Following are my learnings from the last 24 months after having tested, adopted and discarded many software packages. Unless noted otherwise, I use all of these programs on a regular basis.
1. Must Haves
- Email: Apple’s Mail.app looks pretty, but that’s all I can say about it. My wife hates it, too. Sooner or later, you’ll switch. My recommendation: Thunderbird
- Calendar: iCal is good, but if you switch to Thunderbird, stay with Mozilla and use its calendar, Lightning, instead.
- Address Book: Use Apple’s Address Book (see also below, Synching with your iPhone)
- Browser: If you switch from Internet Explorer, you’ll find Safari a very capable browser. If you prefer Firefox, stay with it. I use both, with Firefox set as my default browser. There are other Mac browsers (Opera, Camino, OmniWeb, aso.) - I’ve tested some, but did not see a need to adopt any of them
- RSS Reader: Nothing beats the free NetNewsWire, which is the Mac implementation of the popular FeedDemon
- Office Management: Office 2008 for Mac, if you need MS Office compatibility (it’s not a feature-complete port, though, so if you are an Office power-user, you might have to stay on Windows. I did). Apple’s iWork is OK: Pages is a worthy Word replacement, Numbers cannot hold a candle to Excel and Keynote is a mixed bag compared to Powerpoint.
- iTunes: Stick with it
- Video: Quicktime is Apple’s solution - it’s OK at best (and also a security risk). Unfortunately, you cannot uninstall it, so just ignore it. Download the open-source vlc player - you’ll never go back to Quicktime.
- Photos: iLife comes pre-installed and includes iPhoto which is a good hobbyist program. If you are a serious amateur photographer, Apple offers Aperture ($279). Personally, I use Adobe Lightroom in addition to Adobe Photoshop. Both are pricey, but highly recommended.
- Password Management: 1password from Agile Web is awesome and certainly worth its price ($39.95)
- Video Transcoding: If you need to transcode video for your iPod, the free, open-source Handbrake is what I use and recommend.
- Ongoing Maintenance: If you want to keep your Mac in top shape, get Cocktail ($14.95) - it runs automated daily, weekly and monthly clean-up tasks.
- Blogging: One word: MarsEdit ($29.95). Enough said.
- Document Repository: If you are like me, you like to dump different documents into one program, which organizes and indexes them, so you can easily search for what you want. YoJimbo ($39) is the best I have tried so far.
2. Nice to Have
- File Management: Apple’s Finder is good enough. If you are a power user, consider Cocoa Tech’s Pathfinder instead. It’s what I use regularly.
- File Transfer (FTP): Fetch ($25) is a great program to upload files to a website.
- Managing Diskspace: Need to know what takes up all of your disk space? Use the free GrandPerspective to find out.
- Screen Capture: Need to do a screen capture as a video, not just still images? iShowU ($29.95) is what everyone uses. Still images can be captured by hitting Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4
3. Continue to use Windows for:
- Money Management: If you use Quicken, you are out of luck. Quicken 2007 for Mac is a woeful replacement for Quicken and the new program Quicken is working on is supposed to have even less features. Most of all, online banking access is severely limited. Stay on Windows.
4. Synching with your iPhone
If all you do is synch your Mac with your iPhone, use iTunes. You might also consider Apple’s MobileMe service ($100/year), but it only works, if you are in an all-Apple environment or want to synch with Microsoft Outlook on Windows. However, if you need to synch your iPhone with Thunderbird or with both a Mac and Windows PC (as I need), switch your calendar to Google Calendar and your address book to Google Contacts. Added benefit: Both are free. Then, use the free Google Synch to synch your iPhone across Windows and OSX. This is what I do. It works fine and I can recommend it.
5. Backup
OSX includes Time Machine, which is a good backup program. For added precaution, I use Chronosync ($49.95) to back up individual folders to my Drobo.