The Switch, Part 2: Applications
In my last post I talked about my decision to trade in my primary PC for a new Mac Mini. When I first started kicking around the idea of making the switch I immediately started to worry about replacing the core library of software that I use on a daily basis. Having worked on the PC for so many years, there are certain applications that I’ve become very dependent on and it was a little scary to think that I might have to give them up.
Having explored the Mac software space a bit while playing with my wife’s laptop, I knew that there were plenty of applications out there but it wasn’t obvious which one’s were the best. Some of these are fairly obvious, but here’s a bit of what I’ve discovered so far.
Web Browser
Google Chrome is pretty new to the PC browser scene, but it quickly became my default browser on most of my PCs. I love my Firefox extensions, but have sort of realized that I don’t use most of them on a daily basis. The speed and simplicity of Chrome make it a very attractive Firefox alternative.
Unfortunately, there is no Chrome for the Mac (yet!) and instead of installing Firefox I’ve been putting Safari to the test. Interestingly, Safari is built on top of the same WebKit engine that is at the heart of Chrome so the rendering experience is much the same. I definitely miss the Chrome “omni bar” and the “tabs on the outside” UI but Safari has proven to be totally usable for me as a primary browser.
Before the end of the year, I suspect that Mac Chrome and Safari 4 (which introduces some Chrome-like features to Safari) will be released so things are only going to get better in the Mac browser space.
Other Contenders: WebKit, Firefox
Migration Rating: slight downgrade
Media Player
Alright, no surprise here really. iTunes is sort of the gateway drug to full blown Mac usage. It’s the one Apple application that most PC users have installed even if it’s just to load music onto their iPod. However, I never really liked iTunes — I installed it out of necessity, but never used it anymore than I had to. I think part of the problem for me was that it simply looked so out-of-place on the PC. I won’t make an arguments in favor of the Windows UI, but I do think that if you are going to play on their platform you ought to make your app look like it belongs there. Also, it wasn’t until iTunes 7.6 that the program would work properly on 64-bit editions of Windows — just another reason for me not to use it.
Unable to get past the lack of 64-bit support and the un-Windows-like UI of iTunes, I simply defaulted to Windows Media Player. I don’t think that it’s a particularly excellent media player (don’t even get me started on dismal codec situation) but I understood it and it was always there by default when I installed Windows. I thought that WMP did a decent job of managing my music collection and really liked that fact that later versions of the program had a built-in UPnP AV server that allowed me to stream music and video to other computers and my Xbox.
Now that I’m on the Mac, I figured it was time to give iTunes another shot. For one thing, the UI makes a lot more sense when used in the context OS X (no big surprise there). Once I imported my music collection (about 12,000 songs) and really started to use it on a daily basis, I discovered some cool features that actually have me excited about iTunes now.
First, I think the Genius Playlist feature is . . . well, genius. Select any song, hit the Genius button and iTunes will generate a playlist of songs from your library that go great with it. I have no idea how it works, but it has been creating some awesome playlists for me. Some of the associations that it creates are a bit questionable, but it has really helped me re-discover music that I haven’t listened to in years.
The other thing that I’ve found really useful is the “script-ability” of iTunes. I’m just getting started with AppleScript, but with little effort I was able to cobble together a script that would iterate over my music collection and identify all tracks with missing album art. I didn’t have to manipulate binary files or read-up on ID3 tag formats, iTunes did all the heavy lifting.
The final killer feature is the integration with the iTunes store. In the past, I had avoided the iTunes store for music purchases due to the DRM situation. Now, however, with all of the tracks in the store being DRM-free I don’t have any issue buying through iTunes. As a result, the seamless experience between managing my music collection, buying new music and loading my iPod is just too good to ignore.
Other Contenders: Songbird
Migration Rating: definite upgrade
Site-Specific Browser
I’ve blogged about site-specific browsers in the past so I won’t rehash all the reasons why i think they are a cool idea. On the PC side I had been using Mozilla Prism (if you are a Firefox user, check out the Prism for Firefox add-on) as well as the SSB capability built into Google Chrome (via the “Create application shortcut” feature). These two SSBs are pretty comparable so it’s hard to recommend one over the other. I switched from Prism to the Chrome SSB mainly because I switched from Firefox to Chrome.
If you are a Firefox user on the Mac, I suspect that you could continue to use Prism, but there’s another interesting option named Fluid. Fluid provides the same basic features as Prism (see the dock icon for my Fluid-based Gmail app in the picture to the left) but supports a few new tricks as well. One of the cooler features is the ability to create a SSB that exists only as a status bar icon. The screenshot below shows the status bar SSB I created for the Pandora music service. The Pandora window opens whenever I click the P icon in the status bar.
I haven’t even explored all of the features that Fluid provides yet, but it looks to be a definite winner.
Migration Rating: definite upgrade
Image Editor
For me, there is a sweet spot for image editors that exists somewhere between MS Paint (too basic) and Photoshop (far too complex). On the PC, Paint.NET is an incredible, free image editor that does just exactly what I need. As you can probably tell from its name Paint.NET is written on top of Microsoft’s .NET framework so there’s little chance of seeing it running on the Mac anytime soon (Mono or Silverlight perhaps??).
Originally, I set-out to try GIMP as my Paint.NET replacement on the Mac, but stumbled across a program called Pixelmator in the process. I quickly fell in love with Pixelmator and never actually got around to trying GIMP. Much like Paint.NET, Pixelmator makes it incredibly easy to do the few image editing tasks I’m interested in without overwhelming me with options. The fact that it has a beautiful interface certainly doesn’t hurt either. Pixelmator is not a free application like Paint.NET or GIMP, but it certainly seems worth the price ($59).
Other Contenders: Acorn
Migration Rating: neutral (Pixelmator is a step-up from Paint.NET, but I did have to pay for it).
Video Transcoder
I think somewhere around version 4 or 5 I purchased a full copy of Nero on the PC because it was the best tool for burning CDs/DVDs. Every year or so I pay to upgrade to the latest version simply because they typically have great deals on upgrade pricing. Just last year I purchased Nero 9 for like $10 after all of the discounts and rebates. Interestingly, I haven’t used Nero to burn discs in a long time (I don’t seem to have much need for optical media these days) — the only part of the Nero suite that I was using regularly was their excellent Recode application.
Recode allows you to take a DVD or other video file and transcode it to MPEG-4 format (MP4 has emerged as sort of the lingua franca of video formats). I often used Recode to rip DVDs into MP4s so that I could load them onto my iPod or play them on the HTPC I have connected to our TV. Instead of shuffling discs in and out of the player, I’ve got all the kid’s shows/movies ripped to the HTPC so that they can be queued-up with a few clicks of the remote.
Recode has lots of features and a great UI but no Mac compatibility. It seems that the go-to transcoder on the Mac is actually something that I’ve played with on the PC as well: HandBrake. From my experience on the PC, I felt like the speed and output quality of HandBrake was pretty much identical (they could be using the same encoder for all I know) — the only reason I held onto Recode is because I thought the UI was a bit nicer.
I haven’t had a chance to play with HandBrake since I switched over to the Mac, but I suspect that it will suit my needs just fine (and it will probably rescue me from the Nero upgrade cycle!)
Other Contenders: VideoMonkey
Migration Rating: neutral
Screen Capture
Before I started blogging I didn’t have a lot of use for a dedicated screen capture tool. I got by for many years with the good ol’ Alt+Print Screen shortcut in Windows. Once I started this blog though I found that I was doing a lot more screenshots and wanted something that was able to capture the transparency and drop shadow effects of the Windows Vista Aero interface. I found a program called Window Clippings that could properly handle Vista’s fancy windows and also integrated nicely with Paint.NET for making quick adjustments.
On the Mac I discovered a program called Skitch which is a free (I paid $18 for Window Clippings), full-featured screen capture tool and basic image editor all-in-one. Much like Window Clippings, Skitch allows you to capture a specific window or an arbitrary region of the screen but as soon as you “snap” your picture it immediately opens in the Skitch editor which allows you to annotate the image, crop it, resize it, etc.
The picture below is a screenshot of me using Skitch to take a screenshot of this blog post as I’m writing it (that should make your head spin a bit).
I think that I’ve only started to scratch the surface of what you can do with Skitch, but I’m already impressed.
Other Contenders: SnapzProX, Constrictor
Migration Rating: definite upgrade
Blog Publishing
Each of the blog platforms has their own blog publishing UI, and some of them are actually quite good but I found I was more comfortable using a dedicated, desktop application for composing articles. The best tool I found on the PC was Microsoft’s Live Writer — it’s free, compatible with all the major blog platforms and makes it super easy to incorporate pictures and videos into your posts.
On the Mac, I’m still evaluating two different applications: MarsEdit ($30) and Blogo ($25). I like MarsEdit because it has nice integration with Flickr, but it is lacking a WYSIWYG editor. On the other hand, Blogo has a nice WYSIWYG editor, but is lacking any sort of integration with Flickr, YouTube or other sites from which you might want to pull content for your blog. Neither of these apps quite does what I want, so the jury is still out (though I did use Blogo to compose this article).
Migration Rating: definite downgrade
Overall, I’m pretty happy with my new suite of applications and look forward to seeing what else I can find. In my next post I want to talk a little bit about the PC apps I was able to completely abandon because they simply aren’t need on the Mac at all!
2 Responses to “The Switch, Part 2: Applications”
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the nice words, I hope Skitch (and your new mac) makes your blogging life easier!
If you’d like to ’scratch the surface’ a little more, and are on twitter.com, then you may like to follow @skitch for tips and tricks.
Hope that helps!
Keith
skitch.com
I should also add that you can set up Skitch to post to a Flickr account if that makes things a little simpler for you. iPhoto 09 also has support for Flickr uploading too.
Keith
skitch.com
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