I am not much of a bigot when it comes to hardware and software. I'm perfectly content to kick along on an older laptop or OS as long as it's suiting my needs and working well. Earlier this year, I disrupted my professional life with a major hardware and software change.

I've been using PCs since about 1992. I'm a minor unix head though, and most of my technical work is done on linux and solaris. Since OSX is basically an outstanding GUI on top of a unix core, it certainly seemed like a platform worth exploring.

There will long be hearty and emotional support for both PCs and macs, and this article isn't about what's better. Rather, the intent is to document my journey from one to the other, in light of the tools I use most often. I hope it will help you in your decision to try out a mac, or to save you a bit of time as you hunt around for reasonable replacements for your favorite tools.

(Sorry, the formatting is jacked on this page and I will fix it.)

Email
- Was Outlook - Now Mail (part of OSX)

MySQL Administration and Queries - Was SQLyog, now MySQL Admin tools (MySQL administration and querying) - The MySQL Admin tools crash unexpectedly. - CocoaMySQL works reasonably well, but not browsing table data hinders me. - Also, the ability to display several queries but only highlight and execute one at a time is not really possible in these tools. - YourSQL is the best I've found, and you'll probably need the patched-for-intel binary.

Oracle Administration and Queries - Was Toad (freeware) - Trying Froq ($50) - Also trying RazorSQL ($50) - Oh Toad, I miss you so...

Java Development - Was Eclipse, still Eclipse

PHP Development - Was Eclipse, still Eclipse

CVS Synchronization - Was Eclipse, still Eclipse

Simple Tabbed Text Editing and Notes - Was Crimson Editor - Trying ForgEdit (light, powerful, tabbed text editor, does cost $20 where CI was free) - ForgEdit has issues. - TextWrangler is a much better editor, and is free.

Secure Storage for Passwords and Logins - Was PasswordSafe. - Trying keychain (part of OSX) - Actually, creating categories in keychain is a pain - I found a mac port of PasswordSafe and I'm using that. It's about 90% of what it is on Windows, but still a great tool.

Project Management - Was GanttProject, still GanttProject (even better on Mac in fact)

SCP - Was WinSCP - Trying Fugu - Fugu has some issues, such as trying to recreate existing directories in a recursive SCP, and stopping with a user-ack error on each attempt. this makes scping nested directories almost impossible. - after a couple of weeks of repeated directory copy headachess fugu is out. It's pretty unusable if you're copying multiple directories or overwriting existing files recursively. back to command-line "scp -r". - Trying cyberduck. - Cyberduck is absurdly slow for multiple file transfers. Do people really use this tool to transfer more than three files at a time? Good grief. - Trying muCommander. Looks good! - Using both command-line SCP and muCommander.

SSH - Was PuTTY, now Terminal (part of OSX)

PDF Generation - Was PDFGenerator, now using the built-in "save as PDF" feature in the OS print menus.

MS Excel - Was Excel, now ???

MS Word - Was Word, now ???

Slide Presentations - Was PowerPoint, now ???

Browser - Was MSIE, now FireFox

Image Manipulation - Was Gimp, now Seashore

Local File Management and Browsing - Was explorer - Trying Finder (part of the OS) - Finder is geared toward novices and it is hard to undo that. It's hard to control display of hidden files, and it helpfully reminds you that you might not want to change file extensions. (I rarely do this by accident, and that gets old.) - Trying Macintosh Explorer, nice UI but a bit buggy around refreshing the view when something changes. - Trying PathFinder - Beautiful. Exactly what I wanted. Excellent usability. A real file management power tool.

Data Architecture - Was DeZign for Databases (~$400) - Now Power*Architect (free, and may even be a slightly better tool)