A few weeks back I was lucky enough to get a new MacBook Pro as my principle work machine. For good reasons not the newly announced no button model, but a highest spec previous model, and plenty shiny enough for me.
Now I’ve been an NT/XP user longer than the vast majority of people. Reckon it’d have been an NT 3.1 Beta in early-1993 when I first started developing on it. So two things are interesting about my migration or at least embracing of the Mac and OS X - firstly it was a bit of a culture/system shock for about a day but since then it’s been very quick and natural; and secondly it’s not total since I’m not giving up my XP machine anytime soon because …
The simple reality is that there are some applications that I use regularly on XP that simply cannot be matched on the Mac. The most important two are MediaMonkey and Faststone Image Viewer. I use MediaMonkey all my MP3 management including ripping, file management, tagging, resampling, and device management across a big range of different MP3 players. Mac users are seemingly so enamoured of the frankly crappy iTunes that there’s very little else available for OS X, and definitely not as fully featured as MediaMonkey! I’d hoped that SongBird might step into the fray, but frankly it’s not good enough! As for Faststone Image Viewer, clearly there are many very good image editing applications on OS X. However, in terms of something that is able to so effectively browse, file manage, and batch process my many many pictures, again nothing (well that I’ve found for free because I’m cheap) comes close.
Maybe I’ll ultimately go the route of running XP on the Mac using VMWare or Parallels desktop, but for now I’m running two physical machines since both have strengths for now.
Anyhow, there are many other applications or at least functional requirements that I’ve grown very attached to on my XP boxes, and so a large part of the challenge of moving across to the Mac has been finding comparable applications. Oh and yeah as noted above … being cheap I wanted them to be free ones! With the witching hour upon me tonight, I’m going to stop for now, but I plan to blog the various applications that I’ve found that have met my needs in a range of areas, along with any other killer tips I found that have helped me along this path. Both a record for me, and maybe a help to any others!