My Switch (Microsoft Office Replacement)

Office.... one of my least favorite apps for the PC. My change to mac has not helped me here. Office 2004 for mac is a pig. My opinion could be skewed because there is no universal binary and it appears Microsoft might not be releasing one. Let me tell you, running word/excel/entorage on an intel mac is HORRIBLE! So i went looking... and i found a couple replacements.

Open Office will run on a mac no problem, its butt ugly and you have to load x11. For me open office works fine. I am not a heavy office user. I work with some spreadsheets and a few word docs here and there. Nothing crazy and I'm not in the application all day so for me open office appears to have all the functionality of MS Office. I would have stopped here, but for most people i think the loading x11 step will stump most users. So I looked a little more.

ThinkFree Office comes in two versions. A free web based version and 49.99 desktop version. I have tried both. The web version works with safari, but I ran into some problems with it. I couldn't put pictures into my documents, changing fonts, size, color was troublesome at times. I had none of these problems when i would run it in firefox for mac. The web version also comes with 1gig of free online storage. There are a ton of additional features such as posting documents right to your blog, exporting in many formats and other misc perks. Being that i use a laptop I couldn't just settle for an online only version of the application so I loaded up the desktop version. It is very similar to the web version but allows some things the web version wont. Like when I can double click .doc files and it will open with ThinkFree Office. The web version cannot do this. I think for $50 it is a great deal. This was my personal favorite.

There are a bunch of web 2.0 office replacements, but if I dont have internet access I still need to get work done. I might write a review on the web only office suites... but for now i cant rely on them so I wont bother. Long story short, try ThinkFree Office 3.0 you can download a free trial and it runs native on intel MACs.

My Switch (IM Applications)

Everyone needs IM right? Realtime chat is a must for my standard day. Being able to talk on the phone and ask questions to office mates at the same time is indispensable. Or having a casual conversation with a friend that lives in another country. These are some of the benefits that I find I cant live without.

I started out trying to use the built in application "IChat AV" but in order to use MSN you have to setup a complicated jabber proxy. Its not to hard for a techie but the average user would have trouble doing it. Even after you get it setup the results are not the best. Peoples names in the application look like hell because of the jabber formating. For example the msn user spam@spam.com would look like spam%spam.com@msn.ijabber.com. It makes for a overly cluttered buddies list. So IChat went away pretty fast.

Next on my list was the Microsoft MSN Chat application itself. I killed it shortly after loading it. Its a FAT pig and there is no universal binary. It just required to many system resources to run for a simple IM application. I could find no support for the application or even any info about when a universal binary would be released.

FIRE! This was one of my favorites! Open source and clean. It is a great app. It supports most chat protocols and comes in a universal binary for all you intel mac users. It has a ton of features and the tabbed chat window keeps your desktop from getting IM clutter. The only reason i don't use this as my IM application is its lack of growl support for notification.

Adium is the last on my list. It is Open Source as well. This turned out to be my favorite. It supports all the major protocols and then some. It supports encryption with OTR. It has some awesome themes as well as growl support for alerts. It also has tabbed browsing with a very clean colored chat interface. The buddy list window is very customizable and can be made to almost disappear.

Executive Summary



Use Adium :-)

Why I Switched

I have always been a vendor loyal person, as long as I thought the product was the best in the field. For example when I was nearing the age of 16 and was very interested in cars (well trucks) I could tell you almost every detail about any newer model car or truck.

At the time I was a HUGE Chevy fan, partly because of stats and partly because of my Father. Now here I am 10 years later and I own two newer Honda vehicles. What Happened? Simple, I cant stand most chevy dealers and cars now.

What does any of this have to do with Apple computers? In 1988 or 89 I had a apple IIgs and i loved it! I thought PCs would never beat apples. Three years later i was on a PC. What happened? Simple, I couldn't stand apple and their products. :-) Well its not really that simple... I saw all my friends playing games on their X86 boxes. Games i couldn't find for the apple. My other problem was hardware, apple had their boxes so locked down I had to get very apple specific hardware. Ram, modems, etc... were all very expensive compared to the PC equivalent. Sure it wasn't as easy to use... but i was a tweaker even in my early days.

So why now? Why do I think its time to return to Apple? Good question! I'm glad you asked! Four things have occurred in the last few years that have prompted my return to the Mac.

1. Apple got a new OS! OSX is much improved over the aging OS9 turd nugget. (sorry os9 luvers)

2. I can now use most PC hardware in my mac. USB, Firewire, SATA etc etc....

3. Open Source Applications. So many free applications that can run on the mac/linux and in some cases windows as well.

4. Intel Processors, now this is the big one. I can now dual boot my macs into windows. The only real reason for this is games.

Of course all of the other standard features that Macs have like a crazy cool GUI as well as many built in tools put windows to shame. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garage Band, and many other "super" sweet apps. Build quality of their products is also a big plus IMO. Sure you pay more for the hardware but you get what you pay for.

In the coming weeks I will be writing about what apps i miss the most and how i have gotten around any trouble i have had switching.

-Paul