Cormac Moylan

I’m becoming more and more familiar with my iMac. Today I have setup a local network which allows me to grab files - mostly mp3s and movies - from my WinXP machine. I’m getting there slowly and surely…

My biggest concern was that the change from PC to Mac would leave me in the lurch software wise. The truth is that approx 90% of the applications I used, and love, on my PC are available on the Mac. Those that aren’t available have an alternative on the MAC which is often just as good as anything available for Windows.

Skype is on the Mac, and is much sexier and leaner than its PC relative. I never really used Skype on the PC but the inbuilt camera, iSight, is too good a toy to refuse.

Google Talk is probably the piece of software I have used most often in my life. I nearly cried when I found out there was no Mac version. I’m still hoping that Google get their finger out and develop one asap. Google’s mac-less-ness doesn’t prevent me from getting all the functionality out of Gmail though. A Google Notifier Application is available which alerts you of new emails much in the same way as the PC version. In fact, the Google Notifier application is far superior to the alert feature on the PC. It provides more text from the email and it has a very sexy fade out applied to it. The notifier can’t help you chat with your friends thou. But that is where Adium comes to play. Adium is my replacement for Gaim. It can host Jabber, Google, MSN, Yahoo and AIM accounts. So that about covers my instant messaging and VoIP dilemma.

uTorrent was my poison of choice on PC for downloading torrents. I love uTorrent. It is a thing of beauty. I have never used Azureuz before, but it is installed on my Mac. I need to configure my router to open the necessary ports to get a proper connection but it looks nice enough. I suppose I will only find out how good an application it is by actually using it. I doubt it can touch uTorrent though.

Winamp is my default media player on Windows. I like the no fuss that surrounds it. It plays mp3s. That’s all a media player should do in my opinion. iTunes is on the Mac and I have never really liked it as a media player. It is a fantastic application if you want to download podcasts, stream radio and buy music but for playing music it just seems like over kill. I’m looking at getting an alternative for iTunes at the moment but there is hardly any competition. Winamp was released for the Mac a few years ago but it got abandoned such is iTunes dominance.

VLC is a great media player. It plays everything and is available for Mac/Windows and Linux. No problems there then. Quicktime comes as default on the Mac and you wouldn’t really bother with it since VLC can do everthing you want.

Browser wise, they’re all here. The amazing Flock browser, Firefox, Opera and of course Safari. The only absentee is Internet Explorer. My loss i’m sure! I’m switching between Flock and Opera for most of my browsing thus far. Firefox isn’t as great on the Mac with stopping pop ups.

So that’s about it then. The only software I’m missing is Winamp and uTorrent but there are alternatives out there. I haven’t tackled any web design yet but Adobe/Macromedia are at the core of Apple software products so I’m not concerned on that front. I would like to see Fillzilla be ported over to the Mac too. It’s a great peice of software. The Mac alternative is Transmit 3 but it isn’t free.

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