Mac Applications for Windows Users

In my previous post I mentioned that I recently bought a new MacBook Pro. Coming from a mostly Windows background my initial plan was to use Apple's Boot Camp to dual boot with Vista and spend most of my time using it as standard Windows Vista notebook in nice packaging. Well every now and then one has to shift out of your comfort zone and try something new so I decided to take this opportunity and run Mac as my primary OS for a while and see how long I can survive without having to resort back to Windows Vista. Surprisingly though the transition was quite smooth and I've quite happily been running on OS X now for little over a week without any problems.

Below I've compiled a list of software I've installed so far that made it easier for me as a Windows user to make the transition to Mac. On the hardware side I'm impressed with how things just work. Small things like iSync picking up my old Nokia 6680 (even displaying an image of my exact phone model) and syncing my calendar and contacts and also setting up my phone as a 3G modem without requiring 3rd party software has made this a very pleasurable experience so far. Actually I've yet to connect it to anything that doesn't work. I'm sure that day will come but I expected to have problems connecting to our office wireless or VPN. Neither turned out to be a problem and worked first time. 

• Apple's Mac OS X Tiger Mail 2 - The default mail handler that ships with OS X. Like most other applications on Mac it sports a very clean minimalist user interface which is quite a contrast to the busy Outlook 2007 interface. Favorite feature the Smart Folders which similar to GMail's labels allow you to automatically setup folders for mail tagged with certain keywords or matching certain criteria.
• Next two great Mail add-ons to support a more GTD'ed Inbox : Mail Act-on and MailTags. Mail Act-On allows you to attach key strokes to Mail rules to quickly and efficiently deal with incoming email. Now it's just ~A and a mail is tagged with Action, colored and archived. I then have a Smart Folder setup to display all items with the Action tag and similar setups for Waiting For, Sometime (Trickle) etc. The companion to Mail Act-On is MailTags. This add-on has way too many features to fit in one paragraph. Amongst other things allows you to quickly tag emails and link them to events and To-Dos. While I haven't tried it you can also Tag outgoing emails so it's automatically set for the recipient if he/she has a tool that supports these Mail tags. Similarly you can filter incoming mails based on tags or automatically get them picked up by Smart Folders setup to filter on tags. [These two finds thanks to Hawk Wings' Getting Things Done in Apple Mail]
• One of the first things I installed after powering up the Mac for the first time was Quicksilver. It's a quick launcher for Mac which allows you to access applications, contacts, music and basically any other arbitrary data with a couple of keystrokes. Closest match on Windows is the Vista start bar or Colibri.
• A desktop client for the 37signals Backpack tool. (Backpack is a lightweight tool to keep various to-dos, notes, ideas and schedules online) I use Backpack to keep various to-do lists, things to do for holiday, books to buy etc. Now with PackRat I can update and access those same lists offline.
• Microsoft Messenger - Microsoft have several products for Mac. Office, Virtual PC, IE etc which can all be found at Mactopia. (I've got the trial of Office for Mac installed and it looks great, nicer than Office on Windows even). The Microsoft Messenger for Mac

• NewsFire. Mac RSS with Style. That's how the slogan goes and indeed this is one great application. I used it for a couple of hours, got frustrated with the 15 feed restriction in the trial version and bought a license ($18) and never looked back. This application can be used as a benchmark for usability. Favourite feature the ability to (ala-Google reader and some other Mac apps) "Space" your way through posts. Pressing space takes you to the next unread post or scrolls down depending on the post length allowing you to quickly work your way through a list of unread posts. Again keyboard shortcuts to quickly flag posts for follow-up is very useful. What I miss from RSSBandit is the ability to view comments inline as there is no support for the CommentAPI or CommentRss. It's also blazingly fast and deals with all the blogs I threw at it without blinking an eye or skipping a cycle. It also supports blogging from within NewsFire using an editor like Ecto and bookmarking links with del.icio.us with something like Pukka.
• Ecto - A desktop blogging client for Mac OS X and Windows. Ecto is the editor I'm using to edit this post. It's a full featured desktop blogging client with support for multiple blogs, offline reading and editing of previous posts etc etc. I haven't explored all the features yet but it's definitely quite a powerful tool. The one drawback is the text editor itself feels a little clunkier than say Windows Live Writer's editor. While it generates very clean html for the post it's difficult to do more than basic formatting of a post easily. I'm get the feeling though that once I get used to it this will change. (Update: Typing this post it started irritating me as it messes with my bullet points worse than Word on a good day and I have to resort to html editing mode to fix it. )
• Pukka - A richly featured desktop client for del.icio.us. Use it to post to and manage one or more del.icio.us accounts. Very fast and lightweight so you don't have to open your browser to locate a bookmark stored on del.icio.us. Saving bookmarks is just as easy, you just drag it onto Pukka, tag it and you're done.

• Mono - Second install on the new machine after Quicksilver was the latest stable build of Mono. After install X11 from the Apple disks I also had a working WinForms environment. Haven't done much apart from the compulsory "Hello MacWorld" app the last week but it's comforting to know that thanks to the great work from the Mono contributors I can run .NET applications unchanged on Mac.
• Fink - The aim of this project is to bring the full world of Unix Open Source to the Mac. Using package management tools like apt-get and dpkg the chances are if you have a tool that you used on Linux you'll get it from Fink. For a full list of currently supported packages see the complete list here.
• Subversion. Need not say more about Subversion. My scm of choice, got it from fink.

• Boot Camp - Because Macs now ship on Intel hardware you can install Windows or other operating systems on your Mac hardware should you so choose. However because Macs use something called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) to handle booting instead of the old-fashioned BIOS used by Windows you need to install Boot Camp to allow you Mac to boot Windows. Well before getting a Mac I was vaguely aware that there's something different about the way Macs boot but there you have it. It's the lack of a BIOS which is so last season :P As I mentioned earlier in the post I expected to install Boot Camp and install Windows Vista and be done with it. I did install Windows Vista. It ran beautifully with a 4.8 performance score but I uninstalled and had to revert to Windows XP SP2 for reasons I'll list below. I think Apple is confident that once you've bought a Mac you'll give it a bash before installing Windows and that taste would be enough for you to make the switch. It might just work.

• Parallels Desktop for Mac - Parallels Rocks.Now this is definitely one of the coolest software packages I've ever come across. Parallels is a virtualization solution for Mac (and other platforms) similar to VMWare and Virtual Server/PC etc. However according to my humble opinion it blows the other competitors out of the water on the desktop. Sure, it allows you to run another OS, ie. Windows Vista in a virtual machine on your Mac. Nice. But VMWare and VPC can also do that. But then you start looking at features like Coherence and you'll have to pause and appreciate what you see (or don't see) -

  "A groundbreaking feature that lets users run Windows applications without seeing Windows. When a user switches to Coherence mode, their Windows desktop disappears, leaving their Windows applications running directly on their Mac desktop. This is the first opportunity ever for Mac users to run Windows applications in an effectively native environment!

  That means while you have a Windows VM running, applications like Visual Studio you open in the VM appear as normal application windows on your Mac. They show up in the Dock, they adopt the Mac screen resolution, they do everything a native Mac application would do running on Mac. So for development work I've got a Windows VM running in the background, I don't see it but it allows me to run Visual Studio and other Windows applications directly on the Mac desktop. I guess you can think of it as just another application layer as the running instance of the Windows OS enables you to run your Windows apps but without requiring you to see or be aware of the running operating system. With the Core 2 Duo CPU the performance even in the VM smokes my previous home desktop so the performance hit is there but neglible.

  Check out this clip on YouTube to really appreciate this feature. The final version was released today and I believe it fully supports Windows Vista in Coherence mode as well. The reason I uninstalled Vista and had to revert to XP on my Boot Camp partition is due to another incredibly cool feature in Parallels. The ability to boot your Boot Camp partition into a virtual machine. Let that sink in. Typically if you have your machine setup in a dual boot scenario you're restricted to boot into only one of the operating systems at any given time. Not with Parallels. Now I have my Boot Camp partition installed with Windows XP SP2 and I can boot into it natively at any time I want to run Windows directly on my hardware but for day to day use I boot that partition under Parallels while working in OS X. Best of both worlds.

  Windows Vista uses a slightly different boot loader which doesn't work with Parallels booting from Boot Camp partition yet so while you can run Windows Vista fine directly on the hardware in a dual boot scenario or run Windows Vista in a dedicated virtual machine in Parallels you can't do both. For that reason I had to install Windows XP SP2 and upgrade to Windows Vista once the functionality becomes available in Parallels. (Screen shot of Visual Studio running on Mac with Windows in Coherence Mode at the bottom of the post) . [I fully agree with Brad Wilson, Parallels Rocks]