHA/LZH, 7z, TAR, GZ, TGZ, BZIP2, CPIO, RPM, ISO, CHM and Z. Also you can preview images as thumbnail in the tooltip. Another important feature is the drag and drop support.
- Adium X – Adium is a Free and Open Source Instant Messaging application which allows you to connect to any number of messaging accounts on a large number of supported services which include AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, GTalk etc.
Though there are many other applications that I like, these are the five applications I found hard to live with. Some other programs worth mentioning are
Browsers – Firefox, Camino and Opera
Text Editors – BBEdit, Smultron
FTP Client – Transmit
BitTorrent Client – Transmission
Anti Virus – ClamXav
