Nov 4, 2008 9:53 AM | 2 Comments

Alex Kidman works out which Mac apps he couldn't work (or play) without, and ponders the age-old question of whether there are enough Mac applications.

Operating systems aren't just operating systems any more -- and they haven't been for quite some time, whether you're looking at OS X or Windows, or Linux for that matter. No matter which you installed, chances are you've ended up with tens (if not hundreds) of additional applications, designed for everything from simple word processing to web surfing and beyond.

OS X isn't immune to this effect. If I wanted to stay only within the Apple-supplied software cloud, it would be theoretically possible. I could do a lot of my writing work in TextEdit, surf in Safari, listen to my music in iTunes and do all my accounting in Calculator. OK, maybe that last one is a stretch, although only just -- Journalism isn't a trade you get in to for the immense riches. Or the short working hours. Or, for that matter, the adoring groupies.

Anyway, getting back on track, all of those activities would keep me within the OS X cocoon, but the fact is I don't stay there. There's a number of key OS X applications that keep me busy (and all too often distracted) during the day. Here's my personal top five:

Pages: Mac Word is decent, but it's a real memory hog on my humble Macbook. Pages runs cleaner, still sorts out my worst spewling mostookes for the most part, and exports where I want to. I would give the nod to OpenOffice.org 3.0 (which at last has a "native" OS X version) but like Word, it's rather slow and ponderous, unlike my typing style.

Firefox: Yes, I know, as a Mac user I'm meant to shout out about Safari's superiority from the rooftops. But I just can't get on with it. Yeah, it's a functional browser -- and still well ahead of Internet Explorer, at least in its Mac guise -- but that's about it. Firefox does what I want, when I want it to, and thanks to the wealth of extensions, it's also my FTP client of choice.

TwitterPod: Again, I could use a web browser to keep my Tweets in order, but a single desktop client keeps me up to date that much quicker -- and, if I'm being honest, probably wastes more of my time than it really should. Twittering might be blogging for the terse, but it's also food for the ego.

VLC: Again, inbuilt Quicktime is a decent client -- for those formats it supports. VLC is just plain better, in that it more closely follows that Mac marketing mantra of "just working" with anything I throw at it.

Toast 9 Titanium: Again, there's a number of ways to burn discs within OS X itself, but they're not that elegant. Toast has a good rep in the Mac world, and with good reason; it's an excellent utility for everything from iPhone video conversion to straight audio capture, and, of course, disc burning in any format you'd care to name.

Now, there's an obvious point that can be made here; of those five applications, two are cross platform (VLC, Firefox) and the other three all have easy Windows equivalents, including a number of free alternatives. Bear in mind that I'm not in the "you must switch! you must switch! You will be exterminated!" camp of Mac zealots, however.

I'm well aware that the functions of a Mac can be duplicated on a Windows or Linux box. It's an argument that swings both ways, however. The old argument used to be that Macs were only good for a limited subset of creative work, and not much else, because of a lack of applications. That's simply not true any more, and I can say with a solid amount of certainty that the underlying OS gives me a lot fewer headaches than my Windows and Linux boxes. That adds up to more time working, and less time watching crash screens, running virus scans or just plain wondering why things don't work.

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Adam Turner Nov 4, 2008 6:52 PM	Airfoil - rogueamoeba.com/airfoil - streams audio from any app to an Airport Express. Jungle Disk - www.jungledisk.com - online backups.
Alex Kidman Nov 5, 2008 9:13 AM	I stream sans an Airport Express, but yeah -- good call. And everyone should backup. I feel like a stern schoolteacher even typing that, but it's true...