Okay, so a couple of years ago I bought a Mac and felt regret. While there were moments of being overjoyed e.g. seeing my photographs with more vivid colors, iMovie editing, iChat, and a unix based OS; for the most part, I felt less productive. My #1 frustration was lack of synchronization with my SmartPhone. And many of my desiredĀ applications weren’t either as good or available. So I went back to the PC. But that regression only lasted for a year.
Recently I decided it was time to upgrade my PC. I was very frustrated the other day when I was trying to leave the house but Internet Explorer took an hour to upgrade only to find it wasn’t as good as Chrome and ultimately looked like a rip off of FireFox. This drove me to go buy a new Powerbook for my personal computer.
- Think or Swim (Up to you how much money you make or lose) My day trading app is on the Mac, I thought for sure I would have to keep my PC for this one.
- Dupin ($15) – Yes, finally something to get rid of my duplicate songs in iTunes
- TinkerTools (free)- Opens up the hidden controls on the Mac
- Chmox (free) – Helps me read online books with .chm extensions
- Stuffit Expander (free)
- Senuti ($18) – To pull my songs off my iPod and onto my new computer
- Vuze – For Bittorrents
- Little Snitch ($29.95 – works for 3 hours in demo mode) – to tell me what my network is up to and block communication I don’t want. This has been awesome when you are on sites that have a lot of callbacks to advertising firms etc. Also this a great tool to identify a potential worm or virus.
- TextMate ($59) – Simple text editor for code
- Site Sucker (Donation) – To help me in my consultancy work. I can easily archive a client’s old web-site for later reference. Also it is great when I am trying to learn. I can easily look at someone’s web code
- VLC (free) – Media player
Hey Becky, I switched to a (17") MacBook Pro as my main personal and work computer about a year ago and have no intentions of going back. I still use Win7 at work, but it's all OS X at home (we even got Esse one too).
The biggest omission in your list is QuickSilver from Blacktree. Spend some time with it – talk about productivity gains.
Have fun! Miss you!
Sadly facebook doesn't syndicate back comments. There has been lots of good discussion on this thread. Here are two responses I am manually copying back.
From Bill Lloyd on Facebook:
Here are some truly awesome 3rd party apps (no links, but you can Google ;-):
* Things
* Yojimbo
* Leap
* Asent/Rubitrack (if you do anything with a GPS)
* Handbrake
* LaunchBar
* NetNewsWire
* Tweetie
* Snappler
From Andrew Condon via Facebook:
Thanks for the list guys…here's some additions:
FileJuicer and DoubleTake are pretty nice little tools. The former extracts all kinds of files from any binary files you throw at it. The latter does a very clean and simple panorama stitching job.
Switch is a useful tool for converting audio file formats.
address-o-sync does some of the .Mac functionality that gmail etc doesn't do
RAR Expander does Stuffit-y things better, Better Zip allows passwords on zip files
Adium is an excellent IM client
Some additional tools to add to the list:
* Calibre – For managing your eBook collection and converting file formats when borrowing books from the library etc.
* Simple Mind – Best iPhone to Mac OSx Mind Mapping Software