Last week, I bought my first Apple Mac. I’ve been a long-time Windows user, and it took me some time to decide on this purchase. In high school, I played a bit with an older Mac at the library, but I never wanted one myself. In college, I remember trying some newer Macs with OSX. At the time, they ran pretty slowly when compared to the blazing fast gaming box I had in my dorm room, and I didn’t like the single-button mouse. It wasn’t until Apple switched to the faster Intel processors, they released of the ultra-small Mac Mini, and I discovered the safety-net known as Parallels that I felt I was ready to buy a Mac.
Certainly, it helps a great deal that I work with Adobe products. Adobe supports applications like Flex Builder, Flash Authoring, and Photoshop on both Windows and OSX. For other applications, especially simple utilities, I’ve had to spend a bit of time searching for proper alternatives. Here’s a list with a few useful (and free!) applications to help ease your switching pains. I’m sure a million other switchers have listed them too, but I felt like sharing.
Witch adds Alt-Tab support to OSX. While Command-Tab offers similar functionality, it doesn’t allow the user to switch between individual windows. Instead, it seems to switch to the most recently used window of each application. Witch has an amazing array of options to customize the look and feel of its functionality, and I highly recommend it.
If you like using Gaim or Trillian for instant messaging on Windows, you’ll want to check out Adium. It has a simple interface that’s very easy to use. I wish I had it on Microsoft side of life.
For FTP access, I’ve started using CyberDuck. While its interface looks nothing like FileZilla, my personal favorite on Windows, I still found it pretty easy to use.
Of course, both Firefox and Thunderbird work on Macs too. If you’re used to using Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox will probably feel the most familiar. Interestingly enough, both of these programs have different behaviors in some cases when you change between platforms. For instance, I often press the Delete key to move an email to the trash in Thunderbird on Windows, but it doesn’t seem to do anything (other than cause the mouse pointer to disappear for a moment) on the Mac version.
As a Windows user, I commonly use the Home and End keys to move the cursor to the start and end of a line of text. Much to my dismay, these keys behave in a completely different manner on OSX. When I’m coding, I constantly find myself at the beginning or end of the file, rather than the line I was editing. Life Hacker has a good tip for making Home and End behave in a more familiar way. For some reason, I couldn’t get that particular solution to work, but I found a link in the comments to a program called DoubleCommand. The user interface leaves much to be desired, but it worked for me.
If you ever miss an episode of your favorite TV show, or you’re into downloading Linux ISOs, you may want to check out Transmission, a BitTorrent client. I’m a big fan of uTorrent on Windows, which has loads of options, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much I like Transmission for its simplicity. I guess that’s the Mac Way™.
As I continue to explore and discover new things, I’m sure I’ll share more of my adventures as a Mac switcher. I doubt I’ll be making any big rants about how I miss Windows, though, because so far it’s been smooth-sailing.
If you want to get to a specific document window in a given application, you can Control-Tab to the specific application, and then control-` (the tilde/tick key to the left of 1) through that application’s windows.
Another way to browse across all windows is to go to the “Dashboard & Exposé” control panel and set one of your hot corners to “All Windows.” A flick of the mouse to that corner will maintain the aspect ratio of all open windows, but shrink them down so they don’t overlap. Then you click on the one you want and it moves to the front.
As for browsers, don’t forget Opera, Camino, Seamonkey (albeit those two are variations of Firefox), and my favorite for seeing how a website will look through a text reader: lynx.
This certainly isn’t meant to be the be-all end-all list of programs for switchers… just the things I found useful. I’ve tried out Expose. I like it, but my girlfriend wanted a solution that didn’t require the mouse so I found Witch. Personally, Opera feels too strange to me. I don’t like it on Windows either. Camino was the first thing I tried. It didn’t feel polished enough for me. I’m not sure why. I’ll check out Seamonkey.
Quicksilver is worth getting http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
VirtueDesktops can also come in useful (especially if your running Parellels and you only have the one screen) http://virtuedesktops.info/
MAMP you might be interested in too http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php
Desktopple is also useful for hiding those things on the desktop that people aren’t meant to see http://foggynoggin.com/desktopple
TNEF is useful if your using MAil and get a load of winmail.dat attachments http://tnef.sourceforge.net/
Wow I have often thought about making the switch but Im not really ready to make the Jump. I would leave the security of the .NET framework :o( but seeing parallel in action is very promising.. :o)
Congrats on the switch Josh!
I made the same move about 3yrs ago and I haven’t looked back. It’s a treat everyday working with this platform.
My girlfriend has the new Mac Books, and Parallels is definitely a feature I miss on my PowerBook… especially when debugging CSS on IE. If you haven’t already, you should look into setting up “Coherence” in Parallels. It lets you run Windows and Mac apps side by side (without having to run Windows apps in a “virtual machine container”).
If you need any tips or are looking for a Windows equivalent to something, don’t hesitate to email me. It can be a little overwhelming at first… but you’ll soon find yourself wondering why you didn’t switch sooner.
Good luck!
I also switched about a year ago and have mostly found using a mac plain sailing, and in some ways much better than using a PC (not having to bother with AV software, having a proper command line, exposé)
Agree with most of what you said, esp. Home and End behaviour. What’s really annoying is that in some programs (e.g. Dreamweaver) Home and End behave as they do on Windows which is just really confusing!
Other things that I think are a bit frustrating are a) that you can only re-size a window from the bottom right-hand corner b) that you can’t cut and paste files in Finder (in fact Finder is pretty awful generally – PathFinder is an improvement but you have to pay for it) and c) that there seems to be no keyboard shortcut for maximising a window that you’ve minimised to the Dock – get used to using APPLE-H to hide windows instead.
A couple of other things I’ve found really useful are the ability to flash the screen when an alert event happens (System Prefs, Universal Access, Hearing, Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs) as then your screen will briefly flash white when, for example, new mail arrives; and the ability to get the mac to speak alerts (System Prefs, speech, Text to Speech, Announce when alerts are displayed) as then you can set something running, leave your speakers switched on a go off an do something else – if there’s a problem your mac will say ‘Excuse me’ and then read you the alert text!
The zoom feature is also really nice – hold down CTRL and scroll the mousewheel – the entire screen will zoom in!
BTW, am pretty sure you use BACKSPACE to delete an email in Thunderbird on OS X.
How would you say it measures up in terms of Flex and Flash building? Miss anything ? Feels faster/slower? That’d be my main concern; and the only reason of insecurity as to the why I haven’t bought a Mac yet.
Ralph, Flex Builder seems to build pretty fast. I haven’t encountered the CPU-hogging builds that plagued me on Windows. This could be because my old PC doesn’t have a dual core processor, or the recent transition to 2.0.1., or it could be that Eclipse and/or Java simply runs smoother on Macs.
I haven’t tried Flash Authoring on the Mac yet. Word on the street is that Flash 8 is slow running through emulation on Rosetta. I’m waiting for Blaze.
I’m eager to switch myself, but don’t relish paying full price for Adobe and Macromedia products again — did you repurchase everything, or did they offer a cross-platform upgrade? As it is, I feel locked into Windows.
Thud, it’s possible to move a Flex Builder license from Windows to Mac. See the Flex FAQ for more information. I don’t know about other products, though. You may be able to learn more by contacting Adobe.
Personally, with the release of CS3 this spring offering an update to almost everything I use, I don’t mind repurchasing the products I need.
Ahh but you don’t have to leave Windows behind or even go total Mac….
Checkout Synergy
Now you can use your Mac on your PC….
Or you PC on your Mac….
Keep the old keyboard and mouse and throw away that one clicker garbage…
Thank You