Lóránd Somogyi

My adventure in the world of Apples goes on. As I mostly liked the iron of the MacBook, now it is time to go on and see if I can do usual task as simple as in Ubuntu.

So I gathered things I do mostly:

1. Photo processing
2. Java development
3. Listen to music – I’ll need a good media player, an alternative to Amarok
4. Browse the net – Firefox or better
5. Chat through GTalk and Skype
6. Copy files from/to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, SMB – a twin panel, alternative to Krusader
7. Simple text editing – jEdit should work
8. Formated text, spreadsheet and presentation – OpenOffice.org or alternative
9. Video playing – mplayer with front-end or alternative.

In this episode I will left out the first two points. Those need deeper investigation as that’s what I do mostly with any computer. – For those topics I’ll provide a separate article or two.

I spoke to few mac-addicted friends, and their advice was: “you have to feel it”. They said that I do not need a twin-panel file manager or jEdit. What I need is to try to live with Mac provided utils. I’ll try to do that.

What I do not need

I need no email client, address book, calendar or news reader as I use Google Mail, Calendar, etc..

Common stuff

It is easy to acclimatize to the Finder. Starting application from it is natural. Navigating the file system is good to. Feels like a Nautilus, but I’m missing the location bar, and the feature to type in the path.

The window navigation is fine. The docker looks and works nice. I really like it. The top bar includes the menu from the active window, which is, well nice, but I could live without it. I’m really missing the workspace switcher and the way to provide virtual desktops. I know there is software for that, but I try to stick with defaults, so no virtual desktops for now.

I still could not figure out how to switch between windows of same application with keyboard, but I guess there is a way.

It is really important for me to have a keyboard switcher, so I configured it. It was easy, and works fine.

The glittering smooth animations and design are really attractive. Although Linux has that too, and even more. Just think of compiz, avant window manager, screenlets. There is only one thing that OS X better at, and that is stability. – But to be honest, it is easier to be stables when there are less possibilities…

Installation of application is usually easy. Applications are usually sharewares with moderate price, but there are open source alternatives as well.

File handling (scp, webdav, …)

Okay, first I need some files audio, video, etc. for some testing, so the first test would be moving files around. For this operation I use krusader or sometime nautilus. As advised, I try to use built in stuff.

First, I could not find a ftp, scp, etc. client already installed, except the command line. Now command line is great, but usually twin-panel browser is much faster. So I went to fetch a SCP client. Cyberduck looks fine, works fine but that drag and drop is really not my world. So I start to search for some twin-panel software.

I found a blog about Krusader under OS X. For that I would need fink, should upgrade the Mac as now I have Mac OS X 10.4.11 and after all this is not my Mac, so I followed the links from the blog and downloaded muCommander. Now that feels much better. But muCommander does not handles webdav or at least if fails for my https webdav access. After few second of search I found this. So it is easy too. Just “mount” it, and after it even muCommander can see it. Nice, but a little bit circumstantial.

For sure fink is something that would need more exploration…

Now that I have copied some music to the laptop, lets see what we have…

Audio Playback

What I need is an Amarok grade player, which supports at least mp3, ogg, flac. iTunes looks fine. Not an Amarok, but nice. Unfortunately it does not support flac, and I failed to find any extension to it, although I found a flac player. But that is not what I wanted. I need an all-in-one audio manger/player.

As you could read Amarok 2 will be supported on Mac, but for that we still have to wait.

Browser

Well, not much here. Firefox is supported and Safari is good too. Extensions I use work under Firefox.

Chat

Skype is supported and works as expected. Adium work fine for GTalk. And that’s what I need.

Simple text editor

I thought that there is a really cool text editor built in. But no. Or you’re going to buy one, or like me, use jEdit. Ok jEdit hasn’t got that cool look, but I just want a decent text editor and not a Picasso drawing.

Formated text editor

Well. No surprise here. Openoffice.org and NeoOffice. Bot from same source.

Video playback

QuickTime does not support all formats out of box, but VideoLAN Client is good for the purpose. I’m missing the navigation with arrow keys – as in mplayer or SMPlayer -, but as I play video rarely VLC would do.

Conclusion

For all my needs I found a suitable or almost suitable solution. But in most of the cases I needed to search for software, as those does not come out of box. If you would like a really good solutions all those are usually sharewares, which are about 15-40$. Many a little makes a mickle.

So from this point of view, Ubuntu is better, as you could find and install anything with APT.