Mac Substitutes for Windows Applications
Being a long time Windows user, I was quite unfamiliar with the new interface and so read the Switch 101 guide on Apple’s support page. Once I had orientated myself with the UI, the next step I thought of doing was acquiring all the programs I used on Windows, or at least their Mac counterparts.
A short list of commonly used programs on Windows followed by their Mac substitutes and a brief explanation:
| Windows | Mac | Explantation |
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Internet Browsing Safari just didn't cut it for my surfing habits so I downloaded my trusty preferred browser of Firefox, which is fortunately cross-platform. |
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FTP On my Windows PC, FileZilla served as my FTP client. A trusted FTP client for Macs is Cyberduck. It performs my usual FTP operations with little hassle. |
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IRC My Windows client of choice, and by far the most popular, was mIRC. Colloquy is an excellent Mac substitute. |
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IM I primarily used MSN and Yahoo! messengers on my Windows OS. Both of these messengers are also available as Mac binaries, as well as for AIM and ICQ. For an open-source solution, go for Adium, which is compatible with a large number of protocols including all of the aforementioned plus gTalk, QQ, and many more. |
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VoIP For VoIP applications, the trusty Skype which I used to use in Windows also has a version for the Macintosh. Gamer? Then you'd probably be happy to know that Ventrilo has just released a stable version of their client for the Mac OS. |
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Office Suite Like many other people, I used the de facto Microsoft Office for my office work on Microsoft Windows. There also happens to be a Mac version dubbed Office:mac. Apple also has its own office suite, iWork, which includes 3 powerful applications: Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. These would be Apple's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, respectively, and definitely outperforms MS Office in many fields. If you want to go open-source, OpenOffice is a cross-platform office suite which features everything the other office applications have, with even some extra components. |
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Design The standard for design applications has been set by Adobe for both Macs and PCs. Now that Adobe has acquired Macromedia, Flash and Dreamweaver are all part of the Adobe's Creative Suite 3 (which now runs natively on Intel Macs). |
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P2P Of all the BitTorrent programs available on Windows, uTorrent was my client of choice, largely due to the fact that it was feature rich yet kept a small footprint. There aren't many clients for the Mac OS which can emulate this, but there are a number of other clients that stand out from the rest. Transmission is a free, lightweight BitTorrent client which has many of the features you need for regular downloading. For something heavier and more advanced, there's the cross-platform Azureus. For other P2P networks, FrostWire is a good open-source, cross-platform application written in Java for the Gnutella protocol. |
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Media The popular open-source VLC is available for both Macs and PCs, and supports a wide array of formats. Many proprietary media players also have versions for both Macs and PCs, like Real, QuickTime, and Windows Media Player (no longer supported, get Flip4Mac instead). There is also a plugin for QuickTime that enables it to play almost every prevalent video format called Perian. |
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Archiver I used a number of archivers on Windows, but WinRAR was my archiver of choice, mostly because of its good shell integration and support of formats. StuffIt is the only all-in-one archiver for Mac, and like WinRAR, it's shareware. |
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Disc Burning Mac OS X has built-in burning support, however with a limited number of features compared to the application I use on Windows, which was Nero Burning ROM. A program which has many of Nero's features for the Mac is Toast Titanium. |
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Games There are many cross-platform games which work on both Macs and PCs, inluding all of Blizzard's. Other open-source games may also have their own version for the Mac, such as Stepmania and Toribash. |
Other programs that deserve a mention include iStumbler for NetStumbler, Chicken of the VNC for TightVNC, Google Earth for Google Earth, and IE:mac for Internet Explorer. Ok, I’m just kidding about the last one. IE:mac has been discontinued a long time ago — good riddance.
Tags: adium, adobe, colloquy, cyberduck, firefox, iwork, office, skype, stuffit, toast, transmission, vlc |
January 15th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Nice one…..