by Cory Rauch 2008-06-20 Category: Software-Mac
After recently purchasing my first Mac, I quickly found myself looking for alternatives to the PC applications I was use too. In this article I will cover 10 great Mac applications everyone can useful.
FTP / SFTP / WebDAV Client
This one was easy since they had a Mac port of my favorite FTP client, Filezilla. You can pick this up at: filezilla-project.org
Office Suite
If you are looking for an inexpensive office suite that then OpenOffice was great on the PC. While OpenOffice has a port for the Mac, I found that the NeoOffice version to be better since it does not need X and integrates more with Mac OS X. You can download at: NeoOffice Homepage
A Compression / Decompression Program
On the PC there is an excellent free compression program called 7-Zip that supports a variety of compression formats. On the Mac there is The Unarchiver which supports a variety of compression formats including Zip, Bzip2 (Tar Support too), Gzip, Lha, 7-Zip, Stuffit, and others. You can download at: The Unarchiver Homepage
Desktop VM Solution
The first words out of everyones mouth when you say you need to run a windows app on a Mac is "Parallels" but I also found an excellent open source solution called VirtualBox that works for my needs. Its a virtualization product that like Parallels support a seamless environment if you need to run a windows app. You can get this at Sun's Virtual Box page.
Solitaire
Alright! I admit it, I played the solitaire game included with Windows alot. The Mac by default does not include one but fortunately there is an excellent version available here for free: Solitaire XL
Graphics Program
For light weight tasks on windows I would use Fireworks to resize, edit, etc. On the Mac I found that Seashore ( which is a Aqua based Graphics app can do most things I need. For more heavy tasks, I recommend GIMP (Gimp Homepage). Alright, that was 2 programs but this one is hard since you sometimes do not need all the features GIMP offers.
Programming IDE
Well again this was easy since I could get my favorite IDE, Eclipse, as a native port to Mac OS X. In addition, Apple makes XCode available for download for free too. Both are nice, but I favor Eclipse though XCode is best if you plan to write Mac applications. You can download at: Eclipse Homepage
Web Browser
Well since I work on webpages a bit I like to have all the web browsers installed for testing purposes. On the Mac you have all the usual suspects, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Unfortunately though Microsoft has left abandoned IE on Mac. So you have to improvise. You can either run IE under VirtualBox or if you want to quickly test between the browsers you can use Wine and an excellent Wine IE installer called ie4osx. You can download that and the latest darwine build (Mac OS X version of Wine) at the following location.
Video Player
While Mac OS X out of the box has excellent multimedia capabilities it can be challenging to play all video formats under Quicktime due to its lack of support. Because of this I recommend VLC, which is an open source video player that plays many different file formats. You can get this here: VLC Homepage
Conclusion
Mac OS has many built in application that I did not bother mentioning since you get them by default. But the whole iLife suite is great for basic task of managing your home multimedia files.
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