Well after I bought my MacBook Pro I tried working in bootcamp because I’ve been using Windows since version 3.11. But Bootcamp is far from perfect. Sure, it runs natively, but some drivers have irritating bugs. I suspect network and display (the whine on dimming the screen drives me crazy!) drivers on this.

Anyway, so I started using Mac OSX more and more and tried harder and harder to find replacements for my favourite XP apps. I’ll mention a few.

Typing accents
I found this URL which shows you how to type accents on characters: http://www.theblog.ca/mac-character-map

Printing
Well, not a ‘favourite’, but my HP ColorJet 3600 is not directly connected to the Mac, but on a router with printing support. If you connect the printer through USB on the Mac, it works without problems, but the same drivers do not print when this is sent through IP printing. I’ve been Messing around in the prefs panel I couldn’t get it to work… Then I discovered CUPS – (a very powerful web interface on the OSX’s printing drivers: http://localhost:631 ) cool. – but no luck either. OSX keeps printing postscript data to the ColorJet which it interprets as plain text…

After searching around a bit more I came accross the HPIJS OpenPrinting drivers; you can find them here. Follow the installation instructions, it works flawlessly: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs

Quicktime
Apple sure keeps to themselves concerning video and audio formats…. On XP I watched movies in XVID and subtitles in SRT but this is another step to take on OSX. Solution I found for this is Perian; http://perian.org/ this extends Quicktime quite a bit! Combine it with http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm for .wmv support too

Shared Discs
Then there’s Microsofts NTFS. I could see my external USB workdrives in OSX, but discovered I could not write to them. Turned out this is disabled, you need NTFS-3G to work with this: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Default apps
In XP filetypes are recognised by their extension and on OSX this works differend. If you want to change applications with certain filetypes you can install RCDefaultApp http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/ which adds extension recognition to OSX

FTP
Well, next to the fact that you should install Firefox and Thunderbird right away, I found that FireFTP is not all that. I found another program called Cyberduck which handles FTP quite neatly: http://cyberduck.ch/

Torrents
Torrents? -> transmission: http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Developing PHP
I used WAMP on XP to develop PHP, on mac there is.. MAMP (yeah): http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php

Backup:
WinClone is an application which can backup your whole bootcamp partition from OSX. I used it to reproduce my XP environment on another Mac when I had to swap it out: http://twocanoes.com/winclone/

And ofcourse… don’t forget to install Firefox and Thunderbird+lightning for improved browsing, mail reading and calendar functions.