I know there have been plenty of such posts/ articles all over recently, but this is more of a personal post in the public domain. Amitabh is the latest “switcher“, thanks, atleast partially, to yours truly (doses of “Come on dude, get a Mac already” twice a day, thank you very much). He finally bit the bullet and is the proud owner of a shiny new, white Macbook. He asked me for software recommendations and I promised him I’ll do a blog post so that everyone can benefit from the gyaan.
So here it goes. In alphabetic order of categories.
Backup
SuperDuper! (Shareware).
Carbon Copy Cloner (Free).
Blogging
Journler – A lot more than just a blogging tool (Free).
Ecto (Shareware).
Marsedit (Shareware).
Browsers
Safari is good enough for most things (Free).
Camino is Firefox for Mac users (Free).
OmniWeb (Shareware).
Burning CDs etc.
Toast (Shareware).
Disco (Shareware).
FTP
Cyberduck (Free).
Transmit (Shareware).
IM/ Chat
Adium – One Duck to rule them all (Free).
Colloquy – IRC Client (Free).
Media Editors
Audacity – Free audio editor.
AddMovie – Join ’em movies (Shareware).
Media Players
VLC – The only thing you’ll ever need (Free).
Perian – Play DivX videos in QuickTime (Free).
Flip4Mac – Play WMV videos in QuickTime (Free).
RSS
NetNewsWire (Free + Shareware, both versions).
Vienna – Open Source RSS reader.
Text Editors
TextWrangler – Amazing that it’s free.
Textmate – The best text editor ever? (Shareware).
Torrents/ P2P
Azureus – The most popular cross-platform torrent client (Free).
X-Torrent – Torrents, Mac style (Shareware).
Poisoned – Connect to multiple P2P networks (Free).
Virtualization – Intel Macs
aka run Windows on Mac (but why?!!).
Parallels (Shareware).
VMware (Beta).
Boot Camp – Not Virtualization but multi-boot (Free).
Virtualization – PPC Macs
Q (Freeware).
Virtual PC (Not free, no longer in development).
Miscellaneous
Quicksilver – Possibly the best. software. ever. (Free).
Pukka – del.icio.us client (Shareware).
That should be more than enough to get you started dude. I’ll (perhaps!) cover some of the more “exotic” categories/ picks in a follow up post.
Welcome, from darkness, to light.
[tags]Apple, Mac, Shareware, Freeware, Software, Tools, Utilities, Switch, Switcher, GetAMac, Macbook[/tags]
Yes…why run windows on a Mac? But…I must say, Parallels works pretty well. And for sure Flip4Mac is an essential for video on the web, since so many content providers insist on sticking to the PC world of WMV. Cool new DVD imaging app from Telestream too, called Drive In
Thanks KD…that really is a comprehensive list..very helpful indeed..you should probably think of writing to Steve Jobs about getting a cut in their profits… you are doing a great job propagating the Apple brand!! Thanks again and keep up the good work…am gonna need it đŸ˜‰