Author Archives: Kunal

Software for switchers

I know there have been plenty of such posts/ articles all over recently, but this is more of a personal post in the public domain. Amitabh is the latest “switcher“, thanks, atleast partially, to yours truly (doses of “Come on dude, get a Mac already” twice a day, thank you very much). He finally bit the bullet and is the proud owner of a shiny new, white Macbook. He asked me for software recommendations and I promised him I’ll do a blog post so that everyone can benefit from the gyaan.

So here it goes. In alphabetic order of categories.

Backup
SuperDuper! (Shareware).
Carbon Copy Cloner (Free).

Blogging
Journler – A lot more than just a blogging tool (Free).
Ecto (Shareware).
Marsedit (Shareware).

Browsers
Safari is good enough for most things (Free).
Camino is Firefox for Mac users (Free).
OmniWeb (Shareware).

Burning CDs etc.
Toast (Shareware).
Disco (Shareware).

FTP
Cyberduck (Free).
Transmit (Shareware).

IM/ Chat
Adium – One Duck to rule them all (Free).
Colloquy – IRC Client (Free).

Media Editors
Audacity – Free audio editor.
AddMovie – Join ’em movies (Shareware).

Media Players
VLC – The only thing you’ll ever need (Free).
Perian – Play DivX videos in QuickTime (Free).
Flip4Mac – Play WMV videos in QuickTime (Free).

RSS
NetNewsWire (Free + Shareware, both versions).
Vienna – Open Source RSS reader.

Text Editors
TextWrangler – Amazing that it’s free.
Textmate – The best text editor ever? (Shareware).

Torrents/ P2P
Azureus – The most popular cross-platform torrent client (Free).
X-Torrent – Torrents, Mac style (Shareware).
Poisoned – Connect to multiple P2P networks (Free).

Virtualization – Intel Macs
aka run Windows on Mac (but why?!!).
Parallels (Shareware).
VMware (Beta).
Boot Camp – Not Virtualization but multi-boot (Free).

Virtualization – PPC Macs
Q (Freeware).
Virtual PC (Not free, no longer in development).

Miscellaneous
Quicksilver – Possibly the best. software. ever. (Free).
Pukka – del.icio.us client (Shareware).

That should be more than enough to get you started dude. I’ll (perhaps!) cover some of the more “exotic” categories/ picks in a follow up post.

Welcome, from darkness, to light.

[tags]Apple, Mac, Shareware, Freeware, Software, Tools, Utilities, Switch, Switcher, GetAMac, Macbook[/tags]

Bruce Willis is the man!

Four (more) reasons why Bruce Willis is the man:

  1. He hangs around web-sites following discussions of his movies.
  2. He participates in the discussions as “Walter B”, sharing his opinion in no uncertain terms.
  3. When someone doubts his identify, he iChats with the doubter as proof.
  4. Last but not the least (in case you didn’t figure out from above) he uses a Mac.

via TUAW.

An even bigger Bruce Willis fan now, if that was possible.

Edit – Really looking forward to Die Hard 4 btw. Willis mentions in one of the pages linked above that he agreed that parts 2 and 3 were nowhere near the 1st one in terms of quality, but he believes this one comes close and perhaps even betters the original!!

That remains to be seen of course, but if this movie is even half as good as the first Die Hard (one of the links above has people arguing how can a Die Hard movie be a Die Hard movie if the word fuck is used only twice, to comply with PG13 ratings!), then we are in for a treat, because the original Die Hard remains one of the greatest action movies of all times (and a personal favourite of course).