sunday april 15, 2007
Making the switch from WinXP to Mac OS / San Francisco, CA / 13 months ago
After setting myself up in the previous post, I have compiled a short, opinionated list of software that I used to use on WinXP and the comparable software that I now use on Mac OS X. Of course some of the feature sets are not 1 for 1 on the switch, but the tools I have found for Mac OS X have been sufficient in letting me leave Windows behind.
The real enabler for me was when Parallels release 3170 dropped, which allowed me to load my legacy Boot Camp partition inside of Parallels. This gave me a sense of comfort in that I didn't have to completely rebuild my Windows VM on the Mac side, but instead I could load my "comfort zone" OS inside of a new VM and everything would be just as I left it. The reality here is that I almost never load Parallels, but the idea that I easily could geve me enough confidence to make the switch.
So, without blathering on about my control issues, here's the list:
- From Outlook to Mail and iCal
- From HomeSite to TextMate
- From AppRocket to Quicksilver
- From FlashFXP to Transmit
- From SecureCRT to Terminal
- From SQL Manager to Navicat
- From Tortoise SVN to SVNX SCPlugin
- From OneNote to OmniOutliner
- From FastTrack Schedule 9 to OmniPlan
- From Visio to OmniGraffle
- From Internet Explorer 7 to Parallels
- From PHP Encoder to SourceGuardian
I am certainly always open to other suggestions if anyone thinks that there are better tools out there than the ones I have found, so if you have any other recommendations or maybe something that I left off the list... feel free to send me an email. Please address emails to the "nonsense" mailbox here at blather.org or my work address which is the "src" mailbox at cubancouncil.com.
Update: Let me explain the IE7 -> Parallels a bit more... since Firefox is direct to Firefox and Safari/Camino are on their own, the point I am trying to make is that if I NEED IE7 for testing I can simply load Parallels to use the actual browser natively. Sorry, I thought people would make the web develoment association and figure that one out.