Well I did it: I’ve bought a 13″ MacBook. Its size and portability won me over. So far, it’s been pretty smooth: I had no problems setting up my mail accounts in Mail, and it connected to my home wireless network effortlessly. On the other hand, I had to search the web to find out what the Mac equivalents of the Home and End keys were.
This is a big deal for me. The last time I switched computer platforms was in 1985, from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC XT clone. I’ve used Windows since version 3.0 in 1990, and not surprisingly, I’ve built up a huge set of habits that I’m probably not even aware of. (For example, did you know you can double-click the icon in the upper-left-hand corner of a window to close it?)
The next step for me is to get acquainted with a whole new set of programs. For now, I’ve decided to use iWork ’09 for my office suite, which can import and export Microsoft Office files. For those tricky files that iWork can’t handle, I’ll install Windows Vista and Office 2007 in another partition, and then run them inside Parallels Desktop.
For photos, iPhoto would be fine, except I’ve built up years of metadata inside Adobe Photoshop Elements on Windows, which iPhoto can’t read. So I’m getting Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which can import Photoshop Elements metadata and runs on both Windows and Mac. Lightroom isn’t cheap, but luckily I’ve accumulated enough reward points to pay for it.
By the way, I’m still looking for a (cheap) image editor for the Mac, as well as blogging software, so I appreciate any suggestions.
There is one Mac app I look forward to using: Delicious Library (no relation to the social bookmarking site Delicious). It lets you catalog your book and media collection, but instead of typing in all the data by hand, it uses the camera in your Mac as a barcode reader, and then automatically retrieves that data over the net. I’ve known about this app for years, and I look forward to actually being able to use it.
Eventually, I’ll get around to doing what I said I’d do on my new Mac: create iPhone apps.
The image utility of choice on the Mac is GraphicConverter (http://www.lemkesoft.com/). It is one of the oldest and most respected Mac applications still in active development, and it’s maxxed out the rating scale on pretty much every major review. Opens and converts every format on the planet (and a few that were probably from other planets), does batches, and includes a solid set of image editing tools. $35 shareware and a steal at that price.
Also remember that you’re running a BSD derivative, and you therefore have access to a wide variety of free unix tools, from the Gimp to ImageMagick. X11 programs are a little clumsier to run than native Aqua applications, but it is an alternative, especially if you want to script them.
Oh, and speaking of installing unix-y stuff, MacPorts (http://www.macports.org/) is a good package management system for the Mac.
Disclaimer: I was a diehard MSDOS-CP/M-Windoze person from 1980-2005 and went full-time Mac after. But…I use all the expensive programs like CS4, Office 2008, iWork/iLife, Parallels, etc.
So why not get Office 2008 for the Mac and forget Parallels? I personally would never rely on iWork exclusively. In fact, I only use Pages to make nicer-looking invoices and newsletters. (I do, however, use Keynote exclusively and find it a pain to export to PPT. Also have had presentation issues if something happens at the last minute and I can’t connect my laptop.) If I didn’t get iWork and iLife for $39 each (academic discount), probably would never bother with iWork.
The Preview app does some amazing basic image editing, too. And get Skitch! Awesome screen capture/editing app. (One more: Adium is a great all-in-one IM tool.)
And isn’t all blogging “software” web-based, or am I missing something here? I use Blogger and WordPress, but all via the web.
Either way, have fun! And glad you escaped the Dark Side 🙂 It’s a lot more fun over here.
I didn’t buy Office 2008 because I already bought Office 2007 and didn’t feel like shelling out that much more money. I have one friend who really likes iWork, and two other friends who don’t use office suites at all, so we’ll see how this goes. Of course, there’s also OpenOffice, NeoOffice, and even Lotus Symphony…
As far as blogging software goes: sometimes it’s more convenient to use a local app, especially if you’re offline. Basically, I’m looking for a Mac equivalent of Windows Live Writer, a straightforward, easy-to-use blogging tool.
Do NOT install Vista. It is horrid. Install the Win7 RC1 or wait for the real one. It performs very well (I have it on 4 machines, including an Acer Aspire One netbook — it runs fast even on that low-powered machine).
OSX word processors – I’ve used most of the 3rd party offerings quite extensively, and I’m still not sure which one is the best. Here’s my take:
Office 2008 for Mac – it’s quite polished and I actually like the UI better than in Windows. It’s all just more jazzed up visually, including the weird icons. Cons – expensive, and doesn’t read the .odt format (an obvious dealbreaker for me, considering where I work). Sun has released an .odt converter for Office, but it’s (so far) only for Windows.
StarOffice 9/ OpenOffice 3.0 – in theory, these should be the best, with the nicest UI outside of MS (and arguably nicer, if you’re nostalgic for the pre-2007 Office before all the changes), along with full features and .odt support. There’s even a docx converter now (which works decently well on most documents, except for ones with heavy formatting). That being said, I’ve run into this terrible crippling error on both of them, which basically freezes the program after a while, especially for longer documents, or ones converted from .doc. It’s maddening, and it’s forced me to go back to NeoOffice. The good news is, I was on the phone with StarOffice project manager yesterday about an unrelated matter, and took the time to vent about this freezing problem. He’s going to look into the issue personally (I’m supposed to send him examples of documents that crash the program), and they’ll try to fix it right away. Here’s hoping…
NeoOffice – it’s slow and clunky compared to the others, but like your old faithful mule, it has the benefit of (almost) always working. I hate the ship icon. I’ve deleted it numerous times, only to have to reinstall it after StarOffice or OO fail me again. It’s like Olan in The Good Earth. There was a new “major update” a few weeks ago, which as far as I could tell, changed absolutely nothing. It sometimes has problems converting more heavily formatted.docs, and Excel spreadsheets as well.