The mac Switcher

Recently there are a lot of people who are switching from windows to the mac although both are similar in many ways there are a few idiosyncrasies about the mac, this perpetuates from the way the operating system is used to the software that is available for it. To help people transit from windows to the mac smoothly I will be releasing tips that might help people in adjusting to the new environment from time to time. In this article I will give you alternatives to programs that you might have used while on windows but the mac versions are not available.

Switch: Windows Media player to VLC
VLC is a great replacement for the Windows media player. Unlike Quick Time (The apple default media player) VLC can play various types movie formats without the need to install codecs. VLC is riddled with features, practically any feature you see in a movie player VLC probably has it.

Switch: Putty to Terminal
For fellow programmers, mac's are Unix based. Terminal is a useful tool that comes with the operating system, it allows you to ssh, ftp do shell commands and so much more on the mac. This is a good replacement for putty, which tries to emulate this on a windows machine.


Switch: Direct Connect to Shakespeer
Shakespeer is direct connect ported for the mac. This is a peer to peer software for sharing files over a network.

Switch: Smart FTP to Cyberduck
If your a web designer and you FTP and SSH to servers. Cyberduck is a powerful program that lets you do what your Smart FTP has let you do for years.

Switch: Trillian to Adium
Are you an Instant messenger freak you have over four accounts on different services and you are used to putting all of them on Trillian and managing them all at the same time. Adium is an open source Instant messenger client built on Gaim. I think this is one of the greatest Instant messaging clients ever. It lets you customize anything you can imagine, form the font the Adium displays your friend list to the sounds of the different alerts.

Switch: NotePad to Textmate
If you are used to creating text files on the fly Textmate is the software for you. The only drawback is that it is not totally free.


Switch: Winzip/Winrar to Stuff it
This is the ultimate solution for compressing and expanding files on the mac.