In Praise of the Apple Mac - Part 3
It is over a year since I decided to switch from a Windows PC to the Apple Mac as my main computer. There are still some things about the OS/X operating system that irritate me, tasks that would be easier to perform in Windows, but on balance I don’t regret my decision. There are many features of OS/X that make me wonder why Windows didn’t include them years ago. Admittedly as I type this I’m using a Microsoft mouse from a PC instead of the Apple’s infuriating so-called ‘Mighty Mouse’, and I still hate this flat Apple keyboard which, despite being a UK model with a £ sign has several keys (@\|) in the US position, and there is no key for the # symbol at all.
I thought I would list the software that I have installed on the Mac during the past year, to turn it from an attractive desktop accessory into the powerful workhorse that I use daily. Clearly this list is just a personal choice but it illustrates how I have managed to migrate my key tasks from the PC to the Mac.
- Microsoft Office 2008 - This is the Mac incarnation of Office 2007 for Windows. It comprises five applications: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Entourage (email client) and Messenger (this last hardly counts as it’s freely available for download anyway). Sadly there’s no equivalent of the Access desktop database application which Office 2007 for Windows includes. Having migrated to the Mac I regret my dependency upon MS Office but its .doc, .xls, (and latterly .docx and .xlsx) file formats are so ubiquitous that I do find it essential to be able to create and edit these documents. Note that the Leopard operating system is familiar with these file formats so you can read any of the above formats by using the Mac’s Quick Look facility even if you haven’t got Office installed. Note that at the time of writing there is an infuriating bug in Office 2008 if you use the Mac’s Spaces system of virtual desktops. Switching to a different virtual desktop sometimes makes an open Office application try to ‘follow you’, or make it impossible to put the focus back on the Office application when you return to the original desktop. This bug is well documented in several forums. It is said that Microsoft blame Apple’s OS/X operating system for this bug which is curious since I haven’t encountered it with any other application. (And yes, I must explore Open Office as a free alternative to Microsoft’s offering).
- Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional - I hesitated to include Acrobat in this list. I am a huge fan of the PDF file format and use it extensively. However support for PDFs is comprehensively included within the Leopard operating system, so purchase of an Acrobat licence is unnecessary for me. Of course the capabilities of Acrobat Pro extend far beyond those of OS/X but if you just want to create, merge, view, and print PDFs there is no need to buy Acrobat at all when you have the Mac’s OS/X version 10.5 (aka Leopard). You can even reorder pages, rotate them, select text or add annotations. So before you buy Acrobat think whether you really need it.
- Yep - The authors describe Yep as “like iPhoto for your PDFs”. And it is! It is an application that provides a new front end to the Mac’s existing file system, but one that focuses solely on PDF documents. PDFs can be saved anywhere on the Mac, or in an orderly hierarchy of folders. Yep allows you to add a description or various other kinds of metadata to each document, or group of document, and then search and filter to find the relevant documents. Once found, documents can be viewed and printed, and there’s even a delightful ‘loupe’ tool that turns the mousepointer into a magnifying glass so that when a couple of dozen thumbnails are tiled on the screen you can still read the cover page of each. After considerable research this was the best ‘document management’ tool for my PDFs I could find. Its price is fair too.
- Audio Hijack Pro - An audio recorder application that can record digital audio from almost any source: a microphone or other hardware connected to the Mac, from iTunes, Skype, or the Mac’s built-in DVD player, and from MP3 files or webcasts. This last is my area of interest. I like to record programmes from the BBC Radio 4 ‘listen again’ webpage. Using Audio Hijack Pro I can set up a repeating schedule of programmes in the Mac’s calendar and AHP will wake up the Mac if it’s asleep and record the streaming Real Audio feed as an MP3 file that I can copy to my MP3 player or burn to a CD. AHP’s capabilities extend far beyond those I’ve described here and it’s well worth a look for anyone who enjoys listening to music or broadcasts.
- BBC Radio Widget - While on the subject of BBC Radio, a medium I just can’t get enough of, I must recommend this freeware offering. It’s a tiny, minimalist radio widget that sits in the Mac’s dashboard and plays all 60 of the BBC’s national, regional, and local radio stations. Just point and click the desired station from the list. The only other controls are play/pause, and a volume slider. Simple, neat, and it works.
- Journler - There are many so-called personal productivity applications that claim to change your life but in reality require you to alter the way you work or think in order to accommodate the software. Perhaps for some people Journler is like this but for me I am starting to like it a lot. It won’t change anyone’s life but it’s a powerful personal journal that accommodates all kinds of media formats. Journler makes it possible to track and locate these in a way that integrates neatly with the Mac. I did start to use Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. It too has some really neat features but in the end I felt that Journler was a more polished, feature-rich tool for me into which to place all that fragments of life that I didn’t want to lose but didn’t know what else to do with.
- iBank - I looked at numerous personal finance applications before settling on iBank. I was looking for something similar to Microsoft Money that I’d used on the PC. Every application has some nice features but none has them all. For me iBank came closest. It’s not without faults and some strange ways of doing things but it despite being an American application it does work quite happily in a British context with Sterling or any other currency. At the click of a button it connects to my current account with the Nationwide Building Society and downloads all the latest transactions, permitting me to allocate spending and income to categories and reconcile my banking. If you used MS Money before migrating to the Mac, take a look at iBank.
- VMware Fusion - A PC emulator for the Mac. I won’t spend much time describing this because I have previously done so here. In brief it allows you to create one or more virtual machines, each running a different operating system, and exchange files between the Mac and the virtual computer. It integrates very cleverly with the Mac with several options. For those jobs that must run on a Windows platform this is a solution. I expected to spend half my time here when I first migrated from Windows to the Mac but nowadays it’s rarely used as I prefer OS/X.
- Roxio Toast - CD and DVD burning software. It creates and copies CDs and DVDs in a variety of formats, plus taking backups.
- FileZilla - A freeware FTP client for copying files to and from a web server or other host. On the PC I used to use WS FTP and this is very similar.
- Bento 2 database - This is a database from the publishers of FileMaker Pro that’s barely worthy of the name database. To anyone who’s used to proper relational databases, or even a desktop database such as MS Access, it’s little more than a card-index. What makes it useful and worth having is its well-designed integration with the existing Address Book and iCal (calendar) applications that come bundled with the Mac. Bento allows me to customize the data that is stored by these applications, then filter and select them by different criteria. Even pointers to emails can be stored in the database. Once I had learnt the Bento nomenclature, by which tables are called libraries, and what I would call a view (i.e. a set of records that meet certain criteria) is known in Bento as a collection, it all became clear. It makes two-way data exchange with Excel easy too, a feature worthy of praise. Worth a look as a personal productivity tool.
- StuffIt Deluxe 12 - a file compression and decompression utility that works with all the usual file formats (zip, tar, rar, as well as stuffit’s own compression format). For me coming from a PC it’s not quite as intuitive as Winzip but it works.
- Flip4Mac WMV - I just use the free version of this handy ‘fit and forget’ utility. Basically it permits the QuickTime player on the Mac, and the Safari web browser, to recognise and play Windows Media video and audio files. Because WMV is a popular format this gets a surprising amount of use.
- ReadIris Pro 11 - OCR software. On the PC I used Omni Page Pro which was excellent. I did buy a copy of Omni Page Pro X for the Mac but it’s awful. It hangs more than 50% of the time while it’s processing the scanned page and looks an out-dated application that hasn’t been updated for the Leopard operating system. I have recently downloaded ReadIris Pro which looks far more promising. The user interface is clean and straightforward, and it has scanned letters and newspaper cuttings into text and PDF files with 99% accuracy on text conversion.
- Eye TV 3 - This is a hardware add-on as much as a software application. I increased the multimedia versatility of my 24 inch iMac by buying an EyeTV Diversity TV tuner. This is a little device with a built-in USB plug that has two digital terrestrial TV tuners and two aerial sockets. It allows two TV channels to be watched or recorded onto the hard drive concurrently, and the excellent EyeTV 3 software allows live TV to be paused, and one-off or regular repeating programmes can be scheduled in advance for recording. Programmes are recorded in a proprietary .eyetv format but they can be exported to a variety of formats such as MPEG and AVI, and also to a portable device such as an iPod or iPhone, or burnt to a DVD-RW using Toast with a click of the mouse.
I have omitted from this list the applications that come bundled with the Leopard operating system. These include Mail, Apple’s email client that is comparable with Microsoft’s Outlook Express and perfectly usable; the Safari web browser that again is comparable with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (and which is available as a free download for Windows users); iPhoto, a neat repository for digital images; iCal, the calendar/diary application; Address Book which does what it says, Time Machine, the integrated backup application; iTunes, a repository for digital music with many nice features but that doesn’t permit me to organise my music tracks in the way that suits me.