Alright... to change a bit the subject (the ashy stinking holes) one may have noticed though this website / blog that I switched from Linux / Windows to Mac a few months ago. What’s the big deal? Well, without going for a full throttle apology of Mac, it simply made my life so much easier. I get the best of both world (Unix/Linux for obvious reasons and Windows for the hardware support). Since more and more of my acquaintances seem to be going for Mac, I though I’d share few applications and tricks I came across from now on.

So, to start with, here are a few app that I’ve been happily using for the past few months:

MAC SOFTWARE

1. -iWork (Keynote is simply amazing when it comes to presentations). Pages works fine for me while I haven’t used Numbers extensively (and don’t plan to due to my profound aversion to spreadsheets)
   

2. -iLife (iWeb for this site, iPhoto for publishing images). Comes with Mac OS X 10.5)
   

3. -Mail and Safari (Email and web browsing, respectively). Being a long time user of Thunderbird, I found Mail particularly good at detecting SPAM. No complain so far with Safari (fast and efficient)
   

4. -Time Machine (Brilliant piece of soft that allows regular backups without the headaches). Comes with Mac OS X 10.5
   

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7. NON-MAC SOFTWARE
   

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9. -Matlab for everything that comes to numbers and graphics) and COMSOL Multiphysics for FEM modeling
   

10. -Komodo Edit (Powerful Text editor excellent for programming) (Free)
    

11. -If you are unlucky enough to run software that need Windows (e.g., Trimble Total Control for GPS processing), you can either dual-boot your Mac with BootCamp (Free, comes with Mac OS X 10.5) or emulate Windows using Parallel Desktop. The latter works like a beauty for me since I really need Windows for one software only, I hated the idea of dual-booting Mac/Windows).
    

12. -TexShop and LatexIt for LaTeX editing. Comprehensive & powerful (Free)
    

13. -JabRef for references database and BibTeX. There are two things I love about it (in addition to the fact that it’s Java based and multi-platform): 1. it does an excellent job at managing my ref database in BibTex format which makes my life easier when it come to write in LaTeX and 2. has a neat “autofind pdf article” function for linking the pdf version of my references. The trick is to make the beginning of the pdf article name the same than the BibTeX key (e.g., Bob2005 as key and bob2005JGR_HowToKeepYourWifeHappy.pdf). Most likely not as powerful as some other bibliographic database software but if you’re closest to a scientists than a professional librarian it is exactly what you need (Free)
    

14. -OmniFocus for GTD and keeping track of various projects, tasks, calendars. It works well with iCal and Mail (for ToDo’s)
    

15. -PersonalBrain. This is an amazing piece of software that you can use for literally everything from visual database to project management. Apart from the eye candy, you can link file attachments to every single component of your charts. For instance, I use it to manage all my monitoring data from GPS campaigns to cGPS, or Gas monitoring. Simply great. You can download a free trial. The full Pro version is not cheap but it really outclasses other similar softwares and I now use it for everything.
    

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20. -Fink. A great way of installing software ported from Unix to Mac (Free)
    

21. -GMT (Generic Mapping Tool) (Free)
    

22. -Macport. Another Unix to Mac porting solution. Ideal for command lines that I often use (e.g., wget) (Free)
    

23. -FileZilla as FTP client (Free)
    

24. -Chicken of the VNC. Well, quite self-descriptive, really.... A good VNC client (Free)
    

And as Mac OS X 10.5 is Unix based, it is a piece of cake to run all shell scripts done in Linux/Unix. I’ll post some useful shell commands every now and then.

To sum up, the move was all in all a very good move indeed. Don’t listen to people telling you that Macs are only nice and pretty. From a scientific standpoint, Mac is quite simply -and by far - the best platform I’ve been using so far.

And no, I don’t have Apple auctions.